The monument to the murdered Jews in Europe, or Holocaust memorial
for short, in the historic center of Berlin is reminiscent of the
approximately six million Jews who were murdered under the rule of Adolf
Hitler and the National Socialists.
The memorial, which Peter
Eisenman designed, consists of 2711 cuboid concrete steles. Between 2003
and spring 2005 it was built on an approximately 19,000 m² area south of
the Brandenburg gate. Inaugurated on May 10, 2005, it has been publicly
accessible since May 12, 2005. Over 3.5 million visitors came in the
first year.
The memorial and the associated location of
information are supervised by the monument founded in 2000 for the
murdered Jews of Europe, which also performed as a client. The
foundation also looks after the monument to the homosexuals pursued in
National Socialism, the monument for the Sinti and Roma of Europe
murdered in National Socialism as well as the place of commemorative and
information for the victims of National Socialist "Euthanasia" murders
..
The monument to the murdered Jews of Europe is located in the west of the district of Mitte, south of the Brandenburg Gate, on an area of 19,000 m² between Behrenstrasse in the north, Cora-Berliner-Straße in the east, Hannah-Arendt-Straße and Ebertstrasse in West. Before the Second World War, the area belonged to the area of so -called ministerial gardens. The city villa of Joseph Goebbels stood on the site; Their bunker, who had recently served at the Battle of Berlin as the fight of the SS division "Nordland", came to light again during the construction work at the monument and was sealed in the ground after a documentary. Between 1961 and 1989 the area was located in the undeveloped terrain strip directly east of the Berlin Wall, the so -called "death strip" as part of the border security systems.
On the corrugated floor area, 2711-inclined between 0.5 ° and 2
°-cuboid-shaped steles were placed in parallel rows (54 north-south and
87 east-west axes). With identical floor plan (2.38 m × 95 cm), the
steles have different heights, between level (112 pieces in the
sidewalk) and 4.7 meters. Originally, 367 of the non-level steles were
lower than one meter, 869 had heights of one to two meters, 491 steles
were between two and three meters high, 569 steles had a height of
between three and four meters and 303 were larger than four meters . The
heaviest stele weighs about 16 tons. There are 41 trees on the edge of
the Stelenfeld. The paved around 19,000 m² of soil leads to the level of
the surrounding streets. The evenly 95 centimeter wide paths between the
steles are fully accessible for visitors, but do not offer enough space
to go side by side for two. Thirteen path axes are suitable for
handicapped people and wheelchairs and are particularly suitable.
In a multi -stage procedure, the steles are specially treated to
ensure that graffiti removes them easily. The number of 4000 stelae was
reduced to 2711 in the event of later changes to the concept and,
according to the Monument Foundation, has no symbolic meaning. There
have been increasing cracks on the steles since 2008.
An
underground, 930 m² memorial exhibition (place of information)
complements the complex. It consists of four exhibition rooms (778 m²),
two lecture rooms (106 m²) and a bookshop (46 m²). Around four million
names of Jewish Holocaust victims can be viewed at computer stations;
The database is based on the memorial book-victim of the persecution of
the Jews under the National Socialist tyranny in Germany and the central
database of the names of the Shoah victims of the Yad Vashem memorial.
In 1988, publicist Lea Rosh suggested building the memorial. A
support group was set up and the proposal found increasing support, also
in the form of donations.
A competition was announced in May
1994, sponsored by the state of Berlin, the Federal Republic of Germany
and the Förderkreis, to which 528 works were submitted. The jury,
chaired by Walter Jens, did not come to a clear decision, but awarded
two first prizes to the designs by Simon Ungers and a group of artists
led by Christine Jackob-Marks. The representatives of the state, the
federal government and the support group finally favored the design by
Jackob-Marks: a 20,000 m² sloping concrete level with the names of the
victims carved into it. However, Chancellor Helmut Kohl rejected the
draft in June 1995.
In July 1997, designs from 25 architects and
sculptors were again requested for the project, which was not intended
to have the character of a central memorial. The description of the task
stated: "The memorial cannot and should not fulfill the task of a
memorial site, but should complement the existing memorial sites at
historical sites of the Nazi crimes and give them additional public
attention. In contrast to the information and documentation task of a
memorial, the memorial and the place of remembrance are geared towards
the contemplative and emotional receptivity of the visitor.”
