Ugly History Shouldnt Be Beautiful

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/08/what_the_u_s_can_learn_from_germany_about_remembering_a_dark_period_of_history.html


Aug. 17 2017 5:37 PM
Ugly History Shouldn’t Be Beautiful
What Germany can teach the U.S. about remembering an ugly past without glorifying it.
By Fred Kaplan


President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday that he’s “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments”—thus furnishing further proof that he knows nothing about history or culture or beauty, much less the reason why monuments are built in the first place.

As many have pointed out, the statues of Confederate officers that scar the cities of the South (and too many spots in the North as well) were erected not in the immediate wake of the Civil War but rather decades later, during the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, as a show of force—from the rulers to the ruled—that the old guard, though defeated in battle, was still in charge.

Trump and all those who find his appeals to historical preservation persuasive should go to Berlin, a city of vast and multiple horrors throughout its history, yet also a city that is facing those horrors head-on, unflinchingly. The city memorializes not its discarded leaders but rather their victims. And instead of mounting old warlords on pedestals (there is nothing “beautiful” about a man on horseback, whether Confederate, Nazi, or Communist), the city displays the full record of their crimes against humanity.

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The preserved stretch of wall near the old Gestapo headquarters is the sort of monument to history that Berlin cultivates and that Trump doesn’t remotely comprehend. There is a viewing stand that overlooks the structure, and standing there, you realize that the wall was more than merely a wall. It was two sets of walls, each nearly 12 feet high, surrounded by a ditch to keep bulldozers at bay and separated by a 20-foot “no man’s land”—littered with barbed wire, illuminated by spotlights from a watchtower (there were once 302 of these towers), where guards could, and often did, shoot to kill anyone who managed to climb the first wall before he reached the second.

This is a true monument of the regime and the era that Berlin authorities have deemed worth memorializing—not to romanticize the past but to present its dimensions starkly, as something to gasp at in horror and to avoid repeating. This monument is not beautiful, nor should it be.

One thing that American slaveholders had in common with Nazi and East German bureaucrats was that they too were excellent keepers of records. As I walked along these Berlin memorials on a trip to that city this past spring, I wondered whether we would still be experiencing the violent revivals of our own horrendous legacy—the legacy of racism and slavery—if our more enlightened civic leaders had crafted memorials similar to those that brighten and darken the landscape of Berlin.