The invitations to the three colloquia immediately made it obvious that the problems associated with the first competition were likely to carry on into the second. They stated that the problematic aspects of the first round – the group the memorial would honor and the site where it would stand – were part of an “unalterable premise,”31 and that changing them was out of the question. The memorial would still be to the Jewish victims, and the memorial would stand on the grounds of the former Ministärgarten.Indeed, after the colloquia concluded and Kohl issued his official veto of the Jackob-Marks entry, a new competition was announced in August 1997, and, as Wiedmer notes, the only thing that had changed was the number of artists permitted to participate in the contest.32 Instead of opening it to the public, the committee made the second competition invitation-only. Twenty-four artists, the first nine prizewinners of the first competition and fifteen additional selected artists, were invited to submit an entry, and nineteen of them did so. The jury would still consist of members from the German federal government, representatives of the state of Berlin, and delegates of the Sponsor Circle.
In November, the jury narrowed its choices to four entries. The first was an entry from New York architect Peter Eisenman and American sculptor Richard Serra. This design called for 4,000 tombstone-like concrete columns to be spread over the field at differing heights, and was to resemble a graveyard. Daniel Libeskind submitted the second entry, which featured a 141-meter broken wall that would direct visitors’ view to the central park in Berlin, the Tiergarten, and more specifically to a monument honoring Germany’s legendary writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This memorial, Libeskind said, would invite visitors to reflect on the highs and lows of German history. Berlin architect Gesine Weinmiller proposed a memorial with eighteen blocks that would appear as a fragmented Star of David when viewed from a certain angle. The fourth entry, from Paris-based German artist Jochen Gerz, planned for thirty-nine light masts, each of which would feature an inscription of the word “why” in as many languages, the number of different languages that Jewish victims of the Holocaust spoke. The Eisenman-Serra entry quickly found favor with Chancellor Kohl, a preference that set the tone for the remainder of the competition.33
As a final decision approached, resistance to the entire project emerged from two very prominent places, and it became evident that Germany was far from a consensus on the matter of a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Only weeks before the jury was to decide between the four finalists, a group of nineteen German intellectuals, historians, and authors wrote an open letter to Chancellor Kohl and other supporters of the project, urging them to abandon it. Among the contributors to the letter were historian Jurgen Kocka, film director George Tabori, and the president of the Berlin Academy of Arts, Gyorgy Konrad. The group, which also included author Günter Grass, signatory of the letter that originally demanded a central Holocaust memorial, insisted that an “abstract installation of oppressively gigantic proportions” could never create a place of “quiet mourning and remembrance, of warning or enlightenment.”34 The open letter also criticized the exclusion of Gypsies, Homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled persons, and other victims of the Nazis. Furthermore, as Rafael Seligmann had noted earlier, the group felt that with the abundance of historical Holocaust sites already in Berlin (Topography of Terror, Wannsee villa, Sachsenhausen concentration camp), this memorial would be nothing more than an “artificial gesture.”35
German author Peter Schneider, also a member of the group, offered another argument against the nature of the memorial when discussing the open letter. He reasoned that if the memorial was a German memorial, but intended to remember the victims, it would be problematic because one “cannot penetrate the feelings of the victims.” Schneider observed that the suffering of the victims belonged to the victims alone, and one cannot simulate it if one was on the side of the perpetrators and never a victim.36 Schneider’s argument, and those of his fellow intellectuals, would be a key in further prolonging a debate that had already lasted nearly ten years.
