22 Is preservation tantamount to celebration?

Germany was recently faced with an interesting dilemma (not the election of the AfD but it does come at an interesting time). It had to do with a 20 acre property by the Bogensee lake that was built for the infamous Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and later used as an indoctrination school with dorm facilities by the East German communist regime. Specifically, the place was too expensive to maintain so Berlin began to contemplate selling it. Right now, they are unsure what to do with it.

This brings up an incredibly important question that we will have to ask ourselves more often as more pieces of history start to crumble with time: should we spend to conserve pieces of history so they can stand as reminders of the dark periods they lived through, or should we sell or destroy them and risk people forgetting our past mistakes as a society?

Normally, I would not be too bothered by the latter question. Indeed in an ideal society we should not have to bother about this at all. People will be educated, people will know better, people will remember, people will learn, people will be better to one another. Alas we live in the real world where people continue to question established scientific fact. People will continue to question recorded historic evidence. Without physical reminders of darker times in history, the population of deniers will only grow exponentially.

That this question is arising in Germany is of particular interest. Germany has always been admirably open about teaching its own people the atrocities it committed in WWII. Countries have always focussed on their own history more so than those of other countries, and spun their own victories in several ways. Japan, for instance, teaches almost nothing of the Nanjing massacre while China teaches it in “great detail”—and the same goes for most of Japan’s WWII crimes which, unlike Germany, it either sidesteps or outright denies. The result is an entire country of people (with some exceptions no doubt) who take offence to their neighbours, China and South Korea, mentioning any of their war crimes. So long as others talk about it, that history might not be forgotten; but it is only a matter of time before people do stop talking about it altogether.

In the end then what survives are physical structures, like the Goebbels’ villa, dressed in their bloody past. So the question looms: will Germany spend €280,000-a-year to maintain the place? Is it, as Walter Reich of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum put it, “part of the burden of German history” to spend on maintaining such places? And, most importantly, will right-wing parties like the AfD gaining momentum in nearby states like Thuringia, and whose founders have made calls for ending German commemoration of the holocaust, make it that much easier to simply erase Germany’s past?

History repeats itself because we keep forgetting its lessons.