There has been some local excitement in the press (several articles, some letters to the editor) about the Nicknegerle or "little nodding negro" which is part of the Christmas display at the church of the Weggental convent in Rottenburg, Germany. The local paper asks: "Is he a relic of colonialism or an immigrant with a permit?".

The word "Negro" has similar connotations to the German word "Neger" which is here used in the diminuative, "Negerle". It connotes a bygone era when the word was "normal" (unlike the _other_ N-word), but carried with it certain connotations no longer considered appropriate. It is a small, wooden figure with African characteristics holding a hat with a coin slit and the word "Bitte" ("please" or "asking" or "request"). It is used to collect donations. When money is put in the slot, the figure's head nods up and down "in thanks." Traditionally, when the figure was first put up decades ago, the donations were used for missionary work in Africa. Now the money (about 1000 Euros per year) is used for several projects involving Palestinian children or a hospital in Bethlehem.

You can see a picture of the figure at
http://www.kloster-weggental.de/bilder/displayimage.php?album=6&pos=10.

The criticism is predictable: It is condescending to Africans who are portrayed as beggers, dependents, receivers of alms, who nod respectfully in gratitude to their white masters and benefactors. It harkens back to colonial days when Europe was imposing its power on Africa and, at home, it confirms the colonial stereotypes for passers by: a cute, dumb, little African with stereotypical attributes. There have been repeated requests to remove the "nodding negro" from the display and it was in fact taken out of the display for several years before returning in 2005.

Defenders of the "nodding negro" argue that it has become a traditional part of Christmas at the church and shouldn't be removed. Nobody is inflicting colonial humiliation on Africans any more and this is no longer a symbol of cultural hegemony. And, some add, the term "Neger" is not pejorative any longer (much as if the term "negro" had not died out in the 1970s in the United States, I imagine). Two articles have noted the presence of local black African Catholic clergy who do not object to the figurines. The Tübinger Wochenblatt (17 January, 2008, page 1) argued the case - and here is the memory issue - that the figurine is history than cannot be swept under the carpet:

Today these "nodding negros" are only an expression of our own history and we should take them out of storage and and display them. Nobody would seriously conclude that the church or any secular institution today can be accused of being racist because of that. At least nobody with any sense. On the contrary: These historical figurines remind us of the failings in our own history. Whoever believes that they have improved the world by hiding figurines or words is committing a grevious error.

The same story named several other churches (in Aachen, Hedingen and Alttötting) which also display the figure.

The issue is similar to the Judensau ("Jewish swine") issue that has flared up a few times over the years. There are German churches with centuries-old, horrific relief or sculpture depictions of Jews as pigs. These medieval and early-modern depictions are not unlike the worst of Nazi-era propaganda. Some people think that they should be removed. Others argue that they are an historic part of the architecture or that they are reminders of the deep roots of anti-semitism. Still others draw attention to them as evidence of the role of the church in Christian Europe's sordid relations with the Jews. Some want the Judensau to stay, but to be marked with commentary to draw the attention of passers-by to the history to which they attest.

Swastikas have been banned from public display in Germany except in contexts when it is part of an historical lesson. So they can be shown in movies about the Third Reich or in history books, but they cannot be stickers on plastic models (thus models of the Hindenburg do not display them, even though the real airship did), on t-shirts, pins, etc. Might that model - repressive by American standards of "freedom of speech" - be a useful guideline here? Is the "nodding negro" on display as an historical lesson or is the church exploiting subliminal racism, hidden under the veil of cuteness, for money? Can he remain in the Christmas display as long as he has a little sign next to him explaining to churchgoers that he is a relic of colonialism and racism? Would people be less likely to donate?

For decades, the official war memorial of the University of Tuebingen was used for ceremonial purposes by the various student fraternities on the National Day of Mourning (Volkstrauertag), the second sunday in November. These ceremonies began to be disrupted by "leftist" students in the 1960s. Only since2006 have these ceremonies been revived. I attended the ceremony this year.

