Posted on 05/04/2005 11:54:42 AM PDT by lizol
Bold, contentious Jewish memorial opens in Berlin
Wed May 4, 2005 11:28 AM ET
By Noah Barkin BERLIN (Reuters) - Berlin will unveil a haunting memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe next week after 17 years of charged debate and controversy over how Germany should remember the darkest chapter in its history.
Situated on a vast plot of land between the Brandenburg Gate and the buried remains of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the memorial has been hailed by supporters as a courageous symbol of Germany's readinesss to face up to its grim past.
Its detractors have slammed the design -- an open graveyard-like field of rectangular charcoal-gray pillars -- as ugly, overly abstract and a sitting duck for vandals.
The opening of the memorial on May 10 is unlikely to end a polemic that has raged in German political, religious and artistic circles since feisty journalist Lea Rosh began pushing for a monument to Jewish victims of the Nazis back in 1988.
"It is not self-evident for a nation to put a memorial in the center of its capital which recalls the worst acts, the most heinous crimes of its own history," said Wolfgang Thierse, German parliamentary president and a backer of the memorial.
"No one can say how this memorial will work, how it will be accepted and whether the criticism will end. I think the debate and the fights it gave rise to are bound to continue."
Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial consists of 2,711 pillars, which range in height from a few centimeters (inches) to 4.7 meters (15 feet) and form a dense grid pattern through which visitors can wander.
From a distance, the site looks like a dusky, placid ocean. As one descends on uneven, sloping ground into the memorial the concrete blocks grow more imposing, tilt at irregular angles, and street noise fades.
The experience is intended to create feelings of unease and loneliness, encouraging discussion on the plight of the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazi regime.
Eisenman views the field as a metaphor for the Nazi regime and the mad, ordered nature of its genocide.
"The field looks like it's reasonable, lined up," Eisenman said in an interview. "Then you find the stones are not perfectly horizontal or vertical. There is a warping sensation. It's unsettling. It seems reasonable from the outside but when you get into it it's out of control."
At the request of the government, the dark field of pillars has been complemented with an underground information center which documents, in highly personal fashion, the stories of individual Jews killed by the Third Reich. Reaching a consensus on the memorial's final shape has been a messy process replete with unexpected twists since former Chancellor Helmut Kohl backed the project in 1993.
Kohl rejected as impractical initial plans to build a 20,000 sq meter (yard) angled concrete surface on the site, containing the names of all the Jews who died in the Holocaust. He then insisted on changes to the Eisenman plan that prompted the architect's design partner, sculptor Peter Serra, to drop out.
In 2001, the memorial foundation was forced to pull down fund-raising posters which awkwardly tried to grab the attention of passers-by with the title "The Holocaust never happened."
And in October 2003, construction was briefly interrupted after it emerged that the parent of Degussa, the company supplying anti-graffiti protection for the memorial's pillars, provided Zyklon B gas pellets used in Nazi extermination camps.
Along this bumpy road, skeptics have questioned what the pillars have to do with the Holocaust, attacked the decision to put the memorial in its high-profile location and wondered aloud about why it is for the Jews and not other Nazi victims.
Ugly.
Why not a beautiful Remembrance Garden?
"Along this bumpy road, skeptics have questioned what the pillars have to do with the Holocaust, attacked the decision to put the memorial in its high-profile location and wondered aloud about why it is for the Jews and not other Nazi victims."
I agree - Hitler killed gays, gypsies, the mentally retarded and any other undesirable. Why is it the Jews feel they "own" the Holocaust?
Cause it's German?
Why not a beautiful synagogue or a Jewish kindergarten?
I'd rather build useful institutions for live Jews than more rocks and stones for dead Jews.
For some reason they are doing seperate memorials. There is another one in progress for the Roma and Sinti "Gypsies". But it would make more sense to have one memorial with a museum detailing all the people who suffered in the camps instead of potentially a hundred different ones.
I think your idea is a good one.
It certainly looks ugly from the picture.
I remember thinking the Viet Nam Memorial was ugly from the pictures. You have to see it in person to appreciate is somber beauty.
I love the WWII memorial in DC that opened last year (or year before). Absolutely beautiful and majestic. And remember the huge fight that erupted over that?
I agree and then perhaps the memorial would be "less controversial"?
Good point--sometimes a picture or people's initial reactions don't tell the whole story. The Vietnam Memorial is a perfect example.
But I do think that a Holocaust Memorial should honor every victim--if there are to be separate memorials for every "class" of victim, there should be memorials for every ethnic and religious group who were targets, plus those with disabilities, those who spoke against Hitler, those who worked for the various resistance movements, etc. He didn't mind killing anyone.
That's a good idea. I've never entirely understood the concept of memorials. It seems that, in recent years, there has to be a memorial built to everything. Now, I'm by no means implying that the Nazi massacre of Jews and so many other groups shouldn't be remembered, but you are right in that a bunch of stones won't actually accomplish anything.
Well, it sure is ugly.
Maybe that's the point. I dunno.
1. The Nazis only killed "gays" if they were political enemies. Why the "gays" feel the need to "own" any part of the Holocaust is any body's guess.
2. The Nazis attempted the exterminate the entire Jewish race. They succeeded in killing 6 million of them, and virtually wiped out the Jewish population of Poland and Western Russia. You would probably want some sort of remembrance, too, if such a thing were to happen to your family.
3. The Holocaust claimed 11 million lives. Over half of them Jewish.
The problem with a "one size fits all" memorial is that the whole message gets watered down, if not obliterated entirely, because of "political correctness."
Personally I think it is time to stop making more shrines to the dead and concentrate on passing on something other than "Holocaust guilt" to the next generation.
Being gay had nothing to do with being political enemies. Anyone who was not considered the Aryan ideal was genetically imperfect and subject to being "culled" from the master race. As far as ownership of the Holocaust, it was Jews who protested including any other group in this memorial. Even the word Holocaust seems to now longer apply to any other act of genocide other than the Jews in WWII.
BTW, there are those who would dispute the 6 million figure based on the population of Jews before and after the war.
The Holocaust might have claimed 11 million lives, but WWII itself is estimated to have claimed 200 million.
I am in total agreement about the Holocaust guilt thing. This was a horrible tragedy but, while I don't feel we should forget the past, I don't think we should have to have it shoved in our faces all the time. Once my sister was in a psychology class and her teacher showed a video of the Holocaust, which had NOTHING to do with the course of study.
Washington DC has a big Holocaust museum - why, I don't know, since it didn't happen there. There are Holocaust memorials in cities and towns all across the country - more so than in the country where it actually occurred.
Oh yeah, Ernst Zundel and David Irving, for example.
Don't forget Hutton Gibson. He says they moved to Brooklyn :
Yeah, the Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Islamofascists....that's good company you keep.
...there were not that many Jews under Hitler's power under his sway. They claimed that there were 6.2 million in Poland before the war and after the war there were 200,000 therefore he (Hitler) must have killed six million of them. They simply got up and left! They were all over the Bronx and Brooklyn and Sydney and Los Angeles.
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