Here is ARCUS, the memorial for homosexuals persecuted under the Nazi regime. Here I am, standing in front of a memorial commemorating the suffering and death of people during the Holocaust, posing for a photo with my friends, doing the very thing I condemned others for. As someone who identifies with the LGBTQ+ community and having done research on the creation of this memorial, I wanted to have a photo of myself with the memorial. To an outsider, my actions could seem disrespectful to the memory of those who died, just as the actions of others seemed disrespectful to me. My actions had more to do with my critique of the memorial itself than the history it represents, but you would not know that unless you asked me to explain.
This is what I think is so important. We can talk about how we should not judge others for their actions, but that is something that we constantly do. I believe that it is important to step back, take a breath, and realise that everyone has different reasons for their actions. We don’t know why anyone is at a particular site of memory, if they have connections to history or if they even know what the site itself represents. It is not fair for us as outside academics to come in with our feelings of moral superiority and judge them on what we think of as disrespectful attitudes when we don’t now the full picture.
Obviously, as with anything, there are exceptions to this rule and people do purposefully disrespect these sites of memory, but those actions are taken with express intent. The average person does not go to these sites with this intent so we should stop condemning them as if they are.