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The Neue Wache, which stands on Unter den Linden next to the former Prussian Arsenal (now the German Historical Museum), is a small but striking neoclassical building designed by Schinkel in 1818 to celebrate Prussia’s victory over Napoleon. Until 1918 it served as the headquarters of the Palace Guard. In 1931 it was converted by the architect Heinrich Tessenow into a memorial for the German dead of World War I, with an unknown-soldier tomb in the shape of an altar, as well as a large gold and silver wreath that recalled the corona civica awarded by the Roman Senate to the Republic’s heroic soldiers. The Nazis co-opted this shrine, adding a cross on the back wall as “a symbol of the Christian Volk in the new Reich.” As part of their own co-optation of national symbolism, the East Germans rededicated the Neue Wache in 1960 as a “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism.” In front of the building they established a permanent honor guard, whose members goose-stepped into position. (Tourists were always astonished at this sight, associating the goose step with Nazi militarism, but in fact this was an old Prussian maneuver and thus part of the GDR’s appropriation of Prussian symbolism.) In 1969 the East Germans redesigned the building’s interior, adding a Tomb of the Unknown Resistance Fighter and urns containing ashes from the concentration camps and World War II battlefields.

With the collapse of the GDR and the dissolution of the National People’s Army in 1990, the Neue Wache was closed, its fate uncertain. Three years later, however, Chancellor Kohl decided that this structure should be pressed into service once again as a place of memory—this time as the central memorial for all the victims of both world wars, as well as for “the victims of racial persecution, resistance, expulsion, division, and terrorism.” In other words, this was to be a one-stop-covers-all memorial, a kind of supermarket of commemoration sites. As Kohl noted, state visitors wishing to lay a wreath at a sacred site could absolve that obligation here through a single gesture. And for the Germans themselves, he said, the Neue Wache offered a version of the “nation united in mourning.”

But this was just the problem. As many critics noted, the Kohl plan conflated victims and perpetrators, honoring them all equally and indiscriminately. The concept did not distinguish between people who had been killed by the Hitler regime and leading Nazis (like Roland Friesler) who had been victims of the Allied bombing. Since the main thing about victims is their lack of responsibility for their fate, Kohl seemed to be suggesting that the Germans of the Hitler era, virtually all of whom were victims in this scheme, lacked responsibility for the Reich’s crimes. Of course, the chancellor certainly did not mean to suggest this, but in his push to redefine Germany’s relationship with its painful history and to take account of the entire past rather than just the grimmest moments, he showed himself, as he had at Bitburg and Frederick the Great’s reburial, surprisingly ham-handed in the complicated arena of historical symbolism.

Enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s pietà in the Neue Wache, 1999

The controversy surrounding the Neue Wache was further compounded by the renovation plan proposed by Kohl. In place of Tessenow’s stone tomb, the chancellor proposed an enlarged replica of Käthe Kollwitz’s pietà, her sculpture of a mother mourning her dead son. Critics, including leading members of Berlin’s Jewish community, objected that as a Christian symbol this was hardly appropriate for the millions of Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis. Moreover, the sculpture specifically referred to the loss of dead sons and thus did not encompass the millions of women who had died in World War II. Finally, Kollwitz herself had been a pacifist. Was it appropriate to place a work of hers in a former Prussian guardhouse?