CONTIGUITY

There is a certain contiguity of particular events on the 22^nd June. On this day in 1940 France was forced to sign the Second Compiègne armistice with Germany. When Adolph Hitler received word from the French government that they wished to negotiate an armistice, Hitler selected Compiègne Forest near Compiègne as the site for the negotiations. As Compiègne was the site of the 1918 Armistice ending the Great War with a humiliating defeat for Germany, Hitler saw using this location as a supreme moment of revenge for Germany over France. Hitler decided to sign the armistice in the same rail carriage where the Germans had signed the first armistice in 1918.
The Armistice site was demolished by the Germans on Hitler's orders three days later.  The carriage itself was taken to Berlin as a trophy of war, along with pieces of a large stone tablet which bore the inscription (in French):

HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN REICH. VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.

The Alsace-Lorraine Monument (depicting a German eagle impaled by a sword) was destroyed and all evidence of the site was obliterated, with the notable exception of the statue of Marshall Foch: Hitler intentionally ordered it to be left intact so that it would be honouring only a wasteland. The railway carriage itself was taken to Crawinkel in Thuringa in 1945, where it was destroyed by SS troops and the remains buried.

It was also on the 22^nd June 1898 that the German writer Erich Maria Remarque was born. He is best known as the author of Im Westen nichts Neues, translated as All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the best anti-war novels written and which was made into a film which won the academy award for best picture in 1930. The film was produced by Carl Laemmle (see 8th June blog entry)

On 10 May 1933, the Nazis, instigated by the then Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels banned and publicly burned Remarque's works and produced propaganda claiming that he was a descendant of French Jews and that his real last name was Kramer, a Jewish-sounding name, and his original name spelled backwards. This is still cited in some biographies despite the complete lack of evidence. The Nazis also claimed, falsely, that Remarque hadn't done active service during World War I.

E. Remarque

In 1943, the Nazis arrested his sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had stayed behind in Germany with her husband and two children. After a short trial in the "Volksgerichtshof" (Hitler's extra-constitutional "People's Court"), she was found guilty of "undermining morale" for stating that she considered the war lost. Court President Roland Freisler declared, "Ihr Bruder ist uns leider entwischt—Sie aber werden uns nicht entwischen" ("Your brother has unfortunately escaped us—you, however, will not escape us"). Scholz was guillotined on 16 December 1943..

In 1955, Remarque wrote the screenplay for an Austrian film, The Last Act (Der letzte Akt), about Hitler's final days in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which was based on the book Ten Days to Die (1950) by Michael Musmanno. The film was directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Here is a clip from the film.

Checkpoint Charlie taken out

As a sort of coda to Germany’s various struggles towards civilized democracy, it was on the 22^nd June 1990 that Checkpoint Charlie was dismantled in Berlin. Another erasure. Indeed there is no significant sign left to indicate that Germany was ever divided into occupied zones.


The idea that history and past events can be destroyed, buried, executed, demolished or erased is not a particularly successful concept. Contiguity, no matter how remote, will always, one way or another, bring events back into focus.