There’s a personal backstory for my comparison of the post-war histories of two German concentrations camps, one in East and the other in West Germany. In 2023 I visited the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum because I was putting together a syllabus for a course that would bring students from the University of Minnesota to Germany to learn about German memorial culture. That visit led me to wonder about a class trip I experienced in the 1970s when I was living in Hamburg, Germany. Our class had taken an obligatory field trip to see a concentration camp, but instead of going to the one nearby—Neuengamme—we had traveled two hours by bus to Bergen Belsen. Why, I wondered in 2023, had we not simply gone to Neuengamme? And why, in fact, had I at that time never heard of the place, when it was only 30 kilometers east of Hamburg’s city centre?

I texted a longtime friend who had been on that class trip with me, and she replied in minutes with a startling photo. It was a picture from 2000 of her daughter, age 9, and other third graders, wearing costumes and make-up and acting in a play they performed that year in Neuengamme. The play was Brundibar, a children’s opera that had been performed in the 1940s by children imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Posted with permission.

What on earth had happened, I wondered, in the years between the silence about Neuengamme in the 1970s and children performing plays there a quarter century later? This question prompted the research for this article that compares the two very different histories of the two camps. They lent themselves to comparison because Neuengamme was a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen, built only two years later. And yet, after war’s end, Neuengamme had been effectively and intentionally erased from the landscape (read the article to see how!), while Sachsenhausen became a tourist site promoting political messages that suited the Soviet-controlled East German government. Once East and West Germany were reunited in 1990, the challenge arose: how to craft a shared memorial culture across all of these monuments? The country is still grappling with the intractable question of whose suffering should be memorialized, and how.

In researching this piece, I learned about the divergent messages that a memorial site can be made to tell. In addition, I learned that I, too, had been affected by the politics of erasure in Hamburg. The cover-up had worked; as children we had not known the uncomfortable truth about the local concentration camp, which meant we had not asked our elders about what they knew, either. Who had done the hard work of remembering and demanding remembrance? Camp survivors and their friends and descendants had insisted on remembrance. They persevered over decades and eventually prevailed. But the contests over memory continue to this day, because memory is knowledge, and knowledge is power.

Divided memory in a divided Germany: Diverging Cold War narratives about the former concentration camps of Sachsenhausen (Berlin) and Neuengamme (Hamburg) by Kirsten Fischer (University of Minnesota, USA) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 34.

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