Introduction

This Article Addresses Questions about the words used in Germany today to negotiate the National Socialist past. The principal focus of this discussion will be the memorial sites and places of remembrance that have been re-designed and re-named in many places, especially since Reunification, and in particular the youth concentration camp for girls and young women at Uckermark, which was transformed into an extermination site later in the war. Because language and language use play a central role in the interpretation of history, intense debates have been held regarding these re-designing and naming processes. This article will focus on the two main opposing positions at the core of these debates: one demands an explicit naming of the atrocities—along with the corresponding assumption of responsibility for them—while the other supports the use of what are, in my opinion, unclear language and naming practices. As an introduction, I will discuss how these two opposing poles, clarity and ambiguity, were already central to the language policies of Nazi Germany and later to those of the Allied forces: while one characteristic of so-called “NS-Deutsch” is its use of deceptive obfuscation (which can be observed particularly in the Nazis’ prolific employment of euphemisms), the Allies, by contrast, attempted during their denazification efforts to promote explicit speech practices.

Following that introduction, I will discuss how debates about the naming of the most well known memorial sites over the last decades have demonstrated that people are still struggling for clear wording. A central issue in these debates is a representation of history that has been criticized for using linguistic means to equate the National Socialist system with that of the German Democratic Republic. I would like to exemplify this by an analysis of the new Gedenkstättenkonzeption (Memorial Sites Concept) of the Federal Government and the Neue Wache memorial site in Berlin. Against that background, there is an ongoing struggle concerning the naming of the memorial site at Uckermark. This memorial site is not counted among the principal German memorial sites—it is one of the sites of National Socialist crimes whose existence has long been suppressed. By using this example, I will show that the opposition of clarity and ambiguity is also a central point of contention in the debate outside of the official arena.