The
selection committee voted in favor of the proposal by the New York
architect Peter Eisenman and the New York sculptor Richard Serra,
consisting of a field of stelae, as well as a design by Gesine
Weinmiller; one draft each by Jochen Gerz and Daniel Libeskind were
brought into the discussion by the sponsors. While Lea Rosh favored the
Gerz draft and the Berlin Senator for Culture favored the Libeskind
draft, Chancellor Kohl supported the Eisenman/Serra draft, which,
however, suggested a revision: the monument should be surrounded by a
green belt, the steles should be spaced farther apart preserved and
inscriptions should be made.
After the Minister of State for
Culture, Michael Naumann, as a harsh critic of the planned monument, put
forward his counter-proposal, which included the construction of a
museum, Eisenman revised his design again and added a "House of
Remembrance" in a 115 m long perimeter development.
The initiator
of the memorial, Lea Rosh, repeatedly had controversies with various
Jewish representatives who were critical of her or her project,
including Julius H. Schoeps. She was also accused of substantive
criticism and suggestions for improvement "as a hidden hindrance to the
whole project" and "defaming unapologetic critics as anti-Semites...".
"Of course it's important that the Jews can agree, but the organizers
are the federal government, the state and us. I said to the then
chairman of the Central Council, Heinz Galinski: 'Stay out of this, the
descendants of the perpetrators are building the memorial, not the Jews.
But it would be nice if you could nod.' Galinski said he would nod."
– Lea Rosh: Reception of the Holocaust and historical culture.
On June 25, 1999, the German Bundestag debated at length about the
construction of the monument. Proposals not to build the memorial and
instead to use the financial means for other NS memorial sites or for
the construction of a Jewish university in Berlin did not find a
majority, nor did the SPD MP Richard Schröder’s proposal for a memorial
design he had suggested . The proposal to dedicate the memorial to all
victims of the Nazi regime in addition to the murdered Jews was
rejected. The construction of the monument, supplemented by an
underground information center based on the modified Eisenman design,
was approved by a majority of 312 against 207 votes against, whereby the
deputies did not vote in closed groups in all votes.
The Israeli
memorial Yad Vashem agreed in 2000 to provide a list of all names of
known Jewish Holocaust victims for the information center.
With a
law dated March 17, 2000, the Federal Republic of Germany transferred
the construction and maintenance of the memorial to a newly founded
Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, whose first chairman
was the President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse. The historian
Sybille Quack became the first managing director of the foundation.
Construction began on April 1, 2003 and was interrupted in October
2003 when it became known that anti-graffiti protection from Degussa AG
was to be commissioned for the construction of the foundations and
steles. During the National Socialist era, the Degussa subsidiary German
Society for Pest Control (Degesch) produced the poison gas Zyklon B,
which was used in the concentration camps to murder Jews. The fact that
Lea Rosh wanted to exclude Degussa from building the monument without
further consultation caused a scandal. Many critics, including the
architect Eisenman, accused her of having done so out of personal vanity
and argued that Degussa in particular had come to terms with her past in
an exemplary manner. Degussa was also able to prove that it had already
supplied a concrete liquefier for the monument via a subsidiary – which
would have made it necessary to demolish the steles that had previously
been supplied if it had been excluded. On November 13, 2003, the Board
of Trustees of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Foundation
decided to continue construction with further participation from
Degussa.
Sybille Quack resigned from the management on March 31,
2004 "to devote herself to other scientific projects". Her successor was
the former Frankfurt head of building department, Hans-Erhard
Haverkampf, who had previously managed the new construction of the
Federal Chancellery and later the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders and Paul Löbe
houses. According to the specifications of the building physics reports
available for the construction of the steles, the field of 2711 steles
was completed by December 15, 2004 with a public ceremony. The outside
area was mainly planted with conifers. The place of remembrance below
the field of stelae was designed by Dagmar von Wilcken.
On May 10, 2005, the monument was officially opened in the presence of around 1,300 guests from all over the world. In addition to Federal President Horst Köhler, Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the chairman of the Bishops' Conference, Karl Cardinal Lehmann, and the President of the Central Council of Jews, Paul Spiegel, Holocaust survivors such as Sabina van der Linden and Gabor Hirsch also attended the ceremony. Managing Director Haverkamp retired in August 2005 for reasons of age. The historian Uwe Neumärker took his place. He still heads the foundation today.
