How do we remember the Rosenstrasse protest 80 years on?
By Hilary Potter, author of Remembering Rosenstrasse: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Germany
The 27th February 2023 marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Rosenstrasse protest in the heart of Berlin. The protest developed in response to the arrest and feared deportation of intermarried German-Jews and so-called Mischlinge (individuals with Jewish and Christian parentage). They were arrested as part of one of the largest roundups of German Jews, many of whom were forced labourers in the armaments industry. However, unlike the majority of people who were rounded up, these intermarried German Jews and so-called Mischlinge were mostly detained separately in the Jewish Community’s former administrative offices at 2–4 Rosenstrasse, in Berlin’s Mitte district. Their Christian relatives, predominantly wives, found where their loved ones were being held and gathered on the street outside to be near to them, to bring food and clothes and to await further news. Accounts vary from this being a near silent protest or gathering, to detailing how the protesters chanted and demanded the release of their loved ones. We know that the protest ebbed and flowed over the course of a week, at which point the detainees were gradually released but remained forced labourers and at risk. Most survived the Third Reich.
In the intervening decades this historical event has been remembered, forgotten and remembered again. The protest has been written about by historians and represented on film and through exhibitions and memorial artwork. Since the late 1980s it has been commemorated annually, first in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and now in unified Germany. On its 75th anniversary in 2018, commemorative speeches were notable for the way in which the indirect influence of the radical right (Germany’s Alternative for Germany party in particular) helped to shape the way in which the events were remembered that year.
There is, of course, no single way in which the events are remembered. Memory is individual as well as collective, but patterns and trends are discernible, as I demonstrated in my 2018 monograph, Remembering Rosenstrasse: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Germany. There I argued that remembrance of this historical event has been influenced by broader political trends at different stages and that the protest’s multiple representations can be analysed for the way they intersect with one another and influence how the protest continues to be remembered. What the 80th anniversary adds to that remains to be seen. Yet at this pivotal juncture, I find myself asking not just how these events are remembered but what we can still learn from them, and how that can benefit us in the present.
Two main schools of thought have emerged in histories of the protest. The first school of thought holds that the protest was a successful act of resistance, the pinnacle of intermarried Christian Germans’ opposition after years of increasing oppression under the Nazi regime. It was, according to this interpretation, the protest that secured the release of the Rosenstrasse detainees who would otherwise have been deported with the thousands of other German Jews as a result of the nationwide round-up. The protest succeeded in making the Nazi regime concede on this occasion because of fears of civil unrest that would spread, at a time when morale was low following defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad and the devastation wrought by Allied bombing campaigns. Thus, some historians conclude that the Nazis prioritised preventing civil unrest over striving to fulfil their ideological goals in the immediate term.
The second school of thought holds that the regime may have intended to deport the Rosenstrasse detainees in the longer term, but by 1943 the intention was to redistribute some of the intermarried German Jews within the forced labour programme. Specifically, it is argued the Nazis intended to use some Rosenstrasse detainees in forced labour in the immediate term but likely intended to deport them in the longer term, but the course of the war prevented any later attempts to deport intermarried German Jews en masse. The protest, however, is not designated as a success in these interpretations.
Both schools of historical thought have been meticulously researched and both have merit. Yet, they both oscillate around the question of whether or not the protest was a ‘success’. In so doing this perhaps places a limitation on the way interpretations, and with them remembrance, are framed. The protest, historians agree, was remarkably courageous, whatever form it took. The greater the number of narrative accounts we can collect the better but there are some narratives which do not fit neatly within either school of thought. It creates a binary structure to the narrative, depending on which side of the argument you come down on. This binary precludes an interpretation that explores whether elements of both schools of thought hold the key to answers. That aside, focusing on success makes us all too easily overlook other experiences that do not fit neatly within the narrative.
We understand that every story, every history we tell is constructed through the elements we include and exclude, and how we order them; arguably, we need coherent narratives to make historical events rememberable. A narrative in which oppressed individuals successfully overcome the Nazis certainly has an appeal, particularly at a time when the reach of the far right seems to be gaining around the world. It provides hope for what is possible in the most appalling of circumstances. Yet, narratives of heroism are also susceptible to instrumentalisation from any and all political perspectives.
Perhaps the 80th anniversary can serves as a prompt to start looking at precisely those voices that do not fit within that binary narrative, such as those women whose husbands joined the protest if not in Rosenstrasse, then at the nearby make-shift detention centre at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, or those individuals who were arrested and released within a few days, unlike the majority, or those detained for longer — up to six weeks — the most famous of whom was the publicist Heinz Ullstein. In doing so we may learn more about the events themselves but also we may learn to be comfortable with not knowing, with historical uncertainty, which is notably far harder to instrumentalise. This may help us to think more critically about the past, but also about the way the narratives we come across in life are shaped, by whom and to what ends.
