A memorial to the Holocaust in Berlin says much about Germany's 'duty' to remember, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
Auschwitz is everywhere in Berlin. Leave the train station to do some shopping in KaDeWe - Berlin's answer to Harrod's - and you are first confronted with two huge placards reading: "Places of Terror We Must Never Be Allowed Forget." At the head of a list of 12 concentration camps dotted around occupied Europe is Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The German capital will forever be the capital of the Holocaust: around the corner from the memorial at KaDeWe is the site of the offices where the Final Solution was administrated after it was agreed in a villa five kilometres west on Wannsee lake, on January 20th, 1942.
The concentration camp memorial is art at its most functional: yellow lettering on a brown background. In other cities, this would be a perfect site for advertising hoardings. In Berlin, this memorial has, since its erection in 1967, served as a permanent advertisement to Germany's most shameful hour. Like all good advertising, it catches passers-by unawares and gives them pause for thought.
Germany will have time for thought next week, as the world remembers the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. January 27th was made an official day of remembrance for victims of the Nazis in 1996 by the former president, Roman Herzog. His successor, Horst Köhler, has been invited to next week's ceremony in the camp, accompanied by some of the 1,000 men and women who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and still live in Germany.
Remembering Auschwitz-Birkenau is considered a duty in Germany, so news that 45 per cent of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz, according to a BBC survey, was greeted with bewilderment here. Five years ago, a similar survey carried out here found that 7.4 per cent of 14- to 50-year-old Germans and 3.6 per cent of Germans over 50 had never heard of Auschwitz. Statistically, that means around three million Germans had never heard of the most notorious Nazi concentration camp. The survey featured in the book, Auschwitz? Never Heard of It, by Alphons Silbermann and Manfred Stoffers. They warn of the dangers of a so-called "Auschwitz Hole": building up a mythology around the camp and turning it into an all-purpose "metaphor for evil". To back up their arguments they point to statistics that 88 per cent of Germans surveyed thought only Jews were held and murdered in the camps and that less than a quarter knew where Auschwitz was located.
Next week's Auschwitz anniversary begins an important year for Germany, 60 years after the Nazis' capitulation. Three days after the Auschwitz memorial comes a more controversial date: the 60th anniversary of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff liner by a Soviet submarine, which resulted in the deaths of more than 7,000 German refugees and wounded soldiers.
The sinking, incredibly, remained a forgotten episode in German history until it was revived by Günther Grass in his novel, Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk). The taboo-breaking discussion about the suffering of German civilians during the war was driven on by historian Jörg Friedrich. His discussion of the bombing of German cities in Der Brand (The Fire) has proven as popular as it is controversial in Germany.
"Germany has done everything in its power to see justice done for Nazi crimes and to ensure that they are never forgotten," said Friedrich in a recent interview. "But I fear that if we continue to take a missionary attitude towards our children, by trying to instil a sense of personal guilt in them for those crimes, we will witness a backlash." His views have hit a chord here and have even been discussed by members of the German Jewish community.
"I think if a Jewish spokesperson comes up and says they were the only victims of the war, then Germans have every right to refute that," says Walter Rothschild (50), the British-born former chief rabbi in Berlin. "Europe was a hell-hole in the 1940s. Germans were bombed out of their homes, communist Germans, homosexuals, Romanies were all also victims of Nazi war crimes. Nasty things happen in wars."
Foreign commentators have tried to link this debate to the rise of extreme right parties in recent state elections. But while extremists try to create a voter base of "victimised Germans", politicians have united to isolate them.
"Germany has learned in 60 years that Auschwitz remains constitutive," wrote Gunter Hoffman in Die Zeit newspaper. Even as Auschwitz retreats into history, Germany has made sure that it will remain preserved in Germany's "cultural memory", he believes.
"Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin stands for that," he wrote. "The central thought here is: remembering makes you free."