The photo shows student members of the Germania and Arminia fraternities. They formed a small honor guard in their traditional uniforms with sabers and flags to honor the fallen. You can see all the photos from the ceremony at http://sites-of-memory.de/main/eberhardtshoehe.html#vtt.

The ceremony was very poorly attended. There are over two dozen student fraternities in Tübingen. Even when one considers that only a few of them belong to the conservative "duelling" variety (so-called "schlagende Verbindungen" or "Burschenschaften"), I found it astonishing how few of them were involved and how few of the members of the two directly participating fraternities showed up. Not even the musicians who were to play the national anthem showed up. Even if several dozen people had showed in full traditional regalia one would have been able to make the case that this ceremony, at least in this form, was a bit of an anachronism. As it was, with so few people present, it seemed rather awkward, almost like a caricature. Considering that the event wasn't even announced on the hosting fraternity Germania's home page, it is not surprising.

The honor guard showed up about 30 minutes early to rehearse their march, drawing their sabers in unison, marching, etc.

The ceremony consisted of the honor guard carrying the flags to the front, a brief speech by a representative of the Germania fraternity, a wreath-laying, a moment of silence, the singing of the third verse of the national anthem, and the return of the honor guard.

The speech was interesting. Anyone expecting the "Burschenschaften" to present an arch-conservative, pseudo-fascist interpretation would have been disappointed. Much of what was said was very mainstream and could have been said at the city's ceremony taking place at the same time at the Bergfriedhof on the other side of town:

- a resume of the history of the Volkstrauertag
- the dead warn us of the imperative of peace and a peaceful future for Europe
- the Volkstrauertag is struggling for relevance, few people are interested

There were also a few ideas and interpretations which would raise some eyebrows in some circles, but which could certainly find space in mainstream newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, such as:

- those who fell in the Second World War fought for glory, honor and loyalty, but were sacrificed for a criminal government
- honoring the fallen is (wrongly) viewed with suspicion, we must see not only the crimes of the regime, but also see the individual fates of those who died, people who were not just criminals, but people from all classes and parties

The individualization of memory - the focus on the soldiers as individuals and not on the war or the reasons behind it - is a common turn made to avoid the stigma of defeat and still forge some kind of unity within the society through the commemoration. In the words of James Mayo: "...defeat...cannot be forgotten and a nation's people must find ways to redeem those who died for their country to make defeat honorable. This can be done by honoring the individuals who fought rather than the country's lost cause." (Quoted in Wagner-Pacifici, Robin; Schwartz, Barry: The Vietnam Veterans's Memorial. Commemorating a Difficult Past. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No. 2, Sept. 1991, p. 380).

The speech closed with remarks which surprised me for their critical interpretation of current German military involvement around the world. The speaker pointed out that the German soldiers who are stationed on various war fronts around the world are defending certain economic interests and not the real interests of those in the war-torn areas, the people they purportedly defend.

There were no protests or disturbances. The days of sharp, ideological conflict within the student body are clearly over.

There is a local memory campaign of sorts going on here in Tübingen. The Französisches Viertel, a relatively new residential neighborhood built in the former French occupation barracks, has generally used the old street names for the addresses. But there is a large square that still has no name. Members of the community have been invited to submit ideas for names. Now the list is out and being voted on.

One of the proposed names is Deserteursplatz ("Deserters' Square" in English). The name would be in memory of those who were shot for desertion in the nearby forest. The local shootings are not documented, but recounted by eye-witnesses from 1945. Whether they occured here locally or not, tens of thousands of German men were in fact executed for desertion during the Second World War with most of the killings carried out during the final months of the war by roaming groups of SS men who

I had a glance at the list of proposed names. The other names are happy, innocuous names like Kinderplatz. The community will decide whether or not it wants a reminder of the war, politics and ideology in its new, clean, "alternative" living space. It will have to decide whether it will risk a clear statement of solidarity with men who chose flight over fighting for Nazi Germany. Instead of choosing the name of a generally-recognized hero like Dietrich Bonhoffer, a man much admired especially in Tübingen, the issue here is desertion - something that still closely connotes treason and abandonment of community.

