{"id":50883,"date":"2018-10-16T14:10:09","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T18:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=50883"},"modified":"2025-10-01T15:47:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T19:47:09","slug":"learning-from-germany","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/learning-from-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning From Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Learning From Germany\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Steps from the Brandenburg Gate, at the symbolic heart of modern Germany, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe envelops visitors in a discomfiting grey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s the dominant tone of the patio stones underfoot, the oft-overcast sky above, and 2,711 slabs of concrete that extend unevenly in every direction. Their drab featurelessness is inadequate to convey the ineffability of the lives they represent, even with rainfall beading on the smooth film of their anti-grafitti coating like countless tears shed for millions of lives cut short by pogroms, massacres and the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s unsettling. And it’s supposed to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Germany’s darkest hour hasn’t only been commemorated at the centre of its contemporary democracy, it’s been preserved at sites throughout the country. The Jewish Museum of Berlin<\/a> traces Jewish life in Germany over centuries, concentration camps have been preserved, and the House of the Wannsee Conference stands sentinel to the cold calculation with which the mass genocide was planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. Source: Studio Daniel Libeskind.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It’s an in-your-face approach that challenges Germans never to forget or deny, and it could scarcely be more different from how Canada has commemorated the darkest chapters of its own history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that’s starting to change. Sir John A. MacDonald’s role in the creation of the residential school system and dispossession of Indigenous peoples has led to the removal of some statues, and there’s been debate over what should be done with the residential schools themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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