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association to promote the establishment

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Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

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The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a federal foundation, which supervises the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe including the exhibition at the Information Centre, as well as the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime and the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Murdered under the National Socialist Regime.

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The Inadequacy of Berlin's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"

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The Inadequacy of Berlin's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"

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Just south of the Brandenburg Gate is Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, with its two thousand, seven hundred and eleven gray concrete slabs, or stelae. They are identical in their horizontal dimensions (reminiscent of coffins), differing vertically (from eight inches to more than fifteen feet tall), arranged in a precise rectilinear array over 4.7 acres, allowing for long, straight, and narrow alleys between them, along which the ground undulates. The installation is a living experiment in montage, a Kuleshov effect of the juxtaposition of image and text. The text in question is the title of the memorial: in German, Denkmal für die Ermordeten Juden Europas-a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Without that title, it would be impossible to know what the structure is meant to commemorate; there's nothing about these concrete slabs that signifies any of the words of the title, except, perhaps, "memorial"-insofar as some of them, depending on their height, may resemble either headstones or sarcophagi. So it's something to do with death. And as for the title itself-which murdered Jews? When? Where? Does the list include Rosa Luxemburg, who was killed in Berlin by rightist thugs in 1919, or the foreign minister Walther Rathenau, also killed here by rightist thugs, in 1922? Or Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam, who died in Soviet captivity? Or, pardon my sarcasm, Claude Lanzmann's uncle, who was ( as Lanzmann writes in his autobiography) killed in Paris by his jealous mistress?

The title doesn't say "Holocaust" or "Shoah"; in other words, it doesn't say anything about who did the murdering or why-there's nothing along the lines of "by Germany under Hitler's regime," and the vagueness is disturbing. Of course, the information is familiar, and few visitors would be unaware of it, but the assumption of this familiarity-the failure to mention it at the country's main memorial for the Jews killed in the Holocaust-separates the victims from their killers and leaches the moral element from the historical event, shunting it to the category of a natural catastrophe. The reduction of responsibility to an embarrassing, tacit fact that "everybody knows" is the first step on the road to forgetting.

The omission is all the stranger inasmuch as the experience of traversing the field of stelae, which was designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, is, in itself, strong and complex. In the shallow corner of the plaza, tourists sit and chat on bench-high stelae, children climb, all enjoy wide-open and thrillingly grand perspectives on the surroundings, including the Tiergarten to the west, and the installation takes on the cast of an austerely modern yet pleasantly welcoming park. But, upon entering the narrow alleys and plunging between higher and higher slabs, perspectives are sliced to a ribbon, other visitors are cut off from view, and an eerie claustrophobia sets in-even as some visitors (not just kids) play little games of hide-and-seek in the rectilinear maze. And the title, striking against the experience, creates sparks of metaphorical extrapolation: The Jews of Europe lived carefree, as in a park, until they wandered into frightening canyons of shadows from which the escape routes were narrow and distant. Yet, even then, amidst terrors and dangers, children played and families cohered, citizens from whose midst neighboring Jews were deported and slaughtered continued to frolic with indifference, exactly as many living in relative comfort do nowadays while political depravities are inflicted daily on far too many in places around the world. When my family and I got back to the bench-high stelae, I, too, sat down and checked messages.

The memorial also evokes a graveyard for those who were unburied or thrown into unmarked pits, and several uneasily tilting stelae suggest an old, untended, or even desecrated cemetery. The metaphorical possibilities are varied-too much so. The play of imagination that the memorial provokes is piously generic: something to do with death. It contrasts unfavorably with, for instance, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The latter is, in its details, an imperfect exhibit; there's a little too much information dispensed with encyclopedic authority, a little bit of kitschy curatorial cleverness; but it is a true and specific memorial. It recreates the persecution, the flight, the refuge, the life in danger and in hiding, the arrest, and the murder of Anne Frank as well as of other members of her family and their fellow-refugees in the secret annex. It's a memorial to one of the murdered Jews of Europe. Eisenman's installation commemorates the six million murdered Jews collectively; but there is no more a collective death than there is a collective life; an appropriate memorial would commemorate six million times one.

I was astonished to find that the exhibit didn't even offer the names of those who died in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, in Israel, has a record of the names. It would have been fitting for six million names to be engraved, individually, into the stelae-maybe individual Germans could have volunteered to take part in the engraving. (After the visit, I learned, while reading a guidebook, that the list of names from Yad Vashem is in fact present at the exhibit-in a separate information center, located under the field of stelae, that is also said to contain a diverse and generous measure of historical documentation. It's not marked prominently, it's not easy to find, and it's not integral to the display.) And if abstraction were deemed absolutely necessary, why not six million stelae to convey that there were six million individual people who were treated with savage contempt by Germany and its satellites? The very act of manufacturing, counting, and placing them would embody something of the scale of the crimes.

