University of Tennessee at Chattanooga UTC Scholar Student Research, Creative Works, and Honors Theses Publications 8-2015 The layers of memory at Sachsenhausen: from the GDR to contemporary Germany Barry J. Bookheimer Jr. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.utc.edu/honors-theses Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Bookheimer, Barry J. Jr., "The layers of memory at Sachsenhausen: from the GDR to contemporary Germany" (2015). Honors Theses. This Theses is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research, Creative Works, and Publications at UTC Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of UTC Scholar. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Bookheimer 2 Introduction Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never pure.1 James E. Young Identity without memory is empty, memory without identity is meaningless.2 Robert Eaglestone When I visited the former Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin for the first time, I very quickly realized that I was not fully prepared for what I saw. I expected to see victim-centric exhibits that told the story of those that were persecuted in the camp as well as interplay between authentic relics of the Holocaust era and representative works that collaborated to narrate the history of the place. I was prepared for a great deal of sorrow and suffering to characterize the tone of memory at Sachsenhausen. I did not anticipate, however, that I would encounter a massive East German monument to communist victory standing in the center of the former Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen (Sachsenhausen-KZ).