Mind the Gap: Gay Activism and the Remembrance of Gay Victims at the Dachau Memorial Site

Abstract

The first impression visitors of the memorial site of the former concentration camp in Dachau are confronted with is the old roll call square and the main memorial, the huge International Monument.

We thank Nina Rabuza, Jacky Mercey and Juliane Niklas for their very helpful comments.

Introduction

The first impression visitors of the memorial site of the former concentration camp in Dachau are confronted with is the old roll call square and the main memorial, the huge International Monument. The International Monument was inaugurated in 1968 shortly after the memorial site itself opened in 1965. It is composed of two main parts: one is a giant sculpture showing humans with emaciated bodies, entwined with one another and entangled in barbed wire in the center. The second part, the Basis, is accessible; visitors can walk through and find different layers of the artwork commissioned by the Comité International de Dachau (CID), the international committee of Dachau survivors, and developed by Nandor Glid. The whole monument is designed as a “Path of Reflection and Catharsis”,¹ with the visitors entering the complex and passing along a wall with an inscription commemorating, as role models, murdered resistance fighters. Visitors then follow a path that leads downwards until they stand directly beneath the sculpture. When leaving, the monument leads upwards to face a wall with the words “Never again!” and an urn containing the ashes of “an unknown prisoner”.² In the center of the Basis, opposite the large sculpture, visitors see an installation, a bas-relief, showing three links of a chain covered with triangles in different colors. These triangles, so-called ‘Winkel’ (badges), were used by the SS to create a system of hierarchies that forced the prisoners into categories and, in doing so, humiliated them.³ The installation is meant to stand for the solidarity among prisoners in this forced ‘camp society’.⁴

Looking carefully, the visitors may notice that some of the triangles in the installation are left empty; these represent the missing colors, pink, green, and black. In his original concept, Nandor Glid included all the colors used by the SS, but the CID wanted to exclude these three colors representing prisoners categorized as ‘homosexual’, ‘criminal’ or ‘asocial’. In 1976, eight years after the monument had been inaugurated, gay activists started to fight for the recognition of the persecution of gay men during National Socialism and for the remembrance of gay victims. The International Monument became one center of attention.⁵

In this article, we aim to reconstruct this struggle for remembrance with a focus on the gay liberation movement. We discuss how gay activists shaped the commemoration of gay victims at the Dachau memorial site and the relevance of remembrance in the formation of the gay liberation movement itself. The struggle for recognition and equal rights as the main goals of the movement is, as we argue, strongly connected to the struggle for commemoration of the gay victims persecuted and murdered during National Socialism.

To understand the dynamics of the debates and arguments, it is necessary to keep in mind that the existence of the memorial site itself was the result of the long political struggle by survivors and their organizations against a German hegemonic discourse that rejected the commemoration of the victims and their experiences in the concentration camps. We thus start our article by referring to conflicts at the beginning of the memorial site, showing the importance of the survivors as memory actors, as well as the different positions among the survivors regarding who was considered legitimate for commemoration. We then introduce our theoretical framework and understanding of memory. We refer to a praxeological concept of memory, which is introduced as ‘doing memory’ in the scientific discourse,⁶ and focus on actors, their frames of acting, and on changes over time. We combine the ‘doing memory’ concept with the concept of grievability and recognizability elaborated by Judith Butler.⁷

We will discuss the role and impact of the gay movement on changes in the recognizability of gay lives and the grievability of gay victims under National Socialism. We start our analysis by describing the relevance of the pink triangle as a collective symbol for the gay movement. We then show how the focus on persecution during National Socialism shaped the identity of the gay movement as a collective subject. We then turn our focus to the specific debates, fights, and struggles concerning the missing pink triangle in the International Monument in Dachau.