The issue is remeniscent of the memorial to deserters in Ulm which is also located near a similar forest execution location. The same issues of collective identity, community and loyalty come into play.

Since 1920, Germans have recognized the second Sunday after All Saints' Day as Volkstrauertag or "Peoples' Day of Mourning." Since 1949, it has been part of official state memorial culture.

Here in Tübingen, I attended the religious service at the main Protestant church down town, the Stiftskirche and the official municipal memorial service at the hill cemetery as well. The official subject of the church service were texts from the book of Revelation and the Day of Judgement. The sermon managed to make a theological connection to the Volkstrauertag by focuing on the section of Revelations that talks about the city of Smyrna and talking about the martyrdom of Polycarp, who came from that city. The verse at Revelations 2:10, "Be faithful unto death...," is used on many war memorials (for example this 1849 Karlsruhe memorial). The pastor argued that the sacrifice of soldiers on the battlefield are not comparable to those of Christ and that of Polycarp nor are they the kind of future suffering and death that the author of Revelations is talking about to the congregation at Smyrna.

The official municipal memorial featured a brass orchestra, a choir (which did the first of two hymns in English), and two speakers. The city speaker rotates each year between various officials. This year Hermann Strampfer Regierungspraesident for the district of Tuebingen, spoke. The churhc speaker rotates between Protestant and Catholic. This year, the speaker was the Protestant deacon Marie-Louise Kling de Lazzer.

	Three dignitaries - Regierungspresident Hermann Strampfer, Mayor Michael Lucke, and Landrat Joachim Wlater, approach the memorial crosses adjacent to the graves of the fallen to lay a wreath.
	Bundeswehr reservists salute.
	German public buildings usually only fly the flag "at half mast," that is, they only fly it on sad occasions. Instead of being literally at half mast, they attach black mourning streamers to it. This is the city hall of Derendingen, the section of Tübingen where I live.

After the ceremonies, I asked one of the policemen if there is ever any trouble at these events, and he told me about Axel Heinzmann, a man who has been disturbing the ceremony in one form or another since 1985 by laying alternative wreaths. Years ago, there was competition and protest at the cemetery gate between left-wing groups and people around Heinzmann, a right-winger. He has been prohibited from protesting, so this year he appeared alone at the gate with a small sign simply asking for money to help cover the legal costs connected with his previous escapades.

I am in contact with Herr Heinzmann who is going to provide me with material on his history of protest. I will also be investigating these incidents for my upcoming Tuebingen Remembers project.

While the national-level news on the 78th anniversary of the 1938 Reichskristallnacht anti-Jewish pogroms focused on the activity of right-win skinheads in Frankfurt/Oder and especially on the opening of the new synagogue in down town Munich, things here in Tübingen were focused on local history.

The Tübingen Geschichtswerkstatt ("History Workshop") gave the same historical walk I reported on last year. (You can take a virtual tour of many of the sites at the webpage of the soon-to-be-defunct Fördervereins zur Erforschung der Heimatgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im Landkreis Tübingen e.V..)This year, the ceremony at the Gartenstrasse memorial was different, however. It was a fortaste of an exhibition opened later that evening at the Kulturhalle. While over 100 people gathered at the memorial, a computer-generated animated image of the former synagogue was projected onto the wall of the neighboring house - the house which now stands on the location of the former synagogue.

Later, at the opening of the exhibition, several hundred people, including the new mayor Boris Palmer, Michael Lucke and other local church and city dignitaries, were on hand to see two more computer simulation projects showing what the synagogue, which was destroyed on November 9-10, 1938, looked like both on the interior and in the context of the neighboring houses. The simulations were created by three independently-working teams in the club "Courage," a youth group dedicated to the memory of Lilli Zapf, a local historian who spent her life writing about the Tübingen Jews. The teams were coached by Carsten Kaut.

