Lea Rosh is a German journalist in the “Shoah business”, a thriving German industry of Holocaust commemorations in both writing and art,3 and it was Rosh who made the first proposal for a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. On August 24, 1988, in the course of a colloquium organized by German historian Reinhard Rürup, Rosh demanded such a memorial from Germany, the “country of perpetrators.”4 According to Jane Kramer, Rosh, whose maternal grandfather was a Berlin Jew, believes that identification with Jewishness is her German duty, and the journalist has taken this obligation so seriously that she has even legally changed her name from Edith to Lea. Rosh is, in Kramer’s words, “unnervingly enthusiastic” on the subject of Jewish suffering.5
In 1988, Rosh, along with her group Perspective Berlin, began to lobby for the erection of a Holocaust memorial for Jewish victims on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, and the group garnered support from prominent Germans. The letter quoted in the beginning of this essay, which demanded a memorial in Germany, was signed by such personalities as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and the famous German author Günter Grass. The only problems were now location and intention. As Wiedmer notes, the former Gestapo site was problematic because it represented the place where the Nazis instituted their systematic persecution of all of the victims of the Holocaust, not just the Jewish victims. Romani Rose, head of the Central Council of the Sinti and Roma (German gypsies), protested that excluding all other victims would create an “insulting” hierarchy of first- and second- class victims. Rose's claim found support in many circles, including the Berlin Senate, which decreed on October 23, 1989 that a memorial to only one victim group on the former Gestapo site would be inappropriate.6
However, in the next two weeks, Rosh would find a solution to one of her problems, and history would find a solution to the other. Two weeks after the Berlin Senate’s decision, Rosh founded the Sponsor Circle for the Erection of a Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, a title that made the group’s intentions perfectly clear and strengthened its position against other groups of victims fighting to be included. On November 9, 1989, just days after the founding of the Sponsor Circle, the Berlin Wall opened, and suddenly there was not just an abundance of available land in the middle of a soon-to-be reunited Berlin, but a spot of “even greater symbolic value” than the former Gestapo site: the area around Adolf Hitler’s bunker.7 Jakob Schulze-Rohr, a strong proponent of the proposed memorial, remarked that he wanted the project as close to the site of Hitler’s bunker as possible, to show that the ruthless dictator and his ideas had "collapsed and died,” while the Jewish people and their culture, which Hitler had so brutally attacked, survived his attempted genocide.8
Three years later, on July 14, 1992, the reunified German government announced its official plans to erect a central, national memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust on that site, the Ministärgarten (Minister’s Gardens), and to give the land, estimated to be worth DM200 million (about $100 million), to the Sponsor Circle free of charge.9
With the official announcement came a new series of complaints and questions from all across Germany. Rose continued to argue for the inclusion of the Gypsy community, maintaining that the Jews and Gypsies were the only groups systematically exterminated on the basis of race.10 Proponents, however, argued that anti-Semitism was the foundation of Hitler’s worldview, and that their unique persecution made them worthy of their own memorial. As Rosh remarked, “Hitler’s killing program was for Jews, it was about the destruction of Jews. All the other killing followed from it.”11 The Sponsor Circle would not allow the inclusion of other groups in the memorial to detract from the remembrance of Jewish victims.
