Memory can be difficult to navigate.
The Austrian government decided this month to do something with the house where Adolf Hitler was born, although exactly what will become of it isn’t clear.
Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka announced on Oct. 17 that the house would be destroyed, leaving only the original cellar intact. But then the next day, he said the building itself would stay but go through a “profound architectural transformation” so that no one could recognize it.
For decades, the Austrian government has tried to purchase the building to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. But the private owners refused to sell, instead leasing the site to the government. Now Austrian authorities will seize the property using eminent domain, a process that should be finalized by the end of the year.
The home, in the town of Braunau Am Inn near the Austrian-German border, presents a problem governments of both countries have dealt with as decades pass since World War II: how best to deal with sites of significance in Hitler’s life. Some say those tied to Hitler should be destroyed so they can’t become places of veneration for neo-Nazis.
The New York Times argued in an editorial this month that Hitler’s birthplace should be destroyed, writing of the home’s address that “there is no lesson for townspeople or visitors to absorb at 15 Salzburger Vorstadt, and there should be nothing there for neo-Nazis to venerate.”
But not everyone believes doing so is the best course. Eli Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and writer about Nazi crimes, maintained that attempting to whitewash the past was dangerous.
“Fight forgetfulness,” Wiesel said in 1987 amid debate over what to do with the Wannsee Villa, a lakeside mansion in West Berlin where Hitler and his supporters formally decided to carry out a genocide of European Jews in 1942. “Reject any attempt to cover up the past.'”
In 1992, on the 50th anniversary of that fateful conference, the estate became a memorial and education site to document history of the Holocaust.
In Munich, Hitler’s apartment was converted into a police station, which deters visitors with high security and cold welcome for tourists.
But even sites that were destroyed can become a magnet for those who want to memorialize the dictator. Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berghof no longer stands, but got visitors even after it was destroyed.
“Amazingly, the tourists kept coming, and in the 1960s the (now forested) area where Hitler's house stood was the largest undocumented tourist site in Germany,” Despina Stratigakos, author of “Hitler at Home,” told CityLab. “The problem was that there was no historical information there. It was a romantic wooded site over which people could layer whatever meaning they wanted. In trying to erase the traces of Hitler like this, it created a vacuum which people could fill however they wanted. There was no critical context, and up until the 1990s you could buy tourist souvenirs there that were essentially re-purposed Nazi propaganda.”
In 1999, the Obersalzburg Documentation Center was opened “to use education to combat the ignorance and hatred being expressed in the woods.”
Stratigakos argues that “sometimes demolition can do more harm than good.”
“But as the earlier treatment of the Berghof shows, a void is no more secure – and perhaps even more dangerous,” Stratigakos wrote.
Comments