Precarious Memory—Struggle for a Memorial Site in Dachau

The struggle for a memorial site on the area of the former concentration camp in Dachau started as far back as the late 1940s. Although the area of the former prisoners’ camp had been transformed into a residential neighborhood for Germans coming from ‘Sudetenland’, called Dachau-Ost, many survivors held remembrance services, on days like the anniversary of liberation at the end of April, at the site of the former ‘crematory area’ on the edge of the district. It took years of intense struggle, tough negotiations, and a lot of international pressure before the memorial site opened in 1965.⁸

A debate in Dachau in 1960 offers important context regarding the position of survivors in German, post-Nazi society and gives insights into the different opinions within organized groups of survivors regarding (in part indirectly) those who had been persecuted as ‘homosexuals’. In January 1960, Llew Gardner, a British journalist, visited Hans Zauner who had been elected mayor of Dachau in 1952. He had already been second vice mayor between 1933 and 1945 and a member of the NSDAP since 1933.⁹ He was seen as an honorable politician.¹⁰

Gardner’s general aim was to find out more about the silencing of NS-history in Germany and the ongoing debate regarding the Dachau memorial site. His article was published in the Sunday Express,¹¹ and a German translation was released in a Dachau newspaper.¹² Gardner describes reactions he got in Munich when he asked people on the street how to get to Dachau. Typical reactions were incomprehensive as to why he wanted to go there, and assertions that it was over and that it should be forgotten. Hans Zauner expressed similar sentiments and doubted the need for a memorial site. He added that the commemoration of the history of the concentration camp might cause damage to businesses in Dachau as they might be boycotted because of its history. This article exemplifies the lack of support from the majority of German society for survivors’ demands for a memorial site, as well as the precariousness of the memory of persecution during National Socialism.

Gardner’s article exposes another interesting argument which is relevant to the subject we discuss in this article. Hans Zauner tried to legitimize his rejection of the need for a memorial site by stating that one should not “make the mistake of thinking that only heroes died in Dachau”. According to Zauner, many prisoners had been in the camp because “they illegally opposed the regime of the day” and he explicitly mentioned “criminals and homosexuals” to delegitimize the survivors’ demands. He instead described the (non-persecuted) inhabitants of Dachau as the ‘real victims’, who would unfairly be blamed for the war crimes on an international level.¹³ Knowing that it was going to be published in international media, Zauner seemed to take his position for granted. He must have felt ‘safe’ with his opinion in a city in which the myth of innocence concerning the concentration camp persisted, and in a society that still predominantly considered the survivors of the Nazi persecution as mere disrupters.¹⁴ However, his statements not only led to an outcry in the international press, but he also faced fierce resistance from survivors speaking out against his position at a crowded public meeting in Dachau. While this shows the important role of survivors as memory agents, their position was nevertheless still fragile and in need of solidarity which—in this case—was provided by the international public.

A report in the Dachauer Nachrichten the following day quoted the survivor Otto Müller, one of the main speakers contradicting Zauner’s statements, who argued that labeling anti-Nazi resistance as “illegal” was to declare the Nazi government legal and thereby legitimize it. He also emphasized that the number of “homosexuals and criminals” in the camp had been small and drew attention to the fact that, in the context of an unjust state, there had been “criminals” who had not committed real punishable deeds.^15,16 Müller’s statement carried a double message: on the one hand Müller took side with the so-called ‘criminals’ by referring to the arbitrariness of punishment and sanctions during National Socialism, but on the other, the argument of a “small number” of ‘homosexual’ and ‘criminal’ prisoners can be interpreted as a concession to Zauner’s discrimination of these prisoners. One might even conclude that he would have agreed with Zauner’s argument had the number of persons persecuted as ‘homosexuals’ and ‘criminals’ in the camp been higher. Published in the newspaper Luxembourg Wort, Marcel Noppeney adopted this narrative in a commentary written in the name of the Comité International de Dachau (CID), strengthening it by emphasizing that former ‘political prisoners’ had been humiliated by the presence of ‘criminals’ in the camp.¹⁷ Both statements refer to an ongoing debate within survivor organizations regarding a differentiation of persecution—persecution as political resistance fighters and persecution as ‘criminals’. This multi-layered discourse constructs a hierarchy which ultimately corresponds to the categorization in the camp itself. It mainly focused on discrimination against those prisoners who had been categorized as ‘criminals’ and given the green badge in the camps,¹⁸ but, as we show, it also applied to the persons who had been persecuted as ‘homosexuals’.

