A half a century has passed since the Nazis came to power and since the murder of the Jews of Europe. But on German soil, in the country of the perpetrator, there is still no central site of remembrance to recall this singular genocide, and no memorial that remembers the victims.
This is shameful.
Therefore we demand that a clearly visible memorial for the millions of murdered Jews be erected in Berlin…The erection of this memorial is an obligation for all Germans in East and West.Perspective Berlin – January 30, 19891 The demand of Perspective Berlin, which appeared in newspapers across East and West Germany on the fifty-sixth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, marked the formal beginning of what would become an eleven-year saga in Germany’s attempt to construct a national Holocaust memorial. Little more than a year after the ceremonial groundbreaking for the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, which took place on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, January 27, 2000, I am attempting to provide an in-depth account of the persons, arguments, and developments in one of the most controversial debates to arise in Germany since the end of the Second World War. At the present time, Caroline Wiedmer has provided the most thorough English-language discussion of the memorial in her work The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France. However, the section in Ms. Wiedmer’s monograph concluded in relative uncertainty, as the German elections of 1998 were approaching and the prospect of a new chancellor put the possibility of a memorial in serious jeopardy. Now that the German parliament has made its decision, and construction is underway in the former Ministärgarten of central Berlin, I hope to review the years that Ms. Wiedmer has already studied, and then to detail the continuation of this debate from the elections of 1998 to the aftermath of the German Bundestag’s conclusive decision on the design of the memorial, which it reached in the summer of 1999.
In order to discuss such a complex and controversial subject, a chronological account of the happenings and debates of the last thirteen years is a necessity, and will facilitate the analytical discussion later in this essay. Lea Rosh, in conjunction with Perspective Berlin, the lobby group she founded to further her plan for memorial, have been at the center of the Holocaust memorial debate since Rosh proposed its construction in August 1988. The memorial itself, and Rosh’s insistence that such a memorial be only for Jews, raised objections from other groups of victims, German public figures, and a number of journalists and historians. As we will see, objections and debates over the memorial and its functions were to become just as important in the process as Ms. Rosh herself.
Despite skepticism and opposition to her initial efforts, Rosh continued to exert her personal influence and utilize the overall state of German-Jewish relations to her benefit. In 1992, the German government informed her that it would grant a large plot of land in the center of reunified Berlin as the site of the memorial, and in early 1995, the city held a contest for its design, which ultimately received 528 entries.
The initial skepticism and resistance that Rosh’s project met did not abate in the years leading up to the contest, or during the actual selection process itself. In fact, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, one of the memorial’s most visible supporters, rejected the contest winner almost immediately after a special jury officially chose it. He maintained that he still supported a memorial, but opposed the design of Christine Jackob-Marks of Berlin, whose entry the jury of experts had chosen over the work of architect Simon Ungers. He declared that the project would be postponed for a Denkpause, a time for reflection, and that at the conclusion of this respite, Germany would begin a new contest with new parameters.
The German government announced its new competition in 1997, as debates over the memorial continued to rage. Prominent Germans, like author Günter Grass, who had signed the initial letter demanding the construction of a Holocaust memorial, were now urging the government to cancel the nearly ten-year old project. The mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, one of Kohl’s political allies, also made it clear that he was against the erection of a memorial to the murdered Jews. Still, the process continued, and four finalists emerged in November 1998, including Field of Graves, a submission from American architect Peter Eisenman and American sculptor Richard Serra, the favored entry of Chancellor Kohl and Rosh's sponsor group.
However, even as the four final entries emerged from the second contest, the potential result of Germany’s approaching elections made the erection of a monument more uncertain than ever before. A decision on the new competition had been put off until the end of the vote, and Gerhard Schröder, the candidate of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and main challenger to Kohl and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), did not support the idea of a central Holocaust memorial. His election in the fall of 1998, along with the appointment of his Minister of Culture, Michael Naumann, who was also an avowed critic of a memorial, left many wondering whether there would ever be a central memorial site for the Holocaust in Germany.
Schröder would eventually offer his support for a memorial, but his idea took a much different form than the competition’s four finalists. In their stead, the new chancellor and his culture senator proposed an “interactive” project, which, rather than portraying the Holocaust in abstract forms, would feature a garden of contemplation, a research library, an exhibition hall, and a “genocide-watch” institute.2 However, the Eisenman entry (Serra had withdrawn from the competition) still enjoyed support from some very influential Germans, and this influence ensured that it would not be excluded from the final design.
The two sides developed a “synthesis” that included both Eisenman’s Field of Graves as well as the Place of Information that the Social Democrats and some other prominent Germans deemed so necessary. The German Bundestag approved this synthesis, which had undergone additional modifications and survived the threat of a last-minute challenge entry from German theologian Richard Schröder, on June 25, 1999.
With the chronological account of the episodes, incidents, and arguments of the memorial decision process finished, I will then turn to looking at the monument itself in its final, synthesized form, and some of Peter Eisenman’s own comments on his Field of Graves will aid in the understanding of this abstract memorial.
After assimilating all of the pertinent information, a somewhat more thorough discussion of the question of remembrance will be necessary to make a final analysis. I will attempt to explain some of the complexities of remembrance in Germany, namely, the potential problems of Holocaust memorials and the dangerous concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a German word that means “dealing with the past”. Both of these issues have had a great effect on Germany and on its debate over a central place of Holocaust remembrance. In a reunited country and a rejuvenated capital, many Germans are eager to embrace the future, while many critics view their zeal as an attempt to forget the past.
For Germany and its citizens it is clear that, in terms of deciding to build a memorial to the Holocaust, and in terms of deciding what kind of form such a memorial would take, any decision, for or against, and any form, abstract or didactic, would have been met with opposition from one side or another. Such a diverse group of persons, opinions, and motives ensured that the debate over the memorial would continue up until the day the German parliament approved its construction, and then beyond. When attempting to memorialize an event as catastrophic and sensitive as the Holocaust, remembrance, for Germany and its people at least, is truly an impossible task.
