Today I visited the old dam on the Eifgen creek, which is located only few kilometers from here in the forest. It was built in 1906, and as far as I know, it had served a great part of Burscheid as drinking water supply for many years. The last time I was there was certainly ten years ago already. I balanced over a fallen down tree to the other riverbank then, and to my big surprise I discovered a swastika made of small white pebbles that were put into the concrete of the barrage. I was excited about having discovered a small piece of history right on my doorstep.

But when I came there today, I was very disappointed to find that apparently someone did not share my enthusiasm: Obviously he had tried to remove the swastika or at least make it irrecognizable with a chisel. I can’t understand such a thing. No matter what negative connotations one may associate with that sign – it still remains nothing more than a sign. People virtually act as if the symbol of the swastika had been charged with some kind of evil magical energy a hundred years ago and as if it could cast its dreadful spell on us again at any time, if we don’t remove it fast enough.

Well, if nowadays right wing extremists smear swastikas on the walls with spray cans, that surely is another matter, but here we have a piece of history after all, a little treasure of modern period archaeology. It is in the nature of things that buildings from the National Socialist era are occasionally furnished with corresponding symbols – but does that have to lead to a crossroads between moral and historical interest? Just because we don’t immediately remove a symbol steeped in history from a building, that doesn’t automatically imply our approval of National Socialism.

As regards that, we Germans live with a totally exaggerated morality and probably a fear of repetition as well. This fear is also being fanned officially: We are continuously being talked into the idea that as Germans, we bear a historical blame, almost like the original sin. An Example: Joschka Fischer’s speech at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of the concentration camp Sachsenhausen.^[1] There it says:

The name of our country will forever remain associated with the humanity crime of the Shoa. We Germans can, may and will never abdicate this responsibility.

(…)

This we owe to you and your suffering, and this we owe to the dead and their memory.

To put it clearly: Due to the fact that in the year 1982 I was born in Leverkusen (and not 100 km further to the west in Holland or Belgium), I have automatically incurred partial guilt in a mass murder that has taken place 50 years before my birth. How brazen must my parents have been to put me into a white christening robe despite that knowledge? But joke aside. Like many young Germans, I feel a little pranked at this point. Don’t get me wrong: I am quite of the opinion that we should continue doing explanatory and memory work. Of course we should stay sensitized for the subject, but there is a limit to everything – we can’t possibly be expected to answer for things that our grandparents or even great-grandparents did. The only responsibility we can encumber young Germans with is to prevent a repetition of those happenings.

The general overcaution and oversensitization for the subject of National Socialism is, like Harald Martenstein once aptly declared it, “a German neurosis (…), the theory that there is a Nazi beast in all of us, which might come out at every opportunity, whenever we read anything or print anything or inform ourselves of anything.”^[2] And apparently that is exactly the way the Eifgen creek swastika-chiseler was thinking. Pity.

Whereas the future of the dam is hanging in the balance anyway: Since 2000 already, the razing of the building has been planned for ecological reasons, among others because the storage space has become marshy already and the fish ladder, which was meant to allow for fish to continue wandering upstream, doesn’t serve its purpose. Apparently I’m not the only one to feel sad about this project, which was conclusively decided in 2006. There has been a storm of protest, but also alternative proposals.^{[3] [4] [5] [6] [7]}
Personally, I would be delighted if they would only ablate the dam in the middle instead of completely razing it. But then – with the idiotic destruction of the swastika, it has already lost a large part of its historical value anyway.