The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

The decision to build a central memorial to victims led, perhaps inevitably, to an unseemly squabble among the victims. Representatives of the Roma (Gypsies) argued that the extermination of their people must not be separated from that of the Jews. After an ugly debate in which each side invoked Nazi racial categories to characterize the Third Reich’s treatment of the two groups, the Roma were promised their own memorial, although city leaders disagreed about whether it should be nearby or at the suburban location of a former Gypsy prison camp. Roma leaders, in turn, declined to share their memorial with homosexuals or Communists, who, they argued, had not been persecuted for racial reasons. Soon skeptics began to raise the specter of a landscape of segregated victims’ memorials.