The Holocaust memorial in Germany is a gray, indifferent place under the gray and indifferent Berlin sky. Since May, 2,711 cement steles in the heart of Berlin have guarded the Germans’ memory of the Holocaust and its Jewish victims.
The model of the memorial was widely debated among the German public. It was hard to find anybody who did not have a strong opinion about architect Peter Eisenman’s concept and its conceivable alternatives. Although Eisenman’s proposal — the vast number of gravestones aligned in a maze — was not too popular, the German government settled on it, afraid of harming its reputation abroad by allowing the discussion to drag on too long.
The government missed the opportunity to create a Holocaust memorial backed by a broader consensus among the German people. About $18 million of public money was spent on the field of steles, while the Jewish Cultural Center in Berlin for years has had to fight for its survival because of insufficient state funding.
Despite the controversy anticipating the memorial, it was a surprise success as soon as it opened to the public. Germans loved the newest emblem of their capital and also of the innovative handling of their history. Indeed, they liked it so much that they immediately turned the memorial into a picnic site.
Seen from a distance, the memorial reminds one of the Jewish cemetery in Prague. The steles of different heights are a visual reference to the graves piled on each other in a place too small for its many silent inhabitants — and this is the only obvious reference that the architecture makes to Jewish life or death. The steles, although reminiscent of gravestones, bear no names and thus they repeat the monstrous anonymity of the Holocaust, which makes it so difficult today to explain to our children the scale of the crimes that their great-grandparents committed: the extent of the suffering, the vast numbers of Jewish victims, or the magnitude of the loss of German-Jewish culture caused by the Holocaust.
Perhaps it is the loss — the void that the killing of the Jews left in European life — that the field of steles represents best. A name on a gravestone testifies, that a person lived. This is the minimum that remains of a person: a name on a stone. But of the Jewish people and prewar Jewish culture, not even that much is left in Germany, the memorial seems to say. German thoroughness meticulously burned away almost every trace. Such an aura of oblivion may do justice to the scope of the loss, but it inadvertently perpetuates the annihilation it recalls.
The memorial, with its narrow, uneven paths and labyrinthine qualities, evokes a range of uncomfortable emotions: In the first days after the memorial was opened, German visitors reported that they experienced the feeling of being lost or without direction, helpless, alone and disoriented.
Since the memorial presents no specific reference to the Holocaust, it speaks to many aspects of the condition of the postmodern city dweller. The connection of the memorial to German crimes remains abstract and cerebral and is invoked only by a few small plaques, and by the upheaval that accompanied it in the media, rather than being implicit in the architecture itself. Nonetheless, an astonishing number of German visitors report that between the steles they felt connected to the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust; they felt the hopelessness, fear and desperation that the victims must have felt. But if the architecture of the memorial allows everybody to identify with the victim, who then is left to identify with the perpetrator?
A small and thoughtful exhibition in a few rooms underneath the memorial is intended to be part of the visit to the memorial, to teach its visitors about Holocaust history. The exhibition opens with a quotation from Primo Levi: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.”
Other passages are exhibited from the diaries of Jewish deportees and from their letters and postcards home. The clear-sightedness with which people faced their doom and tried to find some meaningful final words for those left behind is extraordinarily moving. These quotations allow the victims to speak for themselves instead of being spoken about. Ironically, the installation of the underground center was initially opposed by Eisenman, who emphatically did not want to include didactic elements in his memorial.
But despite the value of this additional space, to borrow Primo Levi’s phrase, there is nothing at the core of what the memorial has to say. Not many visitors see the exhibition as part of the memorial either, and skip it rather than waiting in line. For them the Holocaust is reduced to 200,000 square feet of cement. There is nothing to be learned, no warning that what has happened can happen again.
Katharina Vester is a former journalist with the Berlin public radio station RIAS and a scholar of cultural studies at Bochum University.