A stele is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living — inscribed, carved in relief A stele long, 0.95m (3' 1.5") wide and vary in height from 0.2 m to 4.8m (8" to 15'9"). According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. An attached underground "Place of Information" (German:
Ort der Information) holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
i
museumA museum is a building or institution which houses a collection of artifacts.Museums collect and care for objects of scientific, artistic, or historical importance and make them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary...
Yad VashemYad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament.The origin of the name is from a Biblical verse: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and...
.
Building began on April 1, 2003 and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public on May 12 of the same year. It is located one block south of the
Brandenburg GateThe Brandenburg Gate is a former city gate and one of the main symbols of Berlin and Germany. It is located west of the city center at the intersection of Unter den Linden and Ebertstraße, immediately west of the Pariser Platz. It is the only remaining gate of a series through which one formerly...
, in the
FriedrichstadtFriedrichstadt was an independent suburb of Berlin, and is now a historical neighborhood of the city itself. The neighborhood is named after the Prussian king Frederick I.-Geography:...
neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately
€The euro is the official currency of 16 of the 27 Member States of the European Union . The states, known collectively as the Eurozone, are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain...
25 million.
History
German journalist
Lea RoshLea Rosh is a German television journalist, publicist, entrepreneur and political activist. Rosh was the first female journalist to manage a public broadcasting service in Germany and in the 70's the first anchorwoman of Kennzeichen D, a major political television program...
was the driving force behind the memorial. In 1989, she founded a group to support its construction and to collect donations. With growing support, the
BundestagThe Bundestag is the parliament of Germany. It was established with Germany's constitution of 1949 and is the successor of the earlier Reichstag...
passed a resolution in favour of the project.
First competition
In April 1994 a competition for its design was announced in Germany's major newspapers. Twelve artists were specifically invited to submit a design and given 50,000 DM (€ 25,000) to do so. The only rules and guidelines given were that building the project could only cost up to 15 million DM (€ 7.5 million). The winning proposal was to be selected by a jury consisting of representatives from the fields of
artArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings...
,
architectureFor a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of architecture. Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use....
,
urban designUrban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has...
,
historyHistory is the study of the human past, with special attention to the written record. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns...
,
politicsPolitics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions...
and administration. It included a few minor celebrities such as
Frank SchirrmacherFrank Schirrmacher is a German journalist, doctored literature expert and essayist, writer, and since 1994 co-publisher of the national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .-Education:...
, co-editor of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungThe Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , also known as F.A.Z., is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . F.A.Z...
. The deadline for the proposals was October 28. On May 11, an information colloquium took place in Berlin, where people interested in submitting a design could receive some more information about the nature of the memorial to be designed.
Ignatz BubisIgnatz Bubis , German Jewish leader, was the influential chairman of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland from 1992 to 1999. In this capacity he led a public campaign against German anti-Semitism...
, the president of the
Zentralrat der Juden in DeutschlandThe Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland is a federation of German Jews organizing many Jewish organisations in Germany. It was founded on July 19, 1950 as a response to the increasing isolation of German Jews by the international Jewish community and increasing interest in Jewish affairs by the ...
, and Wolfgang Nagel, the construction senator of Berlin, spoke at the event.
Before the deadline, the documents required to submit a proposal were requested over 2600 times and 528 proposals were submitted. The jury met on January 15, 1995 to pick the best submission. First,
Walter JensWalter Jens is a German philologist, literature historian, critic, university professor, and writer.In the early 1940s, Jens joined the NSDAP. He denies having applied for membership actively and claims having been forced to join the party...
, the president of the
Akademie der KünsteThe Akademie der Künste, Berlin is an arts institution in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in 1696 by Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg as the Prussian Academy of Arts, an academic institution where members could meet and discuss and share ideas...
was elected chairman of the jury. In the following days, all but 13 submissions were eliminated from the race in several rounds of looking through all works. As had already been arranged, the jury met again on March 15. 11 submissions were restored to the race as requested by several jurors, after they had had a chance to review the eliminated works in the months in between the meetings. Two works were then recommended by the jury to the foundation to be checked as to whether they could be completed within the price range given. One was designed by a group around the architect
Simon UngersSimon Ungers was a German architect and artist.Simon Ungers was born in 1957 as the son of the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers and Liselotte Gable. In 1968, his family moved to the United States. From 1975 to 1980, he studied architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York...
from
HamburgHamburg is the second-largest city in Germany and the sixth-largest city in the European Union...