The International Monument—Solidarity and Exclusion

From its very beginning, and as laid down in its charter in 1958, erecting a central monument on the grounds of the former concentration camp was an important objective of the Comité International de Dachau (CID).¹⁹ It was thought of as an International Monument that would reflect the self-image of the committee as representative of all former inmates who had been deported from numerous countries. The Committee’s members were mainly former ‘political prisoners’ who embraced a wide range of current political opinions and social statuses in post-war societies on both sides of the Cold War border. Regionally, it was dominated by actors from the Benelux states and from France, the headquarters was located in Brussels.²⁰ The debate in the CID about the triangle arrangement started three years after a long and conflict-ridden process about the general design of the monument.²¹ The artist Nandor Glid, a sculptor from Belgrade who was a former communist resistance fighter and a Jewish survivor, developed a concept that aimed to commemorate all victims of the camp. He conceived the expressionistic central sculpture that focused on “the suffering human being”,²² and included the triangle arrangement to express “solidarity, comradeship and the willingness to help”²³ in the extreme conditions of the camp. With this intention, Glid initially included all triangle colors in the installation, but his draft was not fully accepted by the Executive Committee of the CID. René Van der Auwera, architect for the site and a member of the CID, informed the artist by letter in March 1963, that the Executive Committee “wishes to erase the green, black and pink triangles”, and added that he was opposed to this decision,²⁴ arguing that there was a duty to tell the exact truth about what had happened in the camp. He suggested to instead display all triangles in sizes proportional to the number of prisoners.²⁵ However, the decision-making bodies of the CID stuck to their position, arguing that “The Monument is to serve the purpose of commemorating the victims of National Socialism and not to honor people who were imprisoned for reasons of general law, because of homosexuality or as an asocial”.²⁶ In the protocol, the debates about the triangles are rather short and there does not seem to have been any discussion about the prisoners that had been forced to wear the pink triangle.²⁷ The debates on the International Monument illustrate the struggles among the survivors on who was seen as “honorable” enough to be commemorated. However, there were other voices around that time, such as the architect Van der Auwera, and in Dachau itself, Leonhard Roth, who also demanded remembrance of all victims. Roth was a former inmate who was persecuted under §175 which penalized homosexuality but forced to wear a black triangle in the camp. In the 1950s, he served as a priest in the settlement of Dachau-Ost, was a very active fighter for the memorial site and was held in high esteem by many other CID members.²⁸ In 1956 the CID organized a laying of the cornerstone for the International Monument. Roth held the sermon and emphasized that the former prisoners had been the “best of all nations”, with “a clear vision for the eternal and divine ideals of humanity”. At the beginning of his speech, he raised “solemn protest against the discrimination of the Dachau concentration camp prisoners launched by National Socialism”.²⁹ Without referring to his own personal story or explicitly to anti-gay persecution on the basis of §175, Leonhard Roth spoke out for the recognition of all victims.³⁰ The historian Albert Knoll evaluates Roth’s public statements as exceptional for that time.³¹ Roth was also involved in the above-mentioned debate with Hans Zauner in 1960 regarding the memorial site. As a local remembrance activist in Dachau, he was often attacked, and not only by the mayor. But we will never know how Leonhard Roth would have voted in the later decision of the CID about the triangles in the memorial as he was found dead in the Alps in 1960.³²

Although these isolated voices existed, they were not strong enough to change the hegemonic discourse regarding the commemoration of gay victims. This discourse was based on social norms and ongoing discrimination in Germany, as well as in other European countries.

