A sign on the memorial site revealing the “double past” of Buchenwald. Courtesy Buchenwald Memorial.

Part of The Wiener Holocaust Library’s PhD and a Cup of Tea doctoral seminar series.

The German reunification not only caused tremendous social and economic changes but also reshaped the memorial landscape in (East) Germany. Memorial sites like Buchenwald which were instrumentalized under the GDR as showplaces for antifascism had to be redesigned (“reoriented”) after the fall of the Berlin Wall in order to break away from their controversial communist past. This process triggered off, especially in Buchenwald, a highly publicized controversy that lasted for ten years. This presentation gives an overview of the reorientation of Buchenwald by naming its main actors and events, identifying the main bones of contention and by analysing the way the interactions between the actors reshaped the memorial space.

About the speaker:

Maëlle Lepitre is a PhD candidate in History at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena (Germany). Her research explores the effect of the German reunification on memory culture, and more specifically on Buchenwald. She will publish an article about memorial sites in East Germany after 1989 in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (forthcoming, 2022).

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