; it consisted of 85x85 m square of steel girders on top of concrete blocks located on the corners. The names of several extermination camps would be perforated into the girders, so that these would be projected onto objects or people in the area by sunlight. The other winner was a design by Christine Jackob-Marks. Her concept consisted of 100x100 m large concrete plate, 7 meters thick. It would be tilted, rising up to 11 meters and walkable on special paths. The names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust would be engraved into the concrete, with spaces left empty for those victims whose names remain unknown. Large pieces of debris from Massada, a mountaintop-fortress in
IsraelIsrael officially the State of Israel , is a developed state in Western Asia located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan in the east, and Egypt on the southwest, and contains geographically diverse features within its...
, whose Jewish inhabitants killed themselves to avoid being captured or killed by the Roman soldiers rushing in, would be spread over the concrete plate.The fallen jews were all due to the trageties commited by Adolf Hitler These plans would eventually be vetoed by Chancellor
Helmut KohlHelmut Josef Michael Kohl is a German conservative politician and statesman. He was Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 and the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union from 1973 to 1998...
.
Peter Eisenman's plan emerged as the winner of the next competition in November 1997. On June 25, 1999, a large majority of the Bundestag decided in favor of Eisenman's plan, modified by attaching a museum, or "place of information," designed by Berlin-based exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken. Across the street from the northern boundary of the memorial is the site of the new
Embassy of the United States in BerlinThe Embassy of the United States in Berlin maintains diplomatic relations and represents United States interests in dealing with the German government. The U.S. Embassy in Germany has not always been in Berlin.-1797–1930:...
, which is due for completion in 2008. For a while, issues over "set-back" for U.S. embassy construction impacted the memorial. Construction of the memorial started in April 2003.
Degussa incident
On October 14, 2003, the
SwissSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
newspaper
Tages-AnzeigerTages-Anzeiger, also abbreviated Tagi or TA, is a German language Swiss national daily newspaper based in Zürich. Among newspapers in Switzerland, it has one of the largest readerships, reaching around 550,000 readers. The Tages-Anzeiger was first published in 1893...
published a few articles presenting as a scandal the fact that the Degussa company was involved in the construction of the memorial producing the anti-
graffitiGraffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
substance
ProtectosilProtectosil is a silane manufactured by Evonik and marketed a protective coating for building surfaces. It is used as a water repellant, and for corrosion and graffiti control....
used to cover the steles, because the company had been involved in several different ways in the National-Socialist persecution of the Jews. A subsidiary company of Degussa, Degesch, even produced the
Zyklon BZyklon B was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide infamous for its use by Nazi Germany against human beings in gas chambers of extermination camps during the Holocaust....
used to poison people in the
gas chamberA gas chamber is an apparatus for killing, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used. Gas chambers were used as a method of execution for...
s. At first these articles did not receive much attention, until the curatorium (board of trustees) dealing with the construction discussed this situation on October 23 and, after turbulent and controversial discussions, decided to stop construction immediately until a decision was made. Primarily it was representatives of the Jewish community who had called for an end to Degussa's involvement, while the politicians in the curatorium such as
Wolfgang ThierseWolfgang Thierse is a German politician.Thierse was born in Breslau . He is Roman Catholic, grew up in East Germany and studied German language and literature at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Later, he worked for the East German Ministry for Cultural Affairs...
did not want to stop construction and lose money because of this. They also said it would be impossible to exclude all German companies involved in the Nazi crimes, because – as Thierse put it – "the past protrudes into [the German] society".
Lea RoshLea Rosh is a German television journalist, publicist, entrepreneur and political activist. Rosh was the first female journalist to manage a public broadcasting service in Germany and in the 70's the first anchorwoman of Kennzeichen D, a major political television program...