The passive voice of the title-"murdered Jews"-elides the question that wafts through the exhibit like an odor: murdered by whom? At the Anne Frank House, persecution was incarnated, and, together with the sad celebration of the lives of its victims came another thought: How fucking dare they-"they" being the Germans, who elected a violently anti-Semitic government and participated or acquiesced in its exactions. Certainly Germany looks hard, elsewhere, at its poisoned heritage, yet it would be morally fitting to add another emotional component to the commemoration-to link the evocation of a general grief in the face of haphazard fortune with an enduring historical anger at the murderers of the murdered Jews of Europe.

Of course, the very placement of such an exhibit at the heart of the German capital hints that the commemoration is a distinctively German subject-but there's nothing about the stelae themselves to indicate that the murderers were German (or worked for Germany) and that the murdered victims were Jews. Before the Nazis came to power, Berlin had the largest Jewish population in Germany; in "Shoah," a German Jew who survived the war in hiding explained that Germans found the city embarrassingly empty when its Jewish residents vanished, seemingly overnight. The restoration of that prominence, in a symbolic form, would make sense-maybe by way of a gigantic Star of David, occupying the entire ground and standing many stories high. That symbol would also be a fitting provocation: if it proved irritating, that feeling of irritation might stand most evocatively for the history in question.

In any case, the memorial, as imposing and as memorable as it may be in itself, hardly serves the function for which it was intended. That night, I went with my family to a pleasant little restaurant where the spaetzle, served au gratin with zucchini and tomatoes, was delicious; it was on Oranienburgerstrasse-even the street names are redolent of death. The city is heavy with history, the importance of which is in its specifics, regarding the brazen will and vast exertion to commit murder in the name of race hatred. The mollifying solemnity of pseudo-universal abstractions puts a great gray sentiment in the place of actual memory.

P.S. I've visited the U.S. National Archives and seen U. S. Army Signal Corps footage filmed in Ludwigslust, in northern Germany. There was a concentration camp there, where many Jews were interned and many died. After Germany's surrender and the liberation of the camp by American soldiers, the local residents were compelled to exhume bodies from pits, to dig graves in the town square, and to bury the victims prominently, at a service that all residents were required to attend. Put compulsion aside, of course, and imagine six million cenotaphs, actual size, constructed by paid professionals. They could run throughout Berlin and on to Wannsee, along and across actual roads, protected by speed bumps, and every time a driver slowed down or a cyclist pumped a bit harder or a pedestrian shifted his path, it would be an act of memory. Compared to the commitment of land, time, money, and will that such a full-scale memorial would require, the existing one is merely symbolic, an affecting ersatz; Eisenman's display is not just a symbol, but a symbol of a symbol.

P.P.S. This discussion is in no way intended to impugn or to doubt Germany's over-all commitment to the discovery, the study, and the consideration of its history (which, in any case, I'm not competent to discuss); it relates solely to the aesthetic qualities and moral implications of a single memorial.
Photograph by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum.

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The Inadequacy of Berlin's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"

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Just south of the Brandenburg Gate is Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, with its two thousand, seven hundred and eleven gray concrete slabs, or stelae. They are identical in their horizontal dimensions (reminiscent of coffins), differing vertically (from eight inches to more than fifteen feet tall), arranged in a precise rectilinear array over 4.7 acres, allowing for long, straight, and narrow alleys between them, along which the ground undulates.

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Current exhibitions, online features, events, and news-you can use our website to plan your visit to the Jewish Museum Berlin and immerse yourself in our digital museum. Discover biographies, objects and their history, as well as the diversity of contemporary Jewish life in Germany.

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Date

Status
Completed
Client
Stiftung Juedisches Museum Berlin
Building Size
166,840 sq.ft
Description

The Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened to the public in 2001, exhibits the social, political and cultural history of the Jews in Germany from the fourth century to the present, explicitly presenting and integrating, for the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions of the Holocaust. The new building is housed next to the site of the original Prussian Court of Justice building which was completed in 1735 now serves as the entrance to the new building.

Daniel Libeskind's design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down, was based on three insights: it is impossible to understand the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous contributions made by its Jewish citizens; the meaning of the Holocaust must be integrated into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin; and, finally, for its future, the City of Berlin and the country of Germany must acknowledge the erasure of Jewish life in its history.

