Memory in the Closet? Queer Memorials After National Socialism
Munich’s “Memorial for Lesbians and Gays Persecuted under National Socialism” is a roughly 750 square feet ground installation made of pastel rainbow-colored stones at the former location of Schwarzfischer, a gay bar where a raid on October 20th, 1934, marked the start of the persecution of LGBTIQ* people under Nazism (Figure 1). Designed by Ulla von Brandenburg and opened in 2018, the memorial angles around a street corner in a pedestrian zone halfway between the busy central square of Marienplatz and Sendlinger Tor, one of four gates to the old city, near Glockenbackviertel, the city’s “gayborhood.” I grew up in Munich and my research focuses on cultures of remembrance but I had long been unable to picture where this particular memorial was located. When I set off to visit queer memorials across Germany in summer 2023, I sought it out. The experience was disorienting. Arriving at it, I realized I must have passed it multiple times on other recent visits to Munich. What to make of the virtual invisibility of a memorial, particularly one to queer history that has long been hidden from official cultures of remembrance?
Figure 1: Munich Memorial to Lesbians and Gays Persecuted Under Nazism. Corner of Oberanger and Dultstraße. Photograph by Simone Stirner, 2023.
In 2023, the memorial’s pastel reticence seemed out of step with what, this summer, struck me as Munich’s delayed coming out. When I arrived in July, a large rainbow flag spanned the entrance of the central station, a public display of queer visibility that would have been impossible to imagine ten years ago. The central library featured queer literature for all ages in the windows, the tramway carried little rainbow flags too, and on traffic lights around the city black stickers marked “to be seen” recalled the success of the recent exhibition “To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900-1950” at Munich’s NS History Documentation Center. The new lesbian and queer center “LeZ” announced on a large sign in its window: “Invisibility is the problem. Visible for those who can’t be.” Munich, saturated in rainbow colors, seemed to embrace queer culture and community.
Figure 2: Munich Memorial to Lesbians and Gays Persecuted under Nazism. Dultstraße with New Synagogue visible in the back. Photograph by Simone Stirner, 2023.
Yet at the same time, a different reality was also on display. In Bavaria, conservative politicians took a page from the playbook of their colleagues in the U.S. to proclaim outrage over drag queen story hours, mobilizing fears over “gender ideology” in an election year. Violence against LGBTIQ* individuals and spaces was on the rise. A proposal to replace the discriminatory Transsexuellengesetz (“transsexual law”) with a law for “self-determination” was amended last minute to include further inequitable policies. Faced with these tensions, I wanted to understand what role the public visibility of queer memorials plays in the space between historical commemoration and the emancipatory aims of the present. To be “visible for those who can’t be” — is that one of the roles that memorials should take up? If so, then how?
Figure 3: Berlin Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism. Photograph by Simone Stirner, 2023.
Munich lags a decade behind Berlin when it comes to progressive politics. Or so it’s said. Ten years before the Munich memorial, Berlin saw the opening of its “Memorial for Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism” (Figure 3). Designed by artist-duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, it is located in Tiergarten, the large park that expands west of Brandenburg gate that is also home to many other memorials: to other victims of the Nazi regime (Sinti and Roma; victims of “Euthanasia” killings) but also to German composers and writers as well as the Bismarck Nationaldenkmal celebrating the first Chancellor of the German Empire. The assemblage highlights the disjointedness between the supposed historical responsibility that Germany takes toward its National Socialist past and the neglect of the nation’s colonial history.
Figure 4: Yael Bartana's film in the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, Berlin. Photograph by Simone Stirner, 2023.
In this urban space of conflicted memories, Berlin’s queer memorial connects directly to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, commonly known as the Holocaust memorial, across the street. The concrete cube of the queer memorial picks up the design of the Holocaust memorial’s 2,711 concrete stalae, with the exception that the former has a small window set at about half the cube’s height where visitors can peer through to see a looped film of queer couples kissing (Figures 4 and 5).
In 2008, the opening of Berlin’s queer memorial seemed to come both too late and too early. Germany takes pride in its public efforts to commemorate and overcome the National Socialist past, but a new generation of artists, activists, and educators, many of whom write from postmigrant and German-Jewish perspectives, casts this narrative of success in a critical light. The poet and essayist Max Czollek speaks of a performative “theatre of reconciliation,” which effaces the reality of a nation in which antisemitism and racism persist.