To this day, the triangle relief of the International Monument expresses a basic contradiction, claiming the inclusion of all former prisoners and their suffering, yet simultaneously excluding some victims from the monument and thereby from visible commemoration.³³ The decision of the CID, and ultimately the design of the triangle installation, represents a normative order of recognition and legitimacy for the subjects being commemorated. This discrepancy became the focal point of protests by the gay liberation movement one decade later.

Recognizability, Grievability and the Precarity of Life—Judith Butler

The debates concerning the memorial site, as well as those about the International Monument and the relief with the missing triangles, lead to the question of how and why the commemoration of certain victims seems to be more legitimate than others. Judith Butler offers a theoretical framework that we consider to be very helpful in understanding the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in memory processes. Butler incorporates social and political power into the analysis of grief by connecting it to social recognition. With the notion of recognizability, she examines the “general conditions that prepare or shape subjects for recognition”.³⁴ Recognizability describes normative and social conditions (frames) which make the act of recognition possible. With the notion of grievability, Butler asks how processes of recognition and their precondition shape the possibility for public grief. In the essay “Precarious Life, Grievable Life”, Butler connects this figure of recognizability with life, death, and grief, and draws attention to the frames through which “we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable)”.³⁵ Butler does not conceptualize life as ontologically given but rather connects life to recognizability and thus to powerful mechanisms of normative frames. Butler differentiates between ‘living’ and ‘life’; in her conception, life is produced by normative frames of recognizability, so “life has to conform to certain conceptions of what life is, in order to become recognizable”, whereas living has not passed the frames of recognizability.³⁶ Hence, living must be recognizable as life in the first place and only then does the death of this life matter and this life is grieved and seen as grievable.

As a second important point, Butler understands life itself as precarious, because we all have to die. This means, our life always depends on others who protect us or do not threaten our lives. The exposure to precariousness is not equally distributed but connected to social and political conditions that endanger some lives more than others. Thus, even though Butler sees precariousness as “a feature of all life”,³⁷ different conditions lead to different degrees of exposure to precariousness. Butler objects to this “differential allocation of precariousness and grievability”,³⁸ naming these different conditions of exposure to precariousness, “precarity”.³⁹ These conditions can be economic and social or a lack of (legal) protection. Precarity also has an ambivalent relationship to the nation-state. The nation-state claims, as its responsibility and as one of its duties, the protection of its citizens, but at the same time, the nation-state itself is an important institution that produces precarity and endangers life. Hence “to be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state”.⁴⁰

Since Butler is interested in social processes, she not only refers to precariousness, recognition, and grief, but also to the social and political conditions that produce differences in their allocation—precarity, recognizability and grievability. Butler connects life and death to frames of power: normative power that produces recognizability and grievability, and political power that produces precarity.

We argue that grievability can be related to memory and to struggles for commemoration on a public or social level. Grievability can thus be seen as a precondition for commemoration. Butler’s argument connects grievability with recognizability, which means that the strength or weakness of the position of those who fight for remembrance is related to normative frames of recognizability. The continued criminalization of gay life in Germany, based on §175,⁴¹ had a major impact on the ability of survivors, persecuted as homosexuals, to share their experiences and to fight for remembrance. Pierre Seel, a French survivor who had been persecuted as a ‘homosexual’, stated in reference to the impossibility of living a free and self-determined life after 1945, that “the liberation was only for others”.⁴² Hence, the struggle for grievability and remembrance organized by the gay movement was, and also had to be, a struggle for recognizability. In the following section, we will show how both of these perspectives had an important impact on the activities of the gay movement fighting for remembrance at the Dachau memorial site. For the analyses of the intertwining of memory and the gay movement, we focus on actors and frames of interactions following the concept of doing memory.⁴³ Consequently, we do not look at memory itself, but rather at the processes of constructing memory, asking which actors form part of the negotiations of memory, who is represented, and how do power relations influence memory processes.

