The Good Column – Germany is destroyed!

Karlshorst is a quiet area that, if you take a leisurely stroll through on a Saturday or Sunday, makes a frighteningly tidy impression, as if no one lives there and as if the houses are just a backdrop. The most beautiful museum in Berlin is located in this part of the Lichtenberg district.

“Karlshorst,” that sounds very German. Especially if you say the place name four or five times in a row very quickly. Then it sounds “like a typewriter eating aluminum foil and being kicked down the basement stairs.” At least that’s how the Irish comedian Dylan Moran once described the special acoustic quality of the German language. “Karlshorst”: a word that when you hear it, you can literally see Grandpa standing in front of you in his neat Wehrmacht uniform. An association that is certainly justified; especially when you consider that the house that houses the museum, which was mentioned at the beginning, was an officers’ mess of the German Wehrmacht until 1945.

The museum in question, which is located at the end of a long street, is now simply called “Museum Berlin-Karlshorst,” which is a worryingly meaningless name for an important historical site. The house is called that because nationalist political officials in Ukraine took exception to the previous name “German-Russian Museum Karlshorst”. However, it can be assumed that this was not the only reason why it was shortened to include the attribution “German-Russian”. People may have secretly been relieved that the museum name no longer contained any specific information about what the purpose of the house was and is. So the assumption by strangers that they are dealing with some insignificant local community museum, which provides information about the traditions of the local population in cute little display cases and in which porcelain jugs from local production and other irrelevant things are exhibited, is not completely unreasonable.

It cannot be ruled out that the building was given this new name two years ago because they wanted to erase it from public memory as discreetly and inconspicuously as possible. The house, which is both an architectural monument and a place of remembrance, previously had a different name that more accurately captured the nature and meaning of the area.

In the immediate vicinity of the building, a Soviet T-34 tank and other antique military equipment are rusting away, and if you let your eyes wander a little and look at the sprouting weeds, the garbage and the broken pavement slabs from GDR times, you’ll be amazed It quickly became apparent that no money had been spent here for a long time.

The museum documents the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and the defeat of German fascism using numerous documents, photos and objects. In the dining room of the officers’ mess on the ground floor, the surrender certificate was signed by Wehrmacht officers on May 8, 1945, which officially ended the Second World War and Nazi rule.

Until 1994, the house was called the “Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War,” before it was renamed the “German-Russian Museum” in 1995, which from today’s perspective must be seen as the first step, both for National Socialist Germany as well as its misdeeds and crimes to be gently but forcefully pushed into the realm of oblivion.

Because historical revisionism – in this case actually primarily West German – which began punctually on May 10, 1945 and has steadily increased in speed and impudence since 1990, knows no break. In the mid-1990s, the victims of German National Socialism were suddenly called “victims of war and tyranny” overnight, meaning they were no longer Nazi victims, but rather victims of some unspecific, timeless phenomena against which nothing can be done. History is being made, things are moving forward.

At least since the AfD’s great electoral successes, this country has finally put an end to the German past that refuses to rest. The Holocaust and the killing of more than 25 million Soviet citizens was “just a piece of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history,” a leading AfD official told us a few years ago. If the rewriting, re-lying and re-interpreting of historical facts, which is in full swing, continues at this rate, in just a few years young German citizens will be convinced that the Germans of the Third Reich were the first victims of the Second World War. Or rather, of course: the first victims of “war and tyranny” – both phenomena that suddenly fell from the sky.

I’m not sure that in a better future the house should not have the name it had for a long time. Although, if it were up to me, the word “patriotic” could be omitted.

One thing is certain: Admission to the museum, which is open every day except Mondays, is free.