A concert was held on May 9, 2008 to mark the third anniversary of the opening of the Holocaust Memorial. The work Vor dem Stummen by Harald Weiss, composed especially for this occasion, was given its world premiere in the middle of the field of stelae by musicians from the Berlin Chamber Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor Lothar Zagrosek in front of thousands of visitors. The listeners had a different sound experience depending on where they were in the field of stelae. With every step through the monument, the impression of the music changed, here one of the 24 instruments could be heard, there another, and there the singer again. Due to the great effort involved, the concert could only be played once. This concert has existed as a virtual reconstruction on a smartphone app since 2013. With the support of Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, all 24 musical instruments and the singing were re-recorded in December 2012 using a specially developed process.
On August 23, 2008, a total of eleven swastikas were daubed on several columns. This is the greatest damage to the monument since 2005. In general, however, vandalism at the monument does not appear to be a problem.
The steles are hollow to keep manufacturing costs and weight low. Its
wall thickness is around 15 cm. In addition, internal steel
reinforcement was dispensed with for steles that are up to two meters
high, in reliance on the chosen concrete recipe. However, after just
three years, around 50 percent of the stelae showed cracks. Expert
reports were commissioned to determine the cause, first by the
Foundation and then - also to secure evidence for any warranty liability
- by the Berlin Regional Court. The results known so far include that
temperatures of up to 80 °C occur inside the steles on the side facing
the sun, while the other side remains significantly cooler, which leads
to material stresses.
Two damaged steles were removed from the
monument during the night of December 23rd and 24th, 2010, without any
notice to the public and taken to the Institute for Building Research
(IBAC) of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen. One
of them was dismantled there for examination, the other was put back
into the monument in the spring of 2011, so that the monument has only
consisted of 2710 steles since then. According to a report by the
Tagesspiegel in 2012, 23 steles were already secured with steel collars
and the "Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" reported
that every seventh stele was a candidate for security. In 2014, well
over 2,200 steles were now riddled with cracks. The number of pillars
secured with cuffs has increased to almost 50, and another 380 cuffs
have been ordered. The expected clean-up costs are estimated to be in
the tens of millions.
27.6 million euros from the federal budget were spent on the
construction of the memorial: 14.8 million euros for the Field of
Stelae, 10.5 million euros for the construction of the Information
Center and 2.3 million euros for the exhibition. The federal government,
as the owner of the former strip of the Wall, provided the property with
a value of around 40 million euros. Up until the opening, 900,000 euros
had been donated by private individuals.
The foundation, which
carries the monument and does the public relations work, has an annual
budget of 3.124 million euros (as of 2012), which is financed from the
budget of the Minister of State for Culture. In June 2006, Wolfgang
Thierse resigned from his post as Chairman of the Board of the Monument
Foundation because he considered this budget to be underfunded. He
called for an increase in the budget and an organizational merger with
other memorials.
In the original design by Eisenman/Serra, the steles were not themed
symbols, but rather an individually comprehensible field of experience
in a "zone of instability" was to be created. “The magnitude and scale
of the Holocaust inevitably make any attempt to represent it through
traditional means futile. […] Our memorial attempts to develop a new
idea of remembrance.” Peter Eisenman called the Field of Stelae a “place
of no meaning”.
In the course of the discussion, the initially
abstract role of the steles was increasingly filled with interpretive
content; for example, the steles were intended to commemorate tombstones
or sarcophagi or the ashes of the cremated Jews, which were usually
thrown into bodies of water or pits. The support group around Lea Rosh
interprets the steles as cenotaphs and compares them to war memorials
and military cemeteries: this is necessary because most murdered Jews do
not have their own grave. The foundation sees the possibility of
creating a “feeling of insecurity” in the barely perceptible inclination
of the pillars and the apparently swaying floor.
Peter Eisenman
himself also contributed to the meaning with the images of the "surging
wheat field" and the "moving sea surface".
The historian Reinhart
Koselleck complained that in the memorial in the Neue Wache in Berlin
for the victims of war and tyranny, the murdered Jews were placed in a
"victim community" with the perpetrators with this dedication text.
According to Koselleck, the memorial for the murdered Jews, which is to
be erected as a result of the criticism of the "Neue Wache" memorial,
would be a "forced concession ... to commemorate only the Jews and not
the millions of other innocent murdered people". He blamed Lea Rosh and
the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis,
for this exclusion. Bubis then referred to the fact that the Förderkreis
was supported by non-Jews and, like most Jews, he did not need this
memorial for their mourning:
"It is up to the non-Jews whether
they want to erect a memorial for the murdered European Jewry in the
German capital or not. The Central Council is therefore not a member of
the support group and is not represented on the jury or on any other
body.”