Figure 5: Screenshot of the Video for the Memorial for the Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, Yael Bartana, 2018.
Queer history upends the success story further because restriction of civil rights for LGBTIQ* people continued well after 1945. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, the basis for the persecution of gay men under Nazism, was only fully voided in 1994 (1968 in the GDR). Some concentration camp survivors faced renewed imprisonment after the end of the war. And those criminalized under National Socialism weren’t pardoned until 2002 — much too late for many of the victims. Intersex people have long been subject to forced surgery and sterilization, gender transitions were conditioned upon infertility until 2011, and same-sex marriage, parenthood, and adoption were illegal until 2017. “How are we to commemorate something without end?” asked Andrew Shanken in regard to Covid memorials. This question is latent here too. National Socialism ended, but remainders of its policies and value system persist.
Figure 6: Scene from Berlin Tiergarten, with the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism in the background. Photograph by Simone Stirner, 2023.
There are no benches to sit on around Berlin’s queer memorial, and when I visited this summer, I found myself standing next to a large waste container that the city must have put up after a summer storm (Figure 6). Visitors trickle through, alone, in pairs, or with a guide. One by one, they walk up to the small window to watch the short film. The film has itself been the object of intense debates over the difference between the experiences of gay men and lesbians under Nazism. Paragraph 175 did not criminalize female homosexuality, but lesbians were interned as “asocials.” Long left out of the debate is the particular situation of trans people. Trans women were often persecuted as gay men, upending from another angle the clear distinction between persecuted and non-persecuted victim groups. The revelation that one of two kissing men in the original video later became a far right Danish populist further spurred debate around who is actually represented by the memorial.[1] At times it felt like all the internal struggles of queer communities in Germany were projected onto ninety-five square feet of Berlin prime real estate. Could a memorial itself make this complexity visible?
To reflect the diversity within a community that found its members differentially targeted, the memorial started to rotate different films. Since 2018, a film by Yael Bartana shows kissing queer couples before a collage of images that depict moments in queer history, both persecution and protests for equal rights and liberation (see Figures 4 and 5). The film introduces an element of movement into the otherwise static character of the memorial. Set in the memorial’s cube it is also hard to access. Visitors must step up very close, blocking others’ view. It’s too high for many people in wheelchairs to see. Children don’t reach to the height, giving it the sense of an “adult-only” space. The video feels removed, even closeted.
Figure 7: AIDS-Memorial Munich. Photograph by enric archivell, 2014. Courtesy Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Unless, of course, you understand this viewing experience as a form of commemoration itself. In an interview about the project, Elmgreen explains that “It is as if one of the concrete slabs from the Holocaust memorial walked across the street at night, stood in the forest and said: Look at me, I am part of broader history, but I am also something of my own. I am gay.”[2] This move to the forest can be understood as a form of representation; like bathhouses, railway stations, and other parks, Tiergarten was a historical meeting spot for gay men. But what does it mean to move sites of remembrance into similar obscurity and code memory in a way that might not be legible to the mainstream public? What would happen if the memorial walked not into the nocturnal forest but right out onto the street in broad daylight to proclaim “I’m gay”?
Back in Munich, at Sendlinger Tor, a three-minute walk from the new gay and lesbian memorial, I turned to another queer memorial, the so-called “AIDS-column,” dedicated to the victims of AIDS (Figure 7). Designed by the gay and HIV-positive German artist Wolfgang Tillmans and inaugurated in 2002, the column is covered in light blue tiles, echoing the subway station below (Figure 8). Across three of the tiles, a white inscription reads:
AIDS
to the deceased
to the infected
their friends
their families
1981 till today
By quoting the transit station, the AIDS-column walks not into darkness like the Berlin memorial but out of its underground anonymity into the daylight. Tillmans, a celebrated contemporary photographer, has been significantly impacted by the AIDS-crisis. In the late 1980s, when Bavarian politicians, echoing the language of National Socialism, asked that gay men be “concentrated” in “special homes,” and argued for the “thinning out” of the “degenerate” homosexual population, Tillmans’ work brought to light the fragility and beauty of queer bodies in sweaty night clubs. But the metaphoric move of his AIDS-column from the underground to the street did not necessarily translate into public visibility. As Gözde Çelik writes, the memorial is “auffällig unauffälig” — notably not noticeable. It resembles the familiar architecture of the subway station so much so that its presence above ground blends seamlessly into the cityscape.