Struggle for Recognition and Memory—Gay Activism

As we have already outlined above, at the beginning of the conception of the International Monument there had been voices demanding the commemoration of all victims and opposing the omittance of the pink, black and green triangles. These voices had been overruled by the majority. But eight years after the inauguration of the monument, protest against the rejection of the pink triangle started to arise, not primarily from survivors, but from activists of the new gay liberation movement.⁴⁴ In the early 1970s, queer activists started to organize and to speak up in different countries around the globe. The riots at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York in 1969 are considered to have served as the catalyst, although there had been activism beforehand.⁴⁵

In Germany, §175 had been changed in 1969, easing the total prohibition of homosexuality so that political, social, and cultural activities organized by gay people were no longer illegal. In addition to the demand for the complete removal of §175 from the penalty code, a central political goal of the West German gay movement of the 1970s and 80s was the fight for remembrance of the gay victims of National Socialism and compensation for their suffering. They were not officially recognized as victims of Nazi persecution and not included in the compensation law.⁴⁶

In various cities and memorial sites, gay activist groups started to criticize the lack of commemoration, demanding memorial plaques or stones which slowly started to be installed by gay activists in several cities during the 1980s.⁴⁷ This fight was not only a fight for remembrance but also—as we will show—a fight for recognition in the present.

During a national meeting of gay activist groups in the spring of 1976 in Munich, some activists visited Dachau and were outraged to find no sign of remembrance for the gay men that had been persecuted there. One of the activists, “Tilla”, even stripped naked in order to express her rage.⁴⁸ This visit of gay activists may be considered the beginning of the struggle of the gay movement for commemoration at the Dachau memorial site.

The Pink Triangle—From Persecution to Empowerment

In the autumn of 1977, a gay activist group from Heidelberg contacted the CID. They asked for the reasons why the pink triangles were missing in the relief of the International Monument and demanded that this be rectified.⁴⁹ The then General Secretary of the CID in Brussels, George Walraeve, stated in his answer that the choice of the triangles had been made according to “the quality of the prisoners”,⁵⁰ thus confirming the decision made more than ten years ago. This communication suggests that the gay activists assumed the CID, as the representative of survivors, would be in solidarity with their demands. However, the fact that George Walraeve chose this derogatory wording in his reply to the gay activist group, reflects the normative standards of hegemonic society regarding gay life, not only in Germany, where the demands were articulated, but in other European countries as well.

On the envelope of the letter sent to the CID, a pink triangle was used as a symbol of the gay movement,⁵¹ the pink triangle having already emerged as a collective symbol for equal rights at the beginning of the gay movement in Germany and internationally.⁵² It was used for the first time in 1972 by a gay activist group in West Berlin after they had read the first published memoirs of a gay survivor, Heinz Heger’s book “Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel”.⁵³ The use of the pink triangle caused internal debates within the movement in the 1970s and 80s. Activists who used it aimed to transform the symbol of persecution and death into one of empowerment and the struggle for recognition. In flyers, they articulated their demands starting with “that’s why we use the pink triangle”.⁵⁴ To those activists who refused to use the pink triangle as a collective symbol, their current repression seemed incommensurate with persecution during National Socialism. Furthermore, they did not want gay survivors to be confronted with the badge of persecution.⁵⁵

Klaus Müller, historian and activist at that time, interpreted the use of the pink triangle, in retrospect, as an expression of distance to the concrete history of persecution, still largely unexplored at this time, and to the individual stories of the survivors who were rarely represented in the movement.⁵⁶ The historian Sébastian Tremblay sees the use of the pink triangle as a desire to build and form a common history as a collective subject—as a gay movement and gay community. Due to the continuity of criminalization until 1969, there were neither spaces nor possibilities with which to form a collective subject based on common experiences and shared self-esteem. After 1969, new possibilities of collectively dealing with the past and the present ignited the desire to use the pink triangle as a shared and visible identification. Thus, the main argument for the pink triangle was the appropriation and re-interpretation of the symbol and relating it to persecution with a reference to empowerment. The pink triangle became a symbol with three perspectives: collective identification, reference to persecution under National Socialism, and criticism of ongoing discrimination.⁵⁷ Although the histories of gay people and the ways they handled discrimination were quite different, the common reference to the pink triangle as a collective symbol constructed the gay movement as collective subject and actor with a sense, or consciousness, of common history and collective identity.

