Helmut Kohl: in search of a unified past

Brianna Lea Webb

World War II forced the German people to contend with the death and destruction that their country caused and endured, and during the postwar years the division between East and West German memory only perplexed the Germans' past. When West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gained chancellorship in 1982, he strove for integration, and wanted to achieve unity not only through economics and policies, but also through monuments and memorials. The focus of this research will trace Kohl's memorial endeavor, where he tried to establish a unified narrative of struggle and victimization for Germans through a series of commemorations during the 1980s and 1990s. By examining the Bitburg affair in 1985, the Neue Wache memorial, and the Holocaust Memorial dedicated in Berlin, I investigate how Kohl attempted to use sites of memory to manipulate the past in such a way as to achieve unity in memory and national identity. With a conservative agenda, and the effort to emphasize German suffering rather than focusing on the Holocaust, these attempts were often met with controversy, which not only shaped the Kohl government's later monument building projects, but also demonstrates the problematic nature of trying to create a singular interpretation of a nation's past. The three sites of memory represent Kohl's changing ambitions, and his learning curve when confronting Germany's war past. The Bitburg affair is the beginning of Kohl's memorial journey, where Kohl tried to achieve unity by equalizing German victims and relativize the Holocaust for the sake of United States Cold War relations. Unsuccessful in that attempt, and with reunification in 1990, Kohl used the Neue Wache to establish a "clean" site of memory that represented a collective German identity for West and East Germans. With relative success, and the lack of proper memorialization for the Holocaust, the final memorial project for Kohl is the Holocaust Memorial, where Jews, Germans, and international audiences alike can visit a common site. For Kohl, the underlying goal in all three cases is that Germany needed a unified, and usable, past.

Helmut Kohl: in search of a unified past

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