The Kulturhalle exhibition - titled "Stone-Light-Word-Image" - is the provisional, temporary result of long deliberations within the Tübingen city council and local groups about what to do with the few remaining stones from the foundation of the former Gartenstrasse synagogue. In 2004 someone asked what had become of the stones and, as Herr Wilfried Setzler, head of the local culture office, explained, a discussion began about what to do with the stones. Various ideas were discussed and rejected for various reasons including turning the stones over to the local Dietrich-Bonhoffer congregation, putting them in a museum, or putting them in Gräberfeld X.

The various components of the exhibition make for an impressive, elegantly simple combination in keeping with the title. The hall has the stones distributed in artfully random fashion around the room ("stone"). They suggest the scattered, ruined remnants of Jewish life in Tübingen (while posing a danger to visitors who try to walk while looking at the walls or anywhere but down!). On one wall, the computer simulation of the synagogues is shown ("light"). Pre-1938 and post-war photographs of local Jews hang on the other walls ("image").

The "Word" part of the title was provided at the opening by Karl Menrad from the local theater. He read exerpts from the 1882 dedication speech for the opening of the original synagogue by the Rabbi Dr. Silberstein. On the one hand, the rabbi's words reflected the nationalistic mood of the period in which they were written. On the other, some of the passages seemed like eary warnings of the future, such as his admonition against anyone entering the synagogue with hateful intent or feeling and his request that God protect the synagogue from fire and flood.

	This picture shows the main exhibition hall before the huge crowd of visitors blocked all view of the synagogue stones.
	Visitors view the pictures of Jewish life in Tübingen in the 1930s. On the right is Martin Ulmer from the Tübingen Geschichtswerkstatt, who is very knowledgeable about Holocaust history in Baden-Württemberg.
	Carsten Kaut (left) introduces the 14-19-year-old youths who designed the computer animations of the synagogue.

Mayor Olaf Palmer also spoke briefly at the opening of the exhibition. He recalled his own partially-Jewish heritage and a recent visit to the town where his Jewish anscestors came from. In that town, Königsbach-Stein, the location of the former synagogue, which had aslo been destroyed by the Nazis, had not been marked at all, but had had a garage built over it. Palmer recounted the story of a man who returned to the location after decades in America and, upon seeing the garage, remarked that he wanted to have nothing to do with a country that showed such disrespect. Later, a memorial replaced the garage. Palmer spoke with confidence that Tübingen would continue to demonstrate a responsible approach to its own history under his leadership.

The exhibition is at the Kulturhalle near the Nonnenhaus in down town Tübingen until the 18th of November.

At the synagogue ceremony, at the opening of the exhibition, and in the memorial church service in the Stiftskirche, the founding of a new organization was announced: "Bustan Shalom" is the first officially recognized Jewish organization in Tübingen since the Nazi period. They have been meeting in the rooms of the Dietrich Bonhoffer congregation on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays. At the church memorial service, a collection was taken up for the group to buy ceremonial items for their services. The speaker who asked for donations at the ceremony emphasized the symbolic importance of having Christians fund the procurement of Jewish religious items.

The church service has been taking place on 9 November every year since in Tübingen since 1992, the year of "Rostock and Hoyerswerda" as visitors were reminded (the year of racist attacks on foreigners in those German cities). It is organized by an interdenominational Christian coalition, with one congregation running the specifics each year in rotation. This year was the 100th birthday of Nazi resister and Tübingen theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer, so the congregation named after him was in charge. Bonhoffer turned against the Nazis specifically because of their oppression of the Jews and was later executed along with the other plotters of July, 1944. The central element of the ceremony was a presentation by confirmation students from the congregation who reported their impressions from having visited the synagogue memorial and studied the life of Dietrich Bonhöffer. Their words were predictably about being enraged, mystified, afraid of what one might have done if alive back then, and hate for the Nazis. An interesting element to some of their comments, however, and a theme throughout the ceremony, was that of reconciliation and cooperation with, and respect for Judaism. That congregation is the only one in Baden-Württemberg with a Jewish partner congregation (in Petrozavodsk, Russia, a partner city of Tübingen).