The group of intellectuals was not the only source of discontent in Germany, however. The mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, a member of Kohl’s CDU party, emerged as one of the most visible opponents of the memorial. He expressed dissatisfaction with all of the four finalists, which convinced him that it was not possible to portray an event such as the Holocaust through artistic means. Furthermore, Diepgen reasoned, if it was impossible to say how such a memorial should look, this brought into question whether there should be a memorial at all.37 Diepgen also noted the presence of more than forty-five other memorials to Nazi victims in Berlin, and questioned whether additional memorials would do justice to the victims’ memory.38
The German public offered evidence that it was also displeased with the ongoing memorial debate. When a central Berlin exhibition hall displayed all nineteen entries from the second competition, entries in the visitors’ register expressed their dissatisfaction. “No! No memorial!”39 and “The incomprehensible cannot be shown” were typical entries in the register.40 A Forsa institute survey found that only forty-four percent of Berliners polled were in favor of a memorial, while forty-six percent opposed the erection of one. Moreover, seventy-two percent of Berlin residents said they favored a suggestion to take more time to decide on the memorial.41
Supporters of a memorial offered their own arguments, of course, but also showed their first signs of weakness. Lea Rosh, however, took issue with both of these arguments. The founder of the Sponsor Circle responded to Diepgen’s statements by declaring that it would be “an international disgrace and a slap in the face above all for the Israelis” if no memorial were constructed.42 In response to the calls for an extension on the decision, Rosh remarked that it was “a bit ridiculous” to ask for more time in a debate that had already lasted for ten years. She understood that a central memorial was a difficult subject for Germany, and that such a project would strike a great number of nerves, but insisted that Germans could not “close their eyes” to remembrance of the Holocaust43(however, when one considers Berlin’s forty-five smaller memorials, which Diepgen mentioned, one must wonder whether Germans were truly doing this). On the other hand, the mounting opposition had a great effect on Kohl, who reportedly was willing to defer a decision on the memorial if it was not wanted or if the planned form was insufficient.44
However, no open letter or reasonable argument could affect the entire concept of a memorial as much as one event ultimately did: the impending federal election in Germany. Helmut Kohl, concluding his fourth term as chancellor, faced his strongest foe to date in Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Unlike Kohl, Schröder was a strong opponent of a memorial of any kind. He was a member of the post-World War II generation, and, if elected, would be the first German leader without personal memory of the great conflict. Schröder and the SPD were attempting to lead Germany into the twenty-first century as a country equal to the other “normal” ones in Europe, with no special stigma carried over from the Nazi legacy.45
Michael Naumann, Schröder’s top adviser on cultural affairs and would-be Minister of Culture, became the SPD’s central figure in resistance to the Holocaust memorial. Two months before the election, Naumann declared that the money budgeted to the memorial should be used to renovate Germany’s concentration camps and their museums. These camps, Naumann insisted, were the true memorials in Germany, where visitors could remember and reflect and perhaps uncover some of their “personal shame”.46 Unlike a central memorial in the heart of Berlin, visitors of Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and other camps would be on the grounds where the mass extermination was carried out.47
Similarly, Naumann lashed out against the Eisenman proposal (Serra had withdrawn his name from the competition) and the other three finalists, and compared such monstrous designs to the monumental architecture of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s crony. He dismissed any memorial as a Kranzabwurfstelle, a “wreath-dumping ground”, where Germans would attempt to relieve themselves of their guilt simply by leaving flowers.48 A memorial would serve to freeze memory, represent Germans’ “last debt to history”, and encourage them to think that the horrors of the Holocaust could now be forgotten.49
At the end of September, Germans elected Schröder as their new chancellor, and his ascendancy obviously left the ten-year old memorial question in its period of greatest uncertainty. However, the SPD slowly warmed to the idea of a central place of remembrance, and, as the new chancellor remarked, “A ‘No’ to the memorial would have had fatal consequences.” He suggested that such a decision would have only served to create a great misunderstanding in such a sensitive political climate.50
The SPD’s gradual acceptance of the project by no means meant that it would be content with the present competition, however. On December 15, 1998, the new government unveiled its own design for a Holocaust memorial, a completely different concept that because of its didactic elements would be much more suitable for educating future generations. The “interactive” project called for a memorial museum that would feature a research library, an exhibition hall, a garden of contemplation, and a “genocide-watch” institute that would alert the world to potential mass slaughters all over the globe. Furthermore, the new museum would enjoy collaboration with the Holocaust memorial in Israel, Yad Vashem, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and the American Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. Naumann claimed that it would be a “living memorial”, and would link the past, present, and future in an understandable and observable way.51
The SPD’s new proposal found support from prominent historians and architects. German historian Jürgen Kocka agreed with Naumann, noting that an artistic work alone could not offer an answer to changing questions in changing times. Such a work, he wrote, would have to be augmented through a connection to a place of information and enlightenment.52 Manfred Sack, a prominent German architectural critic, insisted that information was the only way to truly grasp the horrors of the Holocaust. Only when a visitor crossed the threshold to a museum or any other place of documentation, and began to read the letters, reports, testimonies, complaints, and hopes of Jewish victims, could he or she begin to understand the consequences of Hitler’s Final Solution.53
Obviously, supporters of the monument were not prepared to give up the fight for their own version of the memorial. German Jewish leaders felt that Naumann’s proposal was not powerful enough, and criticized it as an excuse not to have a memorial. Bubis told a Munich-based newspaper, “You can either build the memorial or don’t build it, but one shouldn’t hide behind a museum.”54 Just as opponents of the project used the concentration camps and the exhibit on the former Gestapo site as a basis for their arguments against a memorial, Bubis said that the museums at the camps and the documentation center at the Topography of Terror already offered a wealth of information to anyone who wanted to visit them, and that the proposed house of information would contain much of the same information.