Memory Work: Providing Historical Knowledge

There is, as Enzo Traverso states, a strong link between history and memory. Historical research can initiate commemoration activities but also vice versa; memory and the desire for memory can highlight a lack of historical research and then initiate it.⁵⁸ The continuity of criminalization and the ongoing discrimination of gay life in West Germany after 1945 not only led to the absence of commemoration of gay victims, but also to a lack of historical knowledge and research on the persecution of so-called ‘homosexuals’. As outlined above, survivors were rarely encouraged to share their experiences, and until the changes to §175, this could have even led to further persecution. The significance of memory and the history of persecution during National Socialism provoked research activities within the gay movement that aimed to go public in the form of documentaries, plays or exhibitions. For example, Martin Sherman’s play “Bent” (1979),⁵⁹ which was shown in several German cities, tells the fictional story of three gay men and their persecution during National Socialism. Following Jack Newsome, “Bent” served as a “purveyor of historical memory”, bringing this long-ignored history to a broader public,⁶⁰ and to the gay liberation movement itself. Providing knowledge and displaying it in public spaces was one focus of the gay movement in Munich regarding Dachau and it also seemed to be important to exhibit historical knowledge about the persecution on the memorial site itself. Again, this underlines the relevance of the memorial site as a place and space for controversies regarding public memory at that time.⁶¹

In Munich, two important groups of the gay movement are referred to in the struggle for remembrance on the Dachau memorial site: Verein für sexuelle Gleichberechtigung (VSG, the Association for Sexual Equality) and Homosexuelle und Kirche (HUK, Homosexuals and Church). In 1984, Axel Kay, a volunteer in the organization Action Sign of Atonement and an activist of HuK, organized the exhibition Homosexualität und Politik seit 1900 (Homosexuality and Politics since 1900).⁶² The exhibition took place in the protestant Church of Reconciliation which is built on the memorial site and was organized independently from the official administration of the memorial. It was the first time, that—for a few weeks at least—the Nazi persecution of people as ‘homosexuals’, its previous history and its aftermath, as well as  the history of queer cultures and of the struggles for recognition and equal rights, had been raised publicly at the site.⁶³ The exhibition was well attended which showed the growing interest in this particular part of history. Producing, reclaiming and dispersing knowledge by the gay liberation movement was necessary in the mid-1980s, because virtually no historian had hitherto included this topic in their research. At the same time, going public had empowering effects on the activists themselves. The exhibition in Dachau also refers to the relevance of support, solidarity and the necessity of space for the struggle for remembrance. By displaying the exhibition Homosexualität und Politik seit 1900 the Church of Reconciliation can be seen as both, an actor of doing gay memory in Dachau as well as a space for public articulation for the gay movement.

A “step into the public domain” stated Guido Vael, chair of the VSG, at a memorial service in 1980 for the victims of anti-gay persecution in Dachau. The ceremony was organized by the VSG and took place in the Church of Reconciliation.⁶⁴ At the beginning of the 1980s, independent from the big ceremonies organized by the CID, gay activists started to carry out their own public commemorations on the memorial site. This shows interesting analogies to the struggles for the memorial site itself. As mentioned above, survivors started to mourn on the grounds of the former camp as early as 1945. Public mourning and commemoration on the area of the former concentration camp seems to be an important act of being present and of showing presence.