However, this did not affect historians and writers in their criticisms of the project. Reinhart Koselleck, the “Old Master” of the history theory in Germany, was particularly critical of the plan to honor only Jewish victims. He questioned the omission of millions of dead Russians, murdered Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, biblical scholars and political opponents. As the nation that organized such a brutal mass murder, Koselleck felt that Germany had a distinct responsibility to honor all victims in a central, national memorial.12 If one group received a memorial, Koselleck reasoned, then all of the others would have a moral right to their own. A hierarchy would emerge, not only of victims, but of memorials as well, with the Jewish memorial dominating the city and the other memorials struggling for attention. “The different colored triangles of concentration camp inmates turn back after fifty years, remade into memorials,” the historian icily observed, referring to the Nazis’ system of labeling its prisoners with colored triangles to provide instant recognition of the type of prisoner that they were.13
Koselleck also questioned memorials and monuments in general, and their ability to represent the Holocaust. He maintained that he knew of only a few war memorials that truly forced their viewers to reflect, and that after the Second World War, monuments showed that catastrophes can never be remembered enough, let alone completely. He believed that the future of memory would be found in conversations, because, in his opinion, speaking was often more effective than any material solidifications.14
Writer Rafael Seligmann argued that Berlin had enough monuments and places of remembrance. He noted that the Topography of Terror, located on the former Gestapo site that Rosh previously coveted, already demonstrated the horrors of the Nazi regime effectively. He mentioned that the Wannsee Villa,
where the Nazi hierarchy had organized and sanctioned the systematic extermination of European Jews, was now a museum and education center. Furthermore, two concentration camps, Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen, were only a short distance from the German capital, and these camps that played host to the Nazis’ final solution would always be the best reminder of the treachery in the Germans’ past.15
Katharina Kaiser, an eventual participant in the first contest for the memorial, saw the site itself as problematic, because it evidenced the Germans’ collective inability to mourn. By tying the memory to Hitler himself, Kaiser insisted, the mourners would cast all of the blame on the infamous leader, while at the same time beginning to feel that they too were victims of Hitler’s fight against Europe.16
German senator Wolfgang Nagel offered a view from the other side of the debate. He said that the memorial project was necessary to combat the increasing neo-Nazi sentiments of the 1990s, and that it would be an example to future generations of Germans “to be critical of all actions directed against minorities.” He maintained that proponents of the project wanted to show all visitors what truly happened in Berlin, and that this memorial would continually spark debates that would ensure that the Germans’ responsibility would never disappear.17
In 1995, the competition for a Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe began. The Ministärgarten was officially declared the site of this new memorial. A jury of fifteen experts, five each from the German government, the Berlin Senate, and the Sponsor Circle itself, would select the winner of the contest, which was open only to artists who had lived and worked in Germany for at least six months, as well as twelve specially invited artists, who were paid 50,000 marks each for participating in the contest. In order to construct the winning entry, the federal government and the state of Berlin would each supply one-fourth of the estimated 16 million marks in costs, while the Sponsor Circle would supply the other eight million marks through public and private donations.18
The competition committee claimed that this contest made it clear that Germany was assuming its obligation to confront the truth, to honor and remember the murdered Jews of Europe, to accept the burden of German history, and to “give the signal for a new chapter of human cohabitation in which injustice to minorities will no longer be possible.”19 Entries were supposed to combine mourning, shock, respect, and remembrance, and elicit feelings of shame and guilt, while at the same time inspiring the knowledge necessary for peace, freedom, equality, and tolerance. However, as Wiedmer notes in her work, such a description ignores many of the public debates from the previous years.20 Koselleck questioned the entire concept of a memorial, as well as the exclusion of all other groups of victims, and Kaiser argued about the potential symbolic value of the site. However, as we can see from the committee’s statement, these arguments had little effect on the eventual parameters of the competition.
