We All Have Our Memorials
The question is not if we matter, but how we matter.
Today, I return to a question on which I have already touched: What is the significance of a human life?
Our poets have had much to say on the matter. Consider these words of Walt Whitman, featured prominently in the film Dead Poets Society.
“The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”1
This closely echoes Shakespeare’s words in his play As You Like It.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…”2
But the speech from As You Like It, spoken by the sad and cynical character Jacques, does not capture the fundamental optimism of Whitman’s lyric. Whereas the end of life for Jacques, “Is second childishness and mere oblivion; /
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” Whitman sees each person’s existence tied to a collective human existence, in which their contributions shape the character of the overall play.
Though I may at times feel as cynical as Jacques, wondering if my efforts are all for naught, I know that Whitman speaks the truth. To exist within history is to change history, and though my name may not be remembered after I die, I will have done something to shape the collective human memory. I will have added a verse to the play that is human history.
All of us, great and small, will leave behind a memorial, whether it is marked with stone or not. The question is, what kind of memorial will we leave?
Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Berlin. Like most national capitals, it is packed with memorials to important historic figures, their legacies as mixed as that of Germany itself.
In the Tiergarten, I saw the white stone memorial to Richard Wagner. He sits in a grand chair, with characters from his epic Ring cycle featured below. Farther north, just past the Victory Column, stands the memorial to Otto von Bismarck, that shrewd political operator who birthed a unified German state out of blood and iron. Near the Marienkirche and Neptunbrunnen stands one of the country’s many statues of Martin Luther, as always holding a copy of the Bible.
These memorials were for the most part positive. Although Wagner and Luther were anti-Semitic and Bismarck militaristic, the good they did is seen by many Germans to outweigh the bad. But there are some memorials in Berlin that reveal unmitigated tragedy.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is among the newest monuments in the city. It features row upon row of stone slabs, some taking the form of monoliths and others more sepulchral in appearance. The starkness of those rows of dark rock, unforgiving and brutal, prevents any rose colored interpretation of the events. To walk by each one is to know it represents thousands of dead, and thousands more, and thousands more. Even the name - not a Holocaust Memorial, but a Memorial to Murdered Jews - leaves no room for euphemisms or whitewashing.
Seemingly by coincidence, the former site of the Führerbunker, where the highest ranking Nazi officials sheltered during the final Soviet takeover of Berlin, lies only one block from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This was the location where Adolf Hitler shot himself, while his wife Eva Braun and the entire Goebbels family committed suicide by cyanide poisoning.
As one might expect, there is no monument glorifying their actions. However, contrary to what one would expect, the site is hardly marked at all. An apartment complex has been constructed on the site, and only a lone sign provides a bit of historical detail. The bunker itself has been mostly destroyed, its remnants incorporated into the basements of neighboring buildings.
My husband was surprised by this state of affairs. Did Germany not wish to provide a historical presentation at the Führerbunker as they have at Checkpoint Charlie, the remnants of the Berlin Wall, and the many former concentration camps throughout the country?
“Isn’t there some memorial?” he asked.
I looked at the rows of stone slabs stretching out before us, sweeping my hand through the air. “This is their memorial.”
For you see, there are different kinds of memorials, and some that work two ways. Germany has chosen to remember the Nazis for the evils they committed. (A good and fitting choice considering the severity of those evils.) It is not the Führerbunker that they have memorialized, with its possible mythology of a heroic last stand and unwillingness to surrender, but the all-consuming ideology of hate and death that led eventually to its natural conclusion: suicide. For the Hitlers and the Goebbels had done violence against themselves with every act of violence they endorsed, and the act of self-violence that is suicide flows out of these things like a noxious ooze from a poisoned wound.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews causes us to reflect not only on the victims who were murdered, but also on the hateful hearts of the oppressors who murdered them. The ultimate legacy of the Nazis is death, death, and more death.
We each contribute a verse to the powerful play of human history, but the character of our contributions varies wildly. Every word of grace we speak leaves a legacy of hope. Every word uttered in hate darkens the play. What kind of memorial will we leave?
It is relatively easy to perceive the evils in this world, but far less easy to see the evils within ourselves which have the potential to put us to death and poison those around us. Much of the time, we choose to acknowledge the good in ourselves and others, but cast our eyes away from the hints of shadow which, when combined across the whole of humanity, create a darkness that clouds our existence and puts our hopes for a better future to death.
But what if we should take the metaphor further? What if we are truly actors alone, and there is another who writes the play? Could some other power be at work in and for us, mitigating our worst mistakes and protecting humanity from itself? And what if the playwright wants a happy ending?
The memorials we leave speak of victory and defeat, good and evil, the full complicated spectrum of human existence. We may have hope of vindication only in an intervention from the outside: a power greater than ourselves, who can make of our evils something infinitely good.
For by our own power, we can never leave a perfect memorial, but by the greater power we can truly say, “The play is powerful. The play is good.”
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UPDATE: My newest article for 1517, “Luther vs. Karlstadt: The Other Leipzig Disputation,” can be found here.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly implied that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide using cyanide. The evidence suggests that he actually shot himself in the head, which I knew but failed to properly note in the article. Thank you to the reader who caught this error.
I live in Belgium and I've always been told that Hitler shot himself through the head. Eva died of cyanide. A Belgian journalist researched Hitler's dead and says it's the shot that killed Hitler, not the cyanide.
https://historiek.net/dood-hitler-zelfmoord-theorieen/141682/