Denkmäler
I read a lot of books about World War II as a kid, and lapped up history courses in both high school and college, but until this month I had never heard of Operation Gomorrah. That was the code name given by the Allies to a coordinated aerial bombardment in the summer of 1943 of Hamburg, Germany’s second most populous city and its largest port.
I traveled to Hamburg to visit a friend and didn’t do much research on things to see and do before I went. (This is abnormal for me.) I spent some time walking up the Reeperbahn — a Red Light district famous for hosting some upstart British boy band in the 1960s — and gawking at a working port that sits across from a touristed waterfront. The city feels more modern, with wider roadways and more car traffic than either Munich or Berlin. I walked to the tallest church steeple that I could see, planning to dip my head in and sit for a bit in whatever platz was nearby.
But Hauptkirche Sankt Nikolai had no grand nave or detailed sculpture; no frescoes, no relics. It is just a tower of mauled masonry that serves as a gate to the ruins of the church that once stood here. The parish dates to 1195, around the time Hamburg was founded. It burned, along with much of the rest of the city, during those massive raids in 1943.
The museum below was thought-provoking. It acknowledged and commemorated the victims of strikes by the German Luftwaffe on Rotterdam, Coventry and Warsaw. Nazi warplanes, of course, terrorized London during the Battle of Britain. And then the RAF, supported with day-time raids by the US Eighth Air Force, came for Hamburg.
In the core of the city as many as two-thirds of the structures were destroyed. Roughly 40,000 people died in the strikes, as incendiary bombs created a tornado of fire that rose a thousand feet into the air and turned humans to ash. First-person accounts were narrated over images of the blackened city. I knew the allies bombed Germany and I know that war is hell. I have never before visited a place that, in the lifetime of my grandparents, had been destroyed by my countrymen.
My host in Hamburg was Matthias Revers, a sociology professor who I first encountered more than a decade ago when he did field research for his PhD dissertation at the New York State Capitol. I spoke with him and his wife about their family histories in Austria, and what they knew from their parents and grandparents about the Third Reich. It’s clear to me that the trauma of world war is omnipresent here in both the physical environment and the psyches of the people.
There are stolpersteine — or “stumbling stones” — in cities around Europe to commemorate victims of the Holocaust at their last place of residence. Grand public buildings have been recreated. I found memorials — the German word is Denkmal, which literally translates to “think time” — to the victims of the Third Reich in most of the cities and towns I visited. They are not separate or special, they are woven into the fabric.
And then there are the concentration camps. I visited Dachau, just north of Munich, which became the first Nazi prison camp when it opened in 1933. People walked through barracks, the jail, a crematorium and gas chamber. Every German student is required to visit one of the camps before they can graduate from high school, to be confronted with the horrors of the recent past. It’s quite a contrast to the U.S., where we generally focus on the history to celebrate and downplay the rest.
THE QUESTION: On which river does Hamburg sit?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: The first Oktoberfest celebrated the marriage of crown prince Ludwig I and Theresa.