Like much of the rest of Europe, the city of Nuremberg in the Bavarian region of Germany was baking hot in early August 2018 – which is why I wasn’t originally planning to stop that afternoon when my daughters and I drove by the Zeppelintribüne, the large grandstand of the former Nazi Party rally grounds and its most iconic architectural remnant. But as we were passing by it, the questions began and curiosity won out. We parked and started our climb up.
Yes, I told them, over there is where Adolf Hitler stood when he thundered out his speeches during the infamous Nazi party rallies. This, too, is where the world – through Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will – watched with awe the brilliant creation of Hitler’s master architect Albert Speer: the Lichtdom, or “Cathedral of Light,” created by some 150 anti-aircraft searchlights aimed up at the sky. This gave the audience the impression of being covered by a sky-high dome of light. It is also where, at the end of the war, the Americans – in a highly symbolic and much publicized act – blew the gigantic golden swastika from its perch atop the grandstand.
This was the first time for my children, but I had climbed the steps of the grandstand innumerable times. In the mid-1990s, as a student of history at the nearby university in Erlangen, I had joined a club of young aspiring historians called Geschichte Für Alle (“History For Everyone”). It was one of the best professional decisions I ever made. As a member of “History For Everyone,” I soon gave historical tours of Nuremberg and its troubled past, helped develop ideas for local museums, and worked on writing books on local history. Best of all, none of these activities indulged in Heimattümelei – a German term that refers to the widespread tendency to look at local history through rose-tinted glasses. Instead, we tried to engage in a critical view of our country’s past, especially its Nazi past. It was a real life version of what my professors lectured about in theory when they discussed Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past – what in German is called Vergangenheitsbewältigung. We translated our historical knowledge into historical-political action, driven by our conviction that something like this must never happen again – and that the best way to guarantee it would not was never to forget. The fact that, in the year 2001, a museum opened on the former grounds of the Nazi party rallies also owed to the foundational efforts of “History For Everyone.” Grass-roots public history at its best.
As a result, I was more than prepared to explain to my daughters Germany’s Nazi past. What I wasn’t prepared for were the big, black letters recently spray-painted on the back wall of the grandstand.
“Nie wieder NSU” (“Never again NSU”), it read, and now I was asked, of course, to explain what that meant. Our conversation seamlessly shifted quickly from Germany’s Nazi past to Germany’s present.
I knew all too well why this writing was on the wall. On September 9, 2000, Enver Simsek, a thirty-eight-year-old German businessman with Turkish roots, was shot and killed in his delivery van, which was parked in a clearing off one of the streets connecting the Langwasser district of Nürnberg with Altenfurt, another city district even further southeast of downtown. His van was a common sight in the adjacent woods there. It is where he – or, more normally, his employees – sold nice but inexpensive flowers. At the time, I lived only two minutes down the road and frequently bought flowers there, especially on Sundays, when all the stores were closed and I was looking for a last-minute gift for friends or family. That particular afternoon, a friend of mine was driving down the road on her way to visit me. When we later heard what had happened, she told me that she had noticed that nobody had been standing next to the flowers, but not given it much thought. A few days later, I spoke to a neighbor who followed the local news more closely than I did about the murder and asked her if the police knew anything yet. She said that they suspected it had been that either foreign organized crime or a family feud was behind this – and couldn’t resist making a comment that this wasn’t a surprise, given the man’s Middle Eastern background. As much as I was taken aback by her suggestion that “these people” were much likelier than “we people” to be involved in crimes such as this, my most telling reaction was perhaps this: nothing was further from my mind that day than responding that this might also have been a xenophobic crime.
As it turned out, of course, that is exactly what it was. Enver Simsek was the first of ten victims in the National Socialist Underground murders that plagued Germany from 2000 until 2007. Because it was not just the first one, but altogether three of the murders, that happened in Nuremberg (the last one in 2005), the local police even founded a special unit with the name: Crescent (“Halbmond”). Just as telling as that accusatory name was the news coverage in the local press: “Criminalists suspect”, wrote the Nürnberger Zeitung on June 10, 2005, right after the third Nuremberg murder, “that the shots to the head are punishments by a drug ring.”
Most of the other victims were also ethnic Turks, or Kurds, a fact that soon gave the crime nicknames known across Germany: the “Bosphorus serial murders” (“Mordserie Bosporus”) and the even more derogatory Kebab Murders (“Döner-Morde”). The victims were usually shot in broad daylight. Police subsequently investigated family and friends first – to no avail. Years later, when two of the real perpetrators blew themselves up and had a video sent to several news media in which they claimed responsibility for the murders, the German police finally found out who the real perpetrators had been. Without knowing, Germany had, for years, been witnessing a series of hate crimes by a neo-Nazi group called NSU, an acronym for National Socialist Underground.
As I write, I was part of the curious blindness that surrounded these events. Looking back on it, I try to understand why that was the case. Was my reaction an expression of a twisted form of national pride, namely, that something like this couldn’t possibly happen in twenty-first-century Germany, a country that had arguably dealt so much better with its dark past than any other country? Or was it an understandable oversight, because this group really only represented a tiny minority on the margins of German society. In other words, it was perhaps indeed highly unlikely that the murder series happened at all – finally a case of a true Betriebsunfall (“accident”) in German history?
The recent rise of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany”) as well as the xenophobic and volatile crowds that took to the streets of Chemnitz a few weeks ago certainly seem to suggest that right-wing thought is no longer a marginal phenomenon in Germany – if it ever had been. Does this mean our efforts to coming to terms with the past were in vain? Perhaps. The only thing I do know is that it is a process that never ends. Now off to teach!