In the end, the competition received 528 entries from single artists and groups of artists. Many entries were either absurd or thought provoking, depending on the viewpoint. There was a Ferris wheel with cattle wagons instead of the standard carriages, a forty-meter high tower that supposedly would be able to hold the blood of six million murdered Jews, and an eighteen-meter high black oven with an eternal flame. Henryk Broder, a Jewish essayist and critic of the “Shoah business”, remarked, “not since the discovery of the kidney-shaped table…has so much collective ugliness cavalierly been offered.”21 The jury eventually selected two grand-prize winners. One, the design of Christine Jackob-Marks, was a vast flat concrete gravestone, on which the names of 4.2 million Holocaust victims would be engraved. The other, designed by Simon Ungers, was a large steel enclosure bearing all of the names of the concentration camps. Three months later, on June 29, the jury decided that Jackob-Marks’ design was the more appropriate and feasible entry, and preparations could finally begin for the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The next day brought a startling turn of events, however. Chancellor Kohl, one of the instrumental figures in a competition that had seemingly reached its end, unexpectedly objected to Jackob-Marks’ design, saying he did not support the project because it was too enormous. Spokesman Peter Hausmann added that the government would continue to support the project, but would strongly encourage more discussions on the topic in order to reach a “broad consensus.”22 Although nothing was yet official, Kohl’s initial dissatisfaction with the tombstone design was a sign of things to come. Although the entry encountered this unforeseen opposition, the jury’s decision for Jackob-Marks' design set off another round of debate within Germany. The initial plan intended to finance the engraving of victims’ names through visitor donations, something to which Ignatz Bubis, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, vociferously objected. “It couldn’t be more tasteless,” Bubis remarked. He argued that every visitor with a bad conscience (and some with a good conscience) would have the possibility of simply paying for as many names as they wished, in a sense purchasing their own absolution. 23 Berlin architect Bernhard Schneider questioned another aspect of the overwhelming number of names. “Abraham Rabinowitz, for instance. Is that Abraham Rabinowitz of Brussels – or of Prague?”24 Schneider suggested that 4.2 million names, which supporters claimed would bring the victims out of their anonymity, would have such great potential for repetition that it would result in a “different kind of anonymity.”25 Furthermore, there were six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, not just over four million. The names of nearly two million other victims were simply unavailable. The central, national memorial, therefore, could never be truly complete.
Proponents of the memorial, however, continued to offer convincing reasons for its construction. Historian Eberhard Jaeckel said that this memorial would give all of the victims, murdered in a number of locations throughout Europe, a central grave and place of remembrance.26 Schulze-Rohr remarked, “…Most intellectuals…never answer the question, ‘what did your father do during the war?’”27 He maintained that the location of the memorial, where it could be seen regardless of time or weather, would have an emotional impact. If fifty years later, an eighteen-year old student asked his parents or teachers, “What’s that?”, Schulze-Rohr argued that it would certainly not be a “bad thing.” He pronounced that there would be no better way to facilitate the remembrance of history in Germany.28
Though Kohl’s official veto of the prize-winning project did not come until 1997, it was widely known by the spring of 1996 that if there were going to be a memorial, it would not be to the design of Jackob-Marks. The chancellor promised that the memorial would be built by the time that the German government completed its move from Bonn to Berlin in 1999, but only after both sides had enjoyed a Denkpause, a time of reflection, during which every person involved would contemplate the past and future of the project. To encourage reflection, the German government, the state of Berlin, and the Sponsor Circle announced that they would hold three eight-hour colloquia, featuring a group of historians, philosophers, city planners, and representatives of the Jewish community and its youth groups during the upcoming year.29 The first colloquium would discuss and reconsider the motives of Germany for erecting a memorial, the second would concentrate on the proposed location and its political and historical context, and the third session would consider the form of the monument. The problems of the previous seven years still had not been resolved, and many demanded that new parameters and concepts come with the new beginning.30
The first competition and its results (or lack of them) are the first indicator of the impossible task that Germany faced when it decided to construct a central, national memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Other groups of victims were outraged at their approved exclusion. However, the project’s advocates insisted that as the primary target of Hitler’s program of extermination, the six million Jewish victims deserved a place of their own. Even removed from the victims’ debate, historians, artists, and other intellectuals were divided on many of the same problems. They protested the exclusion of other persecuted groups, the proposed site of the memorial, and even the concept of a memorial itself, while other prominent figures defended all three of these choices. There seemed to be no right or wrong answer to the memorial question, and both sides offered convincing arguments in support of their cause. As we will see in the discussion of the second competition and the conclusive decision of the Bundestag, these are all arguments that would not disappear.