Today is Veterans' Day at home in the States, Memorial Day in other countries. For Germany other days have taken higher priority. The 9th of November has been a very important day in German history: the fall of the wall in 1989, the Reichskristallnacht, when Nazis all over Germany harassed, beat-up and murdered German Jews and burned down their places of worship, in 1923, when Hitler's first bid for power, the "Beerhall Putsch", was defeated, in 1918, when revolution broke out in Germany, in 1848, when the Frankfurt Parliament – which had offered the Prussian King the crown of all Germany as a constitutional monarch under a democratic constitution – was broken up by force of Prussian arms. Decisive moments in national memory with contradictory meanings and opposing constituencies.

Obviously, the last two events are foremost in Germans' minds. The tragedy and shame associated with the Reichskristallnacht prohibit any overtly joyous expressions of joy over the fall of the Wall. Somber memorial ceremonies and events surrounding the former event take precedence over remembrance of the latter, at least in public expression.

Here in Tübingen, Germany, the local Förderverein zur Erforschung der Heimatgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im Landkreis Tübingen e.V. (an organization to promote the study of the local history of National Socialism in Tübingen) conducted a walk through Tübingen led by Sylvia Takacs. About a dozen people showed up. Starting at Gräberfeld X, where victims of the Nazis, whose bodies were used for medical research at the Tübingen anatomical institute were buried, the route continued to the memorial plaques at entryway of the Neue Aula, and on to Münzgasse in down town Tübingen, where the police and, during the Nazi period, the Gestapo was headquartered. It is right around the corner from the memorial plaques in the city center. Finally, we ended up at the memorial ceremonies at Synagogenplatz, the place where the Tübingen synagogue was located until being torched by Nazis 67 years before.

The event was an interesting mix of Gedenken ("remembrance") and education. At Gräberfeld X, the university and at the synagogue memorial there were elements of both: wreath layings and moments of silence and poetry on the one hand, historical background information on the other. Martin Ulmer of the Geschichtswerkstatt presented information about the fate of Tübingens Jews at the down town locations. Especially interesting was his recounting of how one of the city's main clothing stores, Haidt, right across from the memorial plaques, was "aryanized", "bought" far below value, from a Tübingen Jew in 1938 and the scandal it caused when the Haidt store celebrated its 50th jubilee in 1988. It reminded me of the recent discussion about the new book by historian Götz Aly (link in German), who unmasked the local economic reasons why many people supported Nazi anti-Semitism and terror.

One of the highlights was also a visit to the chapel of the city cemetery where Andreas Vogt showed us artwork by Ilona Lenk. It symbolically refers to the 13 unidentified victims of the Nazis interred at Gräberfeld X (see above). The photo here shows her work, 13 cloth-covered cubes arranged in a large X formation; the banner in the background lists the known names of victims buried there. Visitors to the cemetery can view the work, accompanied by the song, "The Train" by Valerio R. Pizzorno in the chapel until 20 November from 1400-1600 on Thursdays and Fridays and 1100-1600 on weekends.

At the synagogue location, there were many more people. A survivor of the Reichskristallnacht in Dortmund, Professor Reynold Koppel, recalled his experiences, and Professor of German Jürgen Wertheimer spoke on the language of memory associated with anniversaries and memorial ceremonies - remarks I will summarize in a later entry. Many then proceeded to the church for a memorial ceremony. I hurried home to help get the kids into bed.

The annual historical walk was announced (in German) here. It was reported on in the Schwäbisches Tagblatt on 11 November.