– Ignatz Bubis: Holocaust memorial: A replica of Reinhart
Koselleck. Who is intolerant here?
As a result of a memorial for
the murdered Jews, Koselleck saw the need to erect their own memorials
for other groups of victims who also lost their lives in the Holocaust.
Jan Philipp Reemtsma sees memorials as "demonstrations of collective
emotions" that cannot convey any kind of insight. From this point of
view, he asked the hitherto unresolved question of the "founding
emotion" at the Holocaust memorial; he himself named the grief, the
feeling of guilt, the shame and the horror as offers, whereby he only
sees this last emotion as a viable basis for the Holocaust
commemoration. Since there was no chance of realizing a common memorial
for all victims, he demanded a separate one for each group of victims.
As a result, a memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under
National Socialism, a memorial to homosexuals persecuted under National
Socialism, and a memorial and information center for the victims of the
National Socialist "euthanasia" murders were erected in the capital.
Originally, there were considerations of erecting the memorial on
the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin-Kreuzberg, but
this was rejected by the Berlin Senate in favor of building the
"Topography of Terror" memorial.
At the start of planning, the
representatives of the concentration camp memorial sites opposed a
“centralization of commemoration”, fearing that commemoration at
“authentic sites” would be devalued as a result. There were also
frequent calls for the memorial to be abandoned and for the funds to be
given to the existing, underfunded memorials. Federal Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, who ultimately agreed to the memorial, would have preferred a
decentralized commemoration at existing memorial sites, "because the
horror itself also took place in a decentralized manner". In an
interview, he later specified his much-cited and criticized wish for the
memorial to be a place where people like to go: “I don't want school
classes to be dragged there because that's the way it should be. Rather,
one should go there because one feels the need to remember and deal with
it.”
There were and are controversial
public discussions about the monumentality of the monument and its
erection in the heart of the capital Berlin.
Even before his time
as Minister of State for Culture, Michael Naumann was a sharp critic of
the Holocaust memorial, which he had "compared to the architecture of
Hitler's master builder Albert Speer" because of its monumentality. In
the minimalist abstraction he saw the "manifestation of an
understandable need to flee, away from history [...] towards
abstraction." After two or three generations, history is no longer
understood. Instead, he advocated a museum as a "place of thought" to
convey the history of the Holocaust in a didactically rational way: "A
museum can also be a memorial."
The memorial was also a topic as
part of the "Walser-Bubis controversy". The writer Martin Walser
described it in 1998 in Frankfurt's Paulskirche as a "soccer field-sized
nightmare in the heart of the capital", "wreath dropping point" and
"monumentalization of shame". After completion, however, he commented
positively on the monument. In a 1998 contribution to the debate,
Spiegel founder Rudolf Augstein turned against the "shame" that was
"directed against the capital and the Germany that was newly forming in
Berlin", and wrote that this memorial created "anti-Semites who might
not otherwise be". Tobias Jaecker criticized this statement because it
accused Jews themselves of being responsible for anti-Semitism. The
Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen was one of the critics in 1998 for
fundamental reasons; he feared that the memorial could turn Berlin into
a “capital of repentance”.
The publicist Henryk M. Broder is one of the prominent critics of the monument. In an episode of the satirical television series Entweder Broder – Die Deutschland-Safari in 2010, he spoke of a waste of money: the money provided could have “really helped many survivors [of the Holocaust] who today live in Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere on the subsistence level”. He had previously set out his attitude in essays.
The way in which the new memorial was advertised,
which was completely unnecessary in Germany given the large number of
authentic Holocaust memorials, was criticized. Spectacular promotions by
Lea Rosh's initiative would have caused other memorials to fall behind
in the public eye. Among other things, Rosh had a 0190 number switched
in a telephone advertising campaign and only stopped the campaign after
violent protests.
A poster campaign with the slogan “The
Holocaust never existed” and Rosh’s announcement at the inauguration
event that she would have a molar she found in the Belzec extermination
camp memorial concreted into one of the steles of the memorial for
authentication purposes also led to controversy. Lea Rosh was relieved
of direct responsibility for the memorial.
