million Jews who were killed by the Nazis was expected to continue Wednesday, May 11, after influential critics said it failed to address the full horror of that period, and politicians warned of vandalism.
The ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ is located in the heart of Berlin, near a former bunker where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler shot himself at the end of the Second World War. Bigger than two football fields, it is also only steps away from Berlin’s two major landmarks – the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag parliament building.
It looks like a huge graveyard, but there are no names on its 2,711 concrete pillars, which tilt at odd angles and rise from uneven, sloping ground to heights of nearly five meters (yards). American architect Peter Eisenman, who designed the memorial, said he wanted visitors to feel disoriented and isolated, just like many Jews did when they arrived at Nazi concentration camps.
"It is excessive. It is claustrophobic. It is tight. The sound is different. The light is different. And the experience is different. And all of those things were things we were looking to try and do to try and give a sense of what it might be like to be lost in space, perhaps to be lost at Auschwitz with your mother gone," he explained.
James Young, a historian of memorial architecture who sat on the committee that selected Eisenman’s design, reportedly wrote that the labyrinth of tombstone-like slabs would force the visitors to "find their own path to the memory of Europe’s murdered Jews."
QUESTIONS RAISED
However in response, The Jerusalem Post newspaper noted that in a column published this week author Hannes Stein called the memorial "monstrous kitsch" and said that all that it really showed was that "the German people gave the Jews a graveyard." At Tuesday’s opening ceremony, Paul Spiegel, head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, said the memorial also failed to address a key question: "Why were members of a civilized people in the heart of Europe capable of planning and carrying out mass murder?"
"The remembrance of those who were murdered lets visitors avoid the confrontation with questions of guilt and responsibility," he added. Other prominent Jewish leaders, including writer Rafael Seligmann, stressed it should have been dedicated not just to Jews, but to all of the Nazis’ victims.
"Why was it only built and named for the Jews? Why not for the Gypsies? Why not for the handicapped? For the communists? And, at this point, you can change, you can name it after all the victims of the Nazis," he asked reporters. At least one Berlin resident agrees. "My father told me that his great-uncle was killed because he was suspected of being a homosexual," said 36-year old Ingrid Schulzinger, a waitress in a fashionable restaurant in Berlin, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. "The Nazis killed Jews, but they killed other people, too, and they made all of the Germans suffer. The suffering of the Germans should be remembered, too," she added.
Backers of the memorial said the opening was an attempt to make Germans more aware of what happened. Its opening was also timed to coincide with this month’s 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender.
"TERRIBLE CRIME"
"Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany’s worst, most terrible crime – the attempt to exterminate an entire people," Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse said at the opening ceremony. He called it a sign that the reunited Germany that emerged at the end of the Cold War "faces up to its history."
Holocaust survivor Sabina van der Linden riveted the audience with her account of loss, terror and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. An 11-year-old Jewish girl when the Wehrmacht occupied her town in July 1941, she was sheltered at great risk by a Christian family and later survived by hiding in a forest. Her parents and brother died in the Holocaust, The Associated Press (AP) news agency reported.
In a message of reconciliation which an AP reporter said "won the most applause of the afternoon," she said there could be no collective guilt for Germans and that her survival represented "a victory of all decent people over evil."
LEARNING FROM HORROR
"What have I learned?" reportedly asked Van der Linden, who now lives in Sydney, Australia. "I have learned that hatred begets hatred. I have learned that we must not remain silent and that each of us must fight discrimination, racism and inhumanity."
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, apparently visibly moved, clasped van der Linden’s hands as she left the podium. Eisenman said he agreed with Germany’s Parliament president Thierse that the memorial "would not please everyone." The architect said he wouldn’t mind skateboarders, children playing hide and seek or even graffiti on the slabs.
Asked if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on it, he was noncommittal. "Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t," AP quoted Eisenman as saying. "Maybe it would add to it." Last year former Nazi ally Hungary opened its first ever national Holocaust memorial in Budapest as an attempt to overcome its controversial past, which was long a taboo topic during and even after Communism. About 600,000 Hungarian Jews were massacred during World War Two.
(With BosNewsLife Research in Budapest, Stefan J. Bos, reports from Berlin and Voice of America).