, who also supported an exclusion of Degussa, answered to this that "the boundary is totally clearly Zyklon B." In the discussions that followed several things were discovered. For one, it turned out that it was not a coincidence that the involvement of Degussa was publicized in
SwitzerlandSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
, because another company that had bid to produce the anti-graffiti substance was located there. Further, it was discovered that the foundation managing the construction, as well as Lea Rosh, had known about Degussa's involvement for at least a year but had not done anything to stop it. Rosh then claimed she had not known about the connections between Degussa and Degesch. It also turned out that another Degussa subsidiary, Woerman Bauchemie GmbH, had already poured the foundation for the steles. The Tages-Anzeiger also reported that Degussa had offered the anti-graffiti substance for an especially cheap price in order to sponsor the memorial. A problem with excluding Degussa from the project was that many of the steles had already been covered with Degussa's product. These would have to be destroyed if another company were to be used instead. The cost of this would be around € 2.34 million. In the course of the discussions about what to do, which lasted until November 13, most of the Jewish organizations including the
Zentralrat der Juden in DeutschlandThe Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland is a federation of German Jews organizing many Jewish organisations in Germany. It was founded on July 19, 1950 as a response to the increasing isolation of German Jews by the international Jewish community and increasing interest in Jewish affairs by the ...
spoke out against working with Degussa, while the architect Peter Eisenman, for example, supported it. On November 13, the decision was then made to continue working with the company; a decision which was heavily criticized. Henryk M. Broder, for example, said that "the Jews don't need this memorial, and they are not prepared to designate a pig sty as kosher."
On December 15, 2004 the memorial was finished. It was dedicated on May 10, 2005 as part of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of
V-E DayVictory in Europe Day was on 8 May 1945, the date when the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany and the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich...
and opened to the public two days later.
It is estimated that approximately 3.5 million visitors entered the memorial in the first year it was open, i.e. about 10,000 every day. About 490,000 people also visited the underground "place of information", with about 40% of these being non-Germans. The foundation operating the memorial considered this a success; its head Uwe Neumärker even called the memorial a "tourist magnet". However,
swastikaThe swastika is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing form or its mirrored left-facing form. Archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates from the Neolithic period and was first found in the Indus Valley Civilization of the Indian...
s were drawn on the stelae on 5 different occasions in this first year.
Criticisms
The monument has been criticised for only commemorating the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
In 1998, German novelist
Martin WalserMartin Walser is a German writer. He became famous for describing the conflicts his anti-heroes have in his novels and stories. In 1998 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt.-Life:Walser's parents were coal merchants, and they also kept an inn next to the station in...
cited the Holocaust Memorial in his public condemnation of Germany's "Holocaust industry." In the speech Walser decried the "exploitation of our disgrace for present purposes." He criticized the "monumentalization", and "ceaseless presentation of our shame." "Take all the towns in the world", said Walser. "Check whether in any of these towns there is a memorial of national ignominy. I have never seen such. The Holocaust is not an appropriate subject of a memorial and such memorials should not be constructed..."
Nowhere inside the memorial, or around it, does it say what it commemorates. Some think that this is a deliberate attempt to encourage visitors to reach their own conclusions.
See also
- Memorial to Polish Soldiers and German Anti-Fascists
The Memorial to Polish Soldiers and German Anti-Fascists is a war memorial in Berlin, dedicated in 1972. Built by the German Democratic Republic during the division of Germany, it is today the principal German monument to the Polish soldiers who died in World War II, as well as an important...
- Soviet War Memorial (Treptower Park)
The Soviet War Memorial , is a vast war memorial and military cemetery in Berlin's Treptower Park. It was built to the design of the Soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky to commemorate 5,000 of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945...
- Shoes on the Danube Promenade
The Shoes on the Danube Promenade, created by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay, is a memorial on the bank of the Danube in Budapest. It is located on the Pest side of the Danube Promenade at the end of Szechenyi Street, about 300 m south of the Hungarian Parliament and near the Hungarian Academy of...
Memorial in Budapest 2005
- Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany
Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany encompass a large group of commemorative works dealing with the outdoor built environment. Most often these memorials attempt to keep the memory of Holocaust victims alive through dissemination of this memory to the public.- Theory :Since the end of World...
External links