Omissions and gaps in history

Driven largely by the Bremen-based newspaper taz, a small alliance has been forming since 2015 to critically examine the history of Kühne + Nagel, founded in Bremen in 1890 and now the world's third-largest logistics group. The company, now based in Switzerland, caused a stir in Bremen in 2015 when its majority shareholder, Klaus-Michael Kühne, announced with great fanfare a multi-million-pound new building for the company's headquarters on the banks of the Weser in Bremen city centre. At the same time, however, the company stubbornly refuses to come to terms with its past. Members of the Bremen initiative investigated in particular the role that Kühne + Nagel played in the so-called ‘Aktion M (Möbel)’ (Operation Furniture) during the Shoah. This order from the Nazi regime involved the ‘utilisation’ of the household goods of deported Jews from occupied Europe, from which not only the occupying administrations of the Nazi state but also countless Germans on the home front were to benefit: Furniture and other household goods were distributed to ‘air raid victims’ in German cities and also offered to the population at publicly advertised so-called ‘Jewish auctions,’ which the population enthusiastically accepted as an opportunity to pick up bargains. The ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish property was the area in which private individuals were most involved in the overall history of the Holocaust. Accordingly, provenance research could also become more important in relation to heirlooms in one's own home. Kühne & Nagel, whose furniture vans made this gigantic raid possible in the first place, also profited significantly from the exploitation, expulsion and murder of European Jews.

In order to draw attention to these profits from the Holocaust and to challenge the global company's policy of silence, the Bremen initiative initially planned to purchase a 4m²plot of land in the city of Bremen, directly adjacent to the plot acquired by Kühne & Nagel on the Weser river, under the slogan ‘Four square metres of truth’. A crowdfunding appeal for the purchase had already raised the considerable sum of 27,000 euros. The plan was to erect a memorial in the immediate vicinity, clearly visible, that would directly name and expose the historical profiteers of ‘Aktion M’. However, this purchase proposal was rejected by the Bremen Senate, even though politicians had signalled their fundamental support for the implementation of such a memorial. This was followed by lengthy negotiations with the city, which finally gave the green light for a memorial to be erected on public land near, but at a certain distance from, the headquarters of Kühne + Nagel. At the end of 2015, the taz newspaper initiated an ideation contest, to which 59 individuals and groups submitted designs for a memorial, including renowned artists such as Bernd Altenstein and Achim Ripperger. A five-member jury selected the winner from the submissions. Prior to the joint meeting, the jurors each made a personal pre-selection of ideas. These proposals were then discussed together and a final selection was made, resulting in two winners being chosen: the jury selected Evin Oettingshausen's idea ‘Leerstellen und Geschichtslücken’ (Empty Spaces and Gaps in History) as the winner. Second place went to the idea ‘Elikan im Mondenschein’ (Elikan in the Moonlight) by Thomas Georg Blank, in which the family's china cabinet, which probably came from Jewish ownership, was recreated. The jury was particularly impressed by the participation of the pupils of the Carl von Ossietzky Gymnasium in Hamburg in the ideation competition. They developed ideas in six groups, one of which, ‘Eye-Catcher,’ even made it onto the jury's nomination list: a two-metre-high marble frame, enclosed by opposing desks, offers idyllic views of the Weser River. However, the floor of the frame depicts deportations – ‘the horror beneath,’ as the students write.

The members of the jury are all familiar with Bremen's memorial landscape and some of them are directly involved in memorial education: Marcus Meyer, who as scientific director of the ‘Denkort Bunker Valentin’ was involved in the design of the memorial both from a historical and an educational perspective, attached importance not only to the artistic design but also to the fact that the ideas ‘worked’ as a memorial . Elvira Noa, chairwoman of the Jewish community in the state of Bremen, pointed out the limits of a certain degree of severity: addressing ‘Aryanisation’ by breaking with Jewish symbolism could point in a direction in which the crimes are to be denounced, but are repeated on an aesthetic level. This is a recurring dilemma in memorial education, especially with regard to National Socialism: the didactic engagement with history often has to contend with the exaggerated aura of a particular place or object and the perception of historically charged things as fascinating.

With Arie Hartog, an expert in contemporary sculpture was also represented on the jury. In addition to his artistic expertise, the director of the Gerhard Marcks House insisted on reviewing the ideas in terms of their suitability for implementation: some ideas only work on paper. Jean-Philipp Baeck and Henning Bleyl, both cultural scientists and editors at the taz newspaper in Bremen, completed the jury as initiators of the call for a memorial.