The misappropriation of the area by residents
and tourists, who use the memorial as a children's playground and picnic
area and as a selfie backdrop, for example, or who (in bikinis) sunbathe
on the steles, is controversial. Architect Peter Eisenman had already
foreseen this at the opening and was relaxed about such a use:
“When you hand the project over to the client, they do what they want
with it – they own it, they own the work. If you want to knock over the
stones tomorrow, honestly, that's fine. People will picnic in the field.
Children will play tag in the field. There will be mannequins posing
here and films will be shot here. I can well imagine how a shootout
between spies in the field would end. It's not a holy place.”
– Peter
Eisenman: Interview at Spiegel Online (2005)
Victim
representatives, on the other hand, reject such use and point out that
such behavior would be considered inappropriate in a concentration camp
memorial, for example.
The artist Shahak Shapira took up this
critical view in January 2017 with his satirical project Yolocaust. On
the website yolocaust.de he combined online selfies that were taken at
the memorial with historical photos of mass graves and concentration
camp prisoners in a pitiful state. When navigating the images with the
mouse pointer, viewers suddenly no longer saw the people in the selfies
in the vicinity of the Holocaust memorial, but in the middle of a
National Socialist death camp. The website was visited by 2.5 million
people and the project was well received in the media. After a week,
Shapira ended the project. In fact, all 12 people pictured in the
selfies used had contacted Shapira. Almost all of them apologized and
deleted the selfies on their Facebook or Instagram profiles.
In
2011 and 2012, more and more users of the Grindr app posed for their
profile pictures in front of the memorial. However, the CEO of Grindr,
who described such recordings as inspirational back in 2011, eventually
distanced himself.
A criticism of the architecture describes the astonishing acoustics,
which quickly recede from the urban environment when entering the narrow
paths and create a tension between the geometrically strict form and
diverse and metaphorical associations. This turns a visit to the Field
of Stelae into an event, into a direct experience that superimposes a
substantive discussion.
The work of art was heavily frequented in
the first few months and shortly after the opening it was actively
involved in Berlin city life - especially among young people - and
Berlin tourism. After opening in May 2005, around 350,000 guests visited
the information center by the end of the year; In 2012, with around
470,000 visitors, it was one of the ten most frequented museums and
memorial sites in Berlin.
In 2006, the Holocaust memorial
received an award from the US magazine Travel and Leisure in the
category "Cultural Buildings/Cultural Spaces", in the same year second
place in the "Globe Award for Best Worldwide Tourism Project" from the
"British Guild of Travel Writers" and in 2007 the "Institute Honor Award
for Architecture" from the American Institute of Architects, which is
considered the highest recognition for architecture in the USA.
At the beginning of 2017, Kia Vahland recognized the importance of the
Holocaust memorial for the culture of remembrance and coming to terms
with the past in Germany.
Holocaust Memorial Bornhagen
In January 2017, AfD Thuringia leader
Björn Höcke gave a speech at Ballhaus Watzke in Dresden, in which he
said: “We Germans […] are the only people in the world who have planted
a monument of shame in the heart of their capital .” Höcke then called
for a “180 degree turnaround in memory policy”. The speech triggered
protests and violent reactions in the media and in politics.
In
November 2017, to protest Höcke's speech, the Center for Political
Beauty (ZPS) erected a scaled-down replica of the Berlin Holocaust
memorial in Bornhagen, Thuringia, under the motto "Build the Holocaust
memorial right in front of Höcke's house!" The "Holocaust Memorial
Bornhagen" is located on a leased, 18 × 13 meter neighboring property
within sight of Höcke's house and consists of 24 concrete steles that
protrude two meters from the ground. This "extension" of the Berlin
Holocaust Memorial was built in just five days and was unveiled on
November 22, 2017.
Related Shapes
In the garden of the Jewish
Museum in Berlin there is a small field of columns that also conveys the
feeling of a swaying ground. The similarity between Eisenman's Field of
Stelae and the Garden of Exile of the Jewish Museum, which was then
under construction, prompted its architect Daniel Libeskind to accuse
him of plagiarism, but the dispute was settled.
A similar field
consisting of 72 identical granite columns (each 4.5 m high and 90 cm
wide) created the French artist Aurélie Nemours under the name
L'alignement du XXIe siècle in a park in the French city of Rennes since
the 1980s; however, this facility has no connection to the Holocaust.