Mourning and the spreading of knowledge about anti-gay persecution was always connected to protests against ongoing legal discrimination and the lack of compensation, as well as the lack of a memorial at the site.⁶⁵ A further step in strengthening the position in the remembrance conflict in Dachau was the first inauguration of a pink triangle plaque at a concentration camp memorial site in Mauthausen, Austria, in December 1984. Activists from Munich took part in the inauguration ceremony.⁶⁶ Encouraged by the experiences of the gay rights organization in Vienna that had initiated the plaque,⁶⁷ HuK sent a petition, in the name of various gay activist groups, to the CID demanding the inclusion of the history of anti-gay persecution into the permanent exhibition and for a memorial to be dedicated to the gay victims on April 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the camp liberation. The petition contained signatures collected during the exhibition referred to above. To be prepared, the activists commissioned a memorial in the same shape as the Mauthausen plaque: a pink marble triangle with an inscription referring to the victims of the Nazi persecution, “Beaten to death”, as well as to the missing remembrance after 1945, “silenced to death”.⁶⁸ The fact that they had already arranged for a memorial to be made shows how optimistic they were regarding the answer of the CID, with whom, as an activist later put it, the activists “naturally felt solidarity”.⁶⁹ They wrote several letters to the CID, in which the tone slowly changed. The reply of the Executive Committee of the CID did not arrive until May 1986, which was after the liberation day, and contained a negative decision. The gay activists were not even informed directly. They got the reply from Barbara Distel, the former director of the memorial site, whom they called and asked for the outcome.⁷⁰ But the memorial that was waiting to be erected was also an announcement of their readiness to fight and this fight began when the negative decision became apparent.

Confrontation and Normative Change

The following period can be described, according to Jenny Wüstenberg, as a shift from memory work to memory protest. This marked the beginning of a phase of ‘contentiousness’ that was filled with various forms of action taken from a broad repertoire of social movements.⁷¹ During the long period of waiting for an answer from the CID in 1985, the groups involved had already started a public campaign seeking solidarity and support. The slogans used by the gay activists show a shift from demand to accusation: “The ones who still silence to death the Nazi crimes against homosexual persons are the ones who ultimately approve these crimes”. This sentence, formulated in a protest letter by VSG and HuK activists to the CID on 10th October 1985, was then frequently used and reproduced in the following years of struggle.⁷² The activists appealed morally to the CID in writing: “as former prisoners you have seen the suffering of your homosexual inmates with your own eyes (…) Only you have the highest moral authority, with your solidarity with the former homosexual prisoners, to make the unjust right to the whole world”.⁷³ The authors of this letter were, and this is important to mention, gay activists who were not survivors themselves. They legitimized their moral demands with reference to their ongoing discrimination which they connected directly—as described above—to the persecution during National Socialism. In the same letter, the activists strengthened their request with a petition containing 1300 signatures and referred to already existing memorials like the plaque commemorating the persecution of Sinti and Roma or the Jewish memorial in Dachau.⁷⁴

With the wide support of gay liberation groups and with press attention, they managed to raise their concerns on a transnational level.⁷⁵ Prominent voices like particular members of the federal parliament spoke up in support, some referring to the Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech in May 1985, which, although it later became a point of controversy, was nonetheless the first speech from a leading German politician to openly refer to anti-gay Nazi persecution.⁷⁶ The support and solidarity from different social actors outside of the gay movement indicated a slight shift of norms in hegemonic society regarding the recognizability and grievability of the gay victims of National Socialism. In a letter dated 30th May 1986, in which activists protested harshly against the rejection of the memorial, they expressed their outrage about the decision which was made “despite the fact that the entire civilized humanity does not consider homosexuality as a crime or an illness”.⁷⁷ With this argument the activists confronted the CID with a conception of social change which from today’s perspective seems very utopian. They constructed the CID as a representative of a conservative mindset which was supposed to have been overcome.

