Germany unveils haunting holocaust memorial

Reuters | May 10, 2005
By Noah Barkin

BERLIN - A vast new Holocaust memorial that opens in the heart of Berlin on Tuesday after 17 years of fevered debate will be greeted by many Germans but may attract vandals, said the politician who is to unveil it.

"I believe it will be accepted by the younger generation, but surely not by everyone," Wolfgang Thierse, speaker of the Bundestag parliament, told German radio.

"There will be opposition, indifference, denial."

He was later formally to unveil the memorial, a haunting field of 2,711 gray gravestone-like slabs, at a ceremony attended by its American architect Peter Eisenman, leaders from Germany's Jewish community and a number of Holocaust survivors.

It sits between the Brandenburg Gate and the buried remains of Adolf Hitler's bunker, and after it is opened to the public on Thursday visitors can wander in freely at any time.

Thierse conceded that this left the memorial vulnerable to those who might want to deface it, but said it was up to Germans to take care of their new monument.

Years of debate, since the idea surfaced just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, have raged over how best to remember the Holocaust.

Critics have argued that the design was too abstract and attacked the decision to put the memorial in such a prominent location. Others have criticized it for honoring the Jews and not other victims of Nazi terror.

Lea Rosh, a journalist who led the campaign for a memorial, estimates about half of Germans still oppose the outcome.

COURAGEOUS

Supporters say the memorial is a powerful symbol of Germany's readiness to face up to its past.

"You can argue with how they went about it, but no other country has erected a monument to its misdeeds. It's courageous," said Michael Cullen, a Berlin-based U.S. architectural historian who has written extensively about it.

Eisenman -- whose previous works include the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio and the City of Culture in Galicia, Spain -- sees his latest work as a metaphor for the Nazi regime and the mad, systematic nature of its genocide.

From a distance, the site looks like a dark, placid ocean. As visitors descend on uneven, sloping ground into the memorial, the unmarked concrete blocks rise to heights of up to 4.7 meters (15 feet), tilt at odd angles and street noise fades.

The experience is intended to create feelings of unease and loneliness, encouraging discussion and reflection on the plight of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Third Reich.

An underground information center, added to the original plan at the request of the German government, complements the field of pillars with personal stories of individual Jews across Europe that were killed by the Nazis.

"My only hope is that people come out of the memorial different than when they entered," Shimon Stein, Israel's ambassador to Germany, told German n-tv television.

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