The influence of Bubis and other supporters forced Naumann and the SPD to alter their stance on the memorial once more. In late December 1998, Naumann and Eisenman
met in New York City to discuss the memorial project, with Michael Blumenthal, former United States Treasury Secretary and head of a new Jewish Museum in Berlin (a distinct project) as mediator. Three weeks later, on January 18, 1999, both sides announced that they had reached an agreement that would keep the field of stone pillars intact, and at the same time fulfill the Social Democrats’ desire for a place of information. The synthesis reduced the number of stone pillars in Eisenman’s field from 2,800 to approximately 2,100, and called for a “House of Remembrance”, which would contain an archive, information center, and exhibition space. A wall of one million books, approximately one hundred yards long and sixty-five feet high, would flank the building. The wall would symbolize the government’s desire to be educational and useful, while still symbolic and commemorative.
Both sides expressed their satisfaction with the new plan. Naumann declared that with the agreement on this “superb synthesis”, the project could move forward, because “all statements pro and con have been taken care of.”55 Eisenman expressed his relief and satisfaction that his plan had survived intact. With both sides agreed on the form of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the only obstacle that remained was the approval of the German Bundestag.
Unfortunately, as was the case with the Holocaust memorial project almost since the day of its inception, the compromise between the government and the architect was met with further resistance, and what seemed to be a virtual guarantee turned out to be far from assured. Only a week after the two sides made their plans known to the public, Henryk Broder, ever the critic of the memorial idea, said that the erection of the planned synthesis would be the “triumph of the absurd.”56 He reiterated his previous criticisms, such as the exclusion of other victims and the presence of so many other Holocaust-related sites in Berlin, while also taking issue with the estimated price of the latest proposal. Whereas the initial budget for a memorial was about fifteen million marks, experts estimated the costs of the synthesis to be between one hundred million and 120 million marks, and Broder cynically observed that “only when it involves dead Jews” is such a remarkable sum “peanuts.”57He warned the Germans that a good idea does not come automatically out of two bad ones.
The greatest resistance to the new proposal was not a public figure or intellectual, however, but one final alternative proposal. Richard Schröder, a German theologian, proposed a smaller memorial inscribed with the words “Thou shalt not kill” in Hebrew and in a number of other foreign languages. Many prominent figures, including German president Johannes Rau and the chairman of the German Bishops Conference, Karl Lehmann, offered their support to the new entry. Criticisms of Schröder’s proposal were quick to point out the faults of his idea, saying that his memorial suggested that it “knew the answer to Auschwitz, instead of keeping the question alive.”58 Nevertheless, the favorable reaction to Schröder’s proposal ensured its inclusion in the vote of the Bundestag, which would make the final decision on the last Friday in June.
On June 25, 1999, the German Bundestag decided in favor of Eisenman’s entry by a vote of 314 to 209, with fourteen abstentions. Many representatives felt that Richard Schröder’s proposal would ultimately turn out to be hypocritical, due to an increasing German presence in NATO peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. It seemed to recall an earlier Germany and its “only peace” attitude, while the present German government was finding it necessary to use a greater amount of force, especially in order to prevent ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.59The Eisenman entry, despite two years of debate, moderations, compromises, and the opposition of many Germans, had survived, and was now the official winning entry in the competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The second competition and all of its inherent controversies further the argument that the Germans’ attempt to construct an acceptable and successful central Holocaust memorial was an impossible undertaking. Intellectuals, political figures, and the general public spoke out against the entire concept of a memorial. Gerhard Schröder’s new, liberal government vowed that the memorial, if it were erected at all, would never take the form that former chancellor Kohl preferred, only to realize just how much influence supporters of Eisenman’s memorial carried. After both sides agreed to a compromise, Richard Schröder’s proposal garnered enough support to merit inclusion in the German parliament’s final vote, and to give evidence that there was still a great divide on the issue of a memorial.
Even after the Bundestag reached its final decision, the debate surrounding the memorial lived on. Mayor Diepgen’s absence at the ceremonial groundbreaking ceremonies for the memorial, held on the anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz, reminded many that there was still opposition to the project, and a neo-Nazi protest against the memorial just days after the ceremony reminded everyone involved that the German past remained an embarrassingly visible part of its present. Even though the winning entry would offer a symbolic and instructional look at the past, a field of graves and a house of information could clearly do nothing to change it.
