Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

INSTITUTIONS | SPEECHES   205 to look back over the past 40 years. And we must also consider the four decades before that – from 1945 to 1985. Flossenbürg: the forgotten concentration camp A closer look at Flossenbürg is especially revealing in this regard. Jack Terry put it this way:“Liberation was the saddest day of my life. Because I realised that I was completely alone. I was 15 years old, and I understood that my parents and siblings were dead. I was alone. So when people ask me when I was liberated, I can only say: I was never liberated. The camp was liberated, but a person with that experience is never free” (from an interview with Jack Terry in Flossenbürg, 1998). By April 1985, only a very small section of the former concen- tration camp grounds had been designated as a memorial site. From the mid-1950s onwards, a residential settlement had been built over the foundations of the prisoners’ camp and the SS barracks. The roll call area, former camp laundry and prisoners’ kitchen had been repurposed as an industrial area. And the former quarry – including its factory halls and administrative buildings – continued to operate in civilian hands. As early as 1946/47, a Polish memorial committee had created a commemorative landscape in the “Valley of Death”. It was reminiscent of the Stations of the Cross and encompassed the crematorium and ash mounds. This was one of the first memorials established at a former concentration camp. 5 How- ever, even when the memorial site was expanded a decade later to include a large cemetery in honour of the more than 5,500 death march victims from across Bavaria who had been reinterred in Flossenbürg, the still-visible character of the for- mer camp was intentionally muted by giving it the appearance of a forest cemetery. A cemetery silence settled – quite literally – over the former Flossenbürg camp. No sign of public protest was discernible until the Bavarian Administration of State- Owned Palaces, Gardens and Lakes – responsible for regional memorials since 1952 – announced its plans to demolish the former detention building, the place where Dietrich Bonhoeffer,   Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster and around 1,500 others had been murdered. After a lengthy debate, the building was at least partially preserved. In the few instances where efforts were made to engage in remembrance work, those efforts were limited to honouring the dead within a Stations-of-the-Cross memorial landscape, a secluded cemetery and an execution site concealed by trees within the remains of the former detention building. It was there that, in early April 1985, commemorations were held for Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster and others involved in the resistance of 20 July 1944. A few weeks later, a modest ceremony attended only by local political figures marked the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. No former prisoners were present at either event. 6 While the nation reached the height of its forgetting in the 1980s, this decade also marked the beginning of a broad societal movement towards a critical and lasting confrontation with the mass crimes of National Socialism. History workshops emerged across the country. A new generation of teachers reshaped the classroom. Forgotten places and victims were rediscovered. Holocaust survivors were actively sought out. In the 1990s, this shift entered an entirely new chapter, shaped by the peaceful revolutions in the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. State-imposed narratives began to crumble, and cultivating a democratic, democratising historical culture became a central task for society and politics. 7 Such a culture inevitably involved disputes over interpretation and manifest conflicts of interest. One of the major debates of the 1990s revolved around the historical and political assessment of state crimes committed before and after 1945. These debates showed clearly how inadequate the remembrance of National Socialist mass crimes had been — in bothWest Germany and the former GDR. 8 What followed were further societal, aca- demic and institutional shifts. These, in turn, led to the intro- duction or restructuring of state funding programmes, aimed at transforming sites of the crimes into democratic places of research, learning and knowledge – without abandoning their commemorative function. 9 Flossenbürg exemplifies this trans- formation. “From Concentration Camp to Park Landscape” was the title of a critical report on the condition of the Flossenbürg Memorial in the mid-1990s. 10 Rediscovering a European place of remembrance “From a forgotten concentration camp to the rediscovery of a European place of remembrance” – this is one way to describe the trajectory of the past decades. Only a few of the most important milestones can be mentioned here: the growing presence of former prisoners and their families, starting with the 50th anniversary in 1995; the establishment of the some- what broadly titled “Information Centre for the Flossenbürg Memorial” in 1996; the restitution of the former roll call area in 1997/98; the creation of a permanent research and adminis- tration office in 1999; the inauguration of the new permanent