Why Bother?
Live and In Person: the Power of Memory Class in Berlin and Washington, D.C.: "To me, it’s worth the bother: being there makes a difference. The Power of Memory class, a new history elective this spring..."
...spent the first part of the semester studying the way societies choose to remember their past, with a special emphasis on today’s Germany and the United States. Shortly after Parent Conferences, nine of the sixteen members of the class joined me and Ms. Tonn in boarding a flight to Berlin, the capital of one Germany or another since 1871. In the course of our eight days of touring monuments and historic sites, we emerged with the kind of structure, depth, and nuance to our thinking that is harder to develop in the classroom alone.
These categories provided us with much to think about: Berlin’s Victory Column, decorated with cannons seized by victorious Prussian forces during the nineteenth-century wars that resulted in a unified Germany, is clearly an old-fashioned Ehrenmal, celebrating national triumph (see slideshow). Touring the preserved site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, the students agreed that we were at a Mahnmal, a memorial designed to warn or admonish its visitors about a bitter past. Later, walking through the largest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, we saw the elaborate mausoleums built in the late nineteenth century by prosperous Jewish Berliners, with an especially poignant section set aside for those who died serving Germany in the Great War of 1914-18 (see photo in slideshow). What kind of monument do we have here, class? Right: an Ehrenmal—and a Mahnmal. Ironically, the community’s honorable tribute to its war dead also reminds us today of the absence of Berlin’s Jewish community, destroyed by the Nazis despite that community’s patriotic identification with Germany.
In Washington DC, most of us were making a return visit. Still, we returned seeing with different eyes than we may have had when here as eighth graders. So Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, the subject of close study in class, meant far more than last time. Hearing the volunteer docent, a Vietnam vet, boast of its being the most visited monument on the National Mall made us wonder: will people flock to the splashy, pointedly didactic National World War II Memorial the way they have to Lin’s transformative work?
We returned to DC to see different monuments, like the Freedmen’s Memorial to Lincoln (see photo below). It’s an 1876 shrine to the failure of the Reconstruction to create an interracial society—note its agenda of white supremacy and black dependency, in a monument funded by donations from formerly enslaved people. We had a lively debate in front of it: should it be removed? Outdated memorials sometimes are. Nope, the class agreed: it’s part of the narrative of race in American history (though we wished for an explanatory poster to clarify its first impression).
Could we have figured this out in M-8? I like to think not. The past is worth the bother to mull these topics live and in person. View slideshow>>
By Kent Holubar, April 10, 2014
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These categories provided us with much to think about: Berlin’s Victory Column, decorated with cannons seized by victorious Prussian forces during the nineteenth-century wars that resulted in a unified Germany, is clearly an old-fashioned Ehrenmal, celebrating national triumph (see slideshow). Touring the preserved site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin, the students agreed that we were at a Mahnmal, a memorial designed to warn or admonish its visitors about a bitter past. Later, walking through the largest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, we saw the elaborate mausoleums built in the late nineteenth century by prosperous Jewish Berliners, with an especially poignant section set aside for those who died serving Germany in the Great War of 1914-18 (see photo in slideshow). What kind of monument do we have here, class? Right: an Ehrenmal—and a Mahnmal. Ironically, the community’s honorable tribute to its war dead also reminds us today of the absence of Berlin’s Jewish community, destroyed by the Nazis despite that community’s patriotic identification with Germany.
In Washington DC, most of us were making a return visit. Still, we returned seeing with different eyes than we may have had when here as eighth graders. So Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, the subject of close study in class, meant far more than last time. Hearing the volunteer docent, a Vietnam vet, boast of its being the most visited monument on the National Mall made us wonder: will people flock to the splashy, pointedly didactic National World War II Memorial the way they have to Lin’s transformative work?
We returned to DC to see different monuments, like the Freedmen’s Memorial to Lincoln (see photo below). It’s an 1876 shrine to the failure of the Reconstruction to create an interracial society—note its agenda of white supremacy and black dependency, in a monument funded by donations from formerly enslaved people. We had a lively debate in front of it: should it be removed? Outdated memorials sometimes are. Nope, the class agreed: it’s part of the narrative of race in American history (though we wished for an explanatory poster to clarify its first impression).
Could we have figured this out in M-8? I like to think not. The past is worth the bother to mull these topics live and in person. View slideshow>>
By Kent Holubar, April 10, 2014