Figure 8: Columns at Sendlinger Tor subway station, Munich. Photograph by Florian Schütz, 2006. Courtesy Wikimedia.
For von Brandenburg, the artist behind the Munich memorial to persecuted lesbians and gays, its non-representational character was deliberate. “I wanted to express the idea in an abstract way. Not telling the story. Not getting literal or too direct,” she has said. Two triangles, one pink, one black, referencing signs that gays and lesbians had to wear in concentration camps, are the only representational elements in the ground installation. Abstraction in memorials to violence is not unusual. It speaks to the impossibility of representing violence and loss. It also prevents the reproduction of images that might upset survivors or their descendants, and further violate the rights of victims. But it is not only the violence that happened at Schwarzfischer that is not shown. Invisible, too, is the story of what was lost, of the space and the people who once gathered there. What were their names? What lives did they live? Could a memorial tell us what the place felt like on a good night? I imagine the joy, the community, the thrill.
According to Hans-Georg Küppers, former cultural advisor in Munich, “for the present and future, the artwork symbolizes the social acceptance of individual lifestyles and the open and tolerant Munich society.” As I stand by the corner observing the memorial, I wonder how the pastels might inspire such openness in the future. People hurry in and out of the buildings’ doors without taking note of the ground. Eventually, as a young family makes their way around the corner, the mother walking ahead, father pushing a stroller, someone finally seems to interact with the space in a conscious way: the older child takes note of the ground and starts a game of hopscotch as the parents shuffle onward.
“What does it mean to code memory in a way that might not be legible to the mainstream public?”
This scene might raise the question whether there is a “wrong” way to interact with memorials — a question articulated in controversial projects such as Shahak Shapira’s “YOLOCAUST,” which combined selfies from the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin with footage from Nazi extermination camps. The Munich memorial need not exclude play. Yet the scene highlights which lifestyles end up being visible in Munich’s “open and tolerant society” — and which don’t. In its subdued approach to queer visibility, the memorial suggests a toned-down version of gay life, domesticated and de-sexualized, that echoes with approaches to queerness in other parts of city life. In 2022, Oktoberfest, Munich’s beer festival and mega tourism event, welcomed queer visitors, but an associated website warned that — when it comes to “flirting” — “it is imperative to show some restrain . . . the beer tent is no place to explain concepts like ‘tolerance’ or ‘equal rights’ to people.” Better to go to the forest, camouflage as a subway station, or mute your colors.
Visibility, of course, brings its own risks. The leafy green of Tiergarten does not protect the Berlin queer memorial from being vandalized frequently, including by arson just a couple of weeks after my last visit. The fact that the far right, anti-migrant, and anti-queer party AfD that soared in polls over the summer is co-chaired by a lesbian meanwhile highlights that “visibility” is not always queer. Amidst these complexities of visibility, how can memorials remember otherwise? In Berlin, I considered what it would mean for Bartana’s film to escape the memorial and run in a loop on a screen among the trees. In Munich, an alternative presented itself by coincidence: when I walked past the AIDS-column this summer, the surrounding square was under construction. Amidst torn open pavement and the dust of hydraulic hammers, the column had received a new look and stood, wrapped in tight black safety rubber, in the warm light of a summer day. No place to linger, but room to note the visual rhyme, which the column now creates not with the subway station but with the black latex and leather toys in the stores of Müllerstrasse around the corner. Most likely, this design would not have won the city-sponsored competition. Neither did an alternative proposal for Berlin that envisioned a watchtower with a teapot perched on its top.[3]
Ultimately, I look out for moments when visibility in public spaces reaches beyond pastels on the ground and perfunctory displays of “openness and tolerance” without, however, reaffirming the static, patriarchal, hegemonic logic of traditional monuments. And while queer visibility is one thing, queer viability is another. When I left Munich in September, the large rainbow flag at the central station had been taken down. The city was getting ready for Oktoberfest. Who remains visible for those who can’t be?
Citation
Simone Stirner, “Memory in the Closet? Queer Memorials After National Socialism,” PLATFORM, Oct. 16, 2023.
Notes
[1] Jennifer V. Evans, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 171.
[2] Nikolaus Bernau, “Der Block ist schwul,” Berliner Zeitung, April 10, 2006, cited in Corinna Tomberger, “Wessen Gedenken? Geschlechterkritische Fragen an das geplante Homosexuellen-Mahnmal,” in Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, 9 (2007), 138-139.
[3] Ibid. 146.
