Contemporary Monument Concepts in Germany

If you say to a taxi driver in the German capital “Take me to the Memorial”, he knows what you mean without asking – and in most cases he takes you, accompanied by an appropriate commentary, to the stele field near the Brandenburg Gate. Since its opening in May 2005, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has become one of Berlin’s tourist attractions. Nevertheless, it remains a bone of contention.

The field of stele with its 2,711 concrete blocks stamps the character of the centre of Berlin between the Paris Square and the Potsdam Square with a matter-of-factness as if it had always been there. Nearly forgotten are the long-standing debates in the nineties about whether there should be a central German Holocaust memorial and how it should look.

Long-standing debates

The impetus to the project came in 1988 from a circle round the historian Eberhard Jäckel and the publicist Lea Rosh. In the following years, the Association for Rising a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe succeeded in winning large parts of the public for the realisation if its idea. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the border to East Germany in 1989/90, the idea arose of building the memorial on the overgrown land of the former Minister’s Garden south of the Brandenburg Gate. In the mid-1990s there were two architectural competitions; then on June 25, 1999, in one of the last sessions of the German parliament held in Bonn, a majority of representatives resolved, after lively debate but cross-factionally, for the construction of a Holocaust memorial according to Peter Eisenman’s design, supplemented by an information centre. The intention of the memorial, declared parliament, is to honour the six million Jews murdered by the National Socialists and to keep alive the memory of this monstrous event in German history.

Open and accessible and day and night

Construction began in April 2003. When the first stele had been raised in October, it came to light that their graffiti protection was a product of the firm Degussa. A subsidiary of Degussa, Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung or German Corporation for Pest Control), sold the poison gas Zyklon B during the Nazi period, which was used to murder millions of people, particularly European Jews. There was a building freeze. In November 2003, after a four weeks long public debate over the way to treat this part of the German past, the Memorial’s board of trustees, chaired by the then president of the German parliament Wolfgang Thierse, decided to continue construction with Degussa products. On May 12, 2005, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, stele field and information centre, could be opened to the public. Since then there have been scarcely any incidents of smearing.

Before the opening there was already another debate about what visitors to the stele field may and may not do. How people conduct themselves towards this memorial is a reflection of our society, and so one can sometimes see children there playing catch or young people jumping from stele to stele. At the same time, there are a vast number of visitors who bring flowers, wreathes, light candles or, as is customary at Jewish cemeteries, lay stones on the stele. All this is part of the venture of building a 19,000 square metres sculpture that is open day and night in the middle of the German capital. And the results show that the majority of visitors conduct themselves appropriately – without extensive security measures or prohibition signs.

Personalising remembrance

Although the postcard and advertising motif of the stele field shapes the image of the memorial, the underground information centre is one of the most frequented exhibitions in Berlin. The purpose of the exhibition there consists in supplementing the abstract form of remembrance conveyed by the stele through information on the murder of the European Jews. One way in which this personalising of remembrance takes place is through the presentation of representative family histories of the very diverse Jewish lives that the Holocaust destroyed; names and short biographies of murdered or missing Jews are recited over a loud speaker. At the same time, information on over 200 places documents the extent of the persecution and extermination throughout Europe. Not least the centre serves as a virtual portal to the multifaceted memorial landscape in Germany and Europe. The Memorial’s legal obligation to keep alive the remembrance of all victims of the Nazis equally forms part of the idea behind the historical presentation.

By virtue of this obligation, the federal foundation responsible for the Holocaust Memorial is also in charge of the memorial to the homosexuals persecuted by National Socialism in the Tiergarten, which was opened on May 27, 2008, and will also be in charge of the memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma near the Reichstag building, which is still under construction.

In spite of all fears, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe does not draw a line under the Nazi past, but is rather a living site of information and encounter, which has been perceived and accepted as such, and which commemorates the murder of six million European Jews in the form of a central memorial of a reunited Germany – admonishing the present.