The jury chose the design by Bremen architect Oettingshausen, whose idea of ‘ommissions and gaps in history’ proved convincing. Her original design is based on the stepped terrain at the Weserarkaden: a shaft drills deep into the banks of the Weser in Bremen, near the site where the new Kühne + Nagel building is to be constructed. A walk-in glass panel in front of the company headquarters allows visitors to look down into a deep hole – and sense that there must be more to see further down. From the side, six metres below, a horizontal viewing shaft, a kind of shop window, meets the same hole. From there, pedestrians on the ‘Schlachte’, Bremen's popular Weser promenade, will be able to see empty spaces: in Oettingshausen's design, these are sharply contoured shadows on the back wall, marking the former location of furniture and pictures – as is familiar from cleared-out flats. Despite the subtlety of the representation, according to the jury, it functions as a clear reference to the theft of Jewish property.

As a sign of official support, in the summer of 2016, the Bremen state government allowed 19 of the 59 submissions to be displayed in an exhibition in the Bremen Parliament. The increased public interest in the realisation of an ‘Aryanisation’ memorial ultimately motivated the Bremen Senate to take up the matter. In November 2016, all political parties in the Bremen Parliament finally agreed to the construction of the memorial. However, what followed over the next five years was a constant back-and-forth between the initiators of the memorial, the Bremen-Mitte local council, which strongly supported its implementation, and the Bremen Senate (in particular the Department of Culture), which was reluctant to scare off the private sector in Germany's smallest federal state with such a critical memorial in the immediate vicinity of the company's headquarters. Accordingly, Bremen business circles argued that ‘individual attributions of guilt’ were highly problematic in principle.

Alternative proposals were repeatedly rejected – they would have placed the memorial in a more or less arbitrary location only approximately close to ‘Kühne + Nagel’. This would have diluted the central message, a criticism of those who profited from the ‘Aryanisation’. However, the Bremen Senate continued to emphasise its willingness to implement Oettinghausen's design. It was only years later, after consultation between the state monument conservator, the various senatorial authorities, the artist and the memorial initiative, that a suitable location was found that could be structurally implemented and was not too far from the Kühne + Nagel headquarters. On 1 February 2022, it was decided to build the memorial at this location, just beyond the Schlachte embankment. After around nine months of construction, the memorial was finally inaugurated on 10 September 2023, accompanied by a programme of events and a panel discussion on the topic of "The memorial is now in place, what next? Perspectives, challenges and pitfalls of commemorative culture.‘

Located directly on the street ’Tiefer,‘ between the Wilhelm-Kaisen-Brücke and Weserarkaden on the banks of the Weser, the memorial is now about 100 metres away from the ’Kühne + Nagel" high-rise building. The location, directly at the staircase to the arcades, allows a view into the interior of the six-metre-high corner shaft both from above through a glass plate embedded in the pavement and when walking past at the level of the Weser promenade, where there is a window on two sides. In the empty interior, the outlines of the missing furniture and pictures will be visible on two to three metre high concrete wall panels. The shaft is clad on the outside with the same sandstone as the surrounding arcade walls, which on the one hand integrates it well into the overall structure, but on the other hand makes the memorial appear rather inconspicuous. Since its opening, there has been repeated criticism of the ‘inconspicuousness’ of the memorial, which most passers-by often simply walk past without noticing. In addition, it turned out that the windows of the shaft were not properly sealed, so that during this wet winter, the moisture inside the empty space caused the panes to fog up. A ventilation system is to remedy this situation. Six months after its inauguration, the memorial is still not complete: the information panels designed to inform passers-by and interested visitors about the historical background – a panel embedded in the floor above the window and a stele on the Weser promenade – are still pending. According to the authorities responsible, this is also due to the fact that construction projects on the banks of the Weser are difficult to implement in winter.

Despite all the adversities in its implementation and an almost ten-year debate about the significance of an ‘Aryanisation memorial,’ its completion has now set a precedent in memorial policy. It is no longer just the absence of the people deported and murdered in the Holocaust with their personal belongings that is addressed here. More than that, it is the absence of a historical examination of Germany's own history of profit and the continuity of moral repression by parts of the German economy that is made visible in this memorial.