From 1985 onwards gay activists decided to join the official annual ceremonies organized by the CID on the anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp at the end of April, using them as a platform for their protests and their demands. With big banners and signs, they made their remembrance, their critique, as well as their demands, visible and got involved in discussions and disputes with other visitors.⁷⁸ These interventions, as Albert Knoll has noted, definitely had a higher impact on public discourse regarding the commemoration of gay victims than a ‘silent’ decision for a commemorative plaque by the CID would ever have had.⁷⁹

In 1988, HuK and VSG erected the pink triangle memorial ‘in exile’ on the grounds of the Church of Reconciliation. Once again, they used the space of the church, this time not only for articulation but to appropriate it in the memory of gay victims in Dachau. From the beginning, the location of the memorial was intended to be preliminary until it could be installed in a permanent place, and they continued demanding an appropriate place for it on the site.⁸⁰

The confrontational strategy of the gay activists underlines their self-confidence regarding the legitimacy of their demand. This strategy also raised awareness within the gay movement that the committee of survivors, who were supposed to be allies due to their own history of persecution, turned out to be their opponent in this conflict of memory. However, discourse in the CID started to change. Whereas the inauguration of a memorial on the grounds of the Church of Reconciliation led to harsh confrontational communications between the CID and gay activist groups, the shift of social norms regarding the grievability of gay victims also reached the internal debates in the CID. Little by little they saw the persecution of people as “homosexuals” and the experiences of gay prisoners as part of the crimes of the National Socialist terror regime.⁸¹

In 1990, for the first time, gay activists were invited by the chairman of the so-called Lagergemeinschaft Dachau, the German section of the CID, to officially take part in the commemoration ceremony in April and to dedicate a wreath.⁸² This invitation was accompanied by the urgent request to abstain from bringing banners and was accepted. Instead, activists carried flags with the pink triangle⁸³ and so, for the first time, they were given the opportunity within the official ceremony to mourn the victims that had been persecuted as ‘homosexuals’. The gay victims of Dachau were at last recognized as equally grievable as the other victims who were commemorated.

Finally in 1995, Max Mannheimer, the then chairman of the Lagergemeinschaft Dachau and a member of the Executive Committee of the CID, spoke up for the erection of the memorial in a room of the museum on the site which was reserved for memorials and plaques privately initiated by individuals or groups. It was the action of a single person which finally found a majority in the CID. At the beginning of his speech at the inauguration ceremony of the memorial, which had been solemnly brought from its exiled place, Mannheimer, a Jewish survivor of the Dachau Camp, acknowledged the long and hard struggle of the gay rights activists.⁸⁴

Conclusion

The conflict between gay rights activists and the CID is an example of changing constellations on the stage of memory in the 1980s. It shows the relevance of new social movements and their chosen forms of action which sought to question marginalization in (memory) politics and representational gaps at the memorial site. The activists represented a younger generation with no personal experience of National Socialism, and this had consequences for their political strategies, their wording, their way of communicating, and the way in which they were perceived by the survivors organized in the CID.

During the 1970s and 1980s the memorial site itself was the place and space for the struggle of grievability in Butler’s sense. At that time the memorial site still represented a space of memory conflict since its very existence was the result of the fights of survivors and their organizations. The gay liberation movement could, on the one hand, build on these achievements and on the other, question established narratives represented at the site. One focus of the fight in Dachau related to the missing pink triangle in the International Monument, and to fill the gap, the gay movement demanded their own memorial and suggested the use of the pink triangle.

At the beginning of their fight gay activists were looking for allies in the doing memory processes on the memorial site and they understandably saw the CID as likely supporters. When they realized their opposition to the memorial, they succeeded in finding solidarity beyond the memorial site. This support strengthened their position in the conflict with the CID. This all implied a slight shift of social norms in the recognizability of gay life, which can also be seen as a result of queer activism, and a general shift in discourse on the importance of commemorating the victims of National Socialism.

The participation in the official commemoration ceremony was an important step toward the grievability of gay victims in Dachau. The installation of the memorial in the exhibition was regarded as a success by gay activists.⁸⁵ The struggle for remembrance in Dachau had an important impact on the recognition of gay people as victims of Nazi persecution. However, this does not imply a general shift in recognizability and grievability in Butler’s sense. To this day there are very few public commemorations, if at all, of the gay people who died of HIV/AIDS during the 1980s, nor of queer victims of violent discrimination or right-wing terrorism.