The visitor enters the Baroque Kollegienhaus and then descends by stairway through the dramatic Entry Void, into the underground. The existing building is tied to the new extension, through the underground, thus preserving the contradictory autonomy of both the old and new structures on the surface. The descent leads to three underground axial routes, each of which tells a different story. The first leads to a dead end - the Holocaust Tower. The second leads out of the building and into the Garden of Exile and Emigration, remembering those who were forced to leave Berlin The third and longest, traces a path leading to the Stair of Continuity, then up to the exhibition spaces of the museum, emphasizing the continuum of history.

A Void cuts through the zigzagging plan of the new building and creates a space that embodies absence. It is a straight line whose impenetrability becomes the central focus around which exhibitions are organized. In order to move from one side of the museum to the other, visitors must cross one of the 60 bridges that open onto this void.

AWARDS
2010 - Buber-Rosenzweig Medal from DKR (German Coordinating Council of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation)
1999 - The German Architecture Prize
1998 - The Best of 1998 - Art forum International

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The Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened to the public in 2001, exhibits the social, political and cultural history of the Jews in Germany from the fourth century to the present, explicitly presenting and integrating, for the first time in postwar Germany, the repercussions of the Holocaust.

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Scroll down to read the reviews from visitors

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Jewish Museum Berlin (Germany) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go - Updated 2018 - TripAdvisor

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Jewish Museum Berlin, Berlin: See 4,048 reviews, articles, and 2,052 photos of Jewish Museum Berlin, ranked No.95 on TripAdvisor among 973 attractions in Berlin.

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Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime

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Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime

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A review from the "Slow Vegan Travel" blog

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" Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
- George Santayana

Though the above quote is often repeated itself, it's not done so without reason; and our staying in Berlin has cermented that thought in our minds ever since we visited the city on our first holiday together in 2010.

The city is shaped by its mixed history of financial fortune in the 19th Century, the Nazi Germany government and East/West split of the 20th Century - and most recently - post-unification and economic strengthing since the 1990's, leading into the 21st Century.

In a city such as Berlin it's of course hard to escape the reminders of the past that has so deeply made its scar across not only the landscape, but the people that give it the living and breathing heart that makes it such a special place to be - however, concealing the past is the exact opposite to what you'll observe as a visitor to the city, hence the hundreds of thousands who travel to the city to experience its regrowth, and to explore and take tours centred around the past 100 years.

Whilst the current generation of Germans are keen to push on towards building their identity of what a modern Germany will be outside the shadow of its past, it never does forget and indeed strives to memorialise the previous chapter of its history, with several memorials built in dedication to so many lives lost during the 20th Century, with the Berlin Holocaust Memorial being the most documented of them.

A Hidden Memorial

One particular memorial that Franca and I were both surprised to find has typically far fewer visitors is the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, an outstanding art piece that sits just opposite the understandably popular granite blocks that make up the area of remembrance that sits literally across the road.

Perhaps it's due to it being slightly off the main road and amongst the bushes and trees of the Tiergarten, but why more people aren't being directed to it whilst so close, we don't quite understand. For example, on one particular tour we joined there was no mention by the guide of the memorial whatsoever ( though this might have been a singular incident). It was only on the recommendation of a friend and the reading of this article by Travels of Adam that we were more factually aware of the history, meaning and location of the piece.

Commissioned As An Art Piece

Constructed on its current sight by the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset in 2008, the origins of the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism art piece began in the parliament building just across Paul-Löbe Allee within the Bundestag in 2003 after several campaigns led to the discussion and approval of its creation. It came after nearly ten years of constant campaigning by a combination of several groups - chiefly the LGBT, Lesbian and Gay Federation of Germany - to bring official recognition to many homosexuals who suffered persecution, imprisonment, and death during Germany's most turbulent years and misguided law-making.

Visually striking amongst the green foliage that surrounds it, this solid granite cube is unmissable once you venture onto the path that leads into the park, but it's the small window cut into the structure that draws your attention, not just for a moment, but for the length of the video playing inside depicting two men kissing.

A Controversial Piece

The discussion centred around the construction of the monument has not been without it's own controversy both prior, and post-creation of the piece.

Over the years there have been many who have complained about its location so close to the Jewish memorial - some opposed, some in favour of incorporating each piece together to remember all those who suffered, suggesting that separating them only goes to continue to compartmentalisation and ideology that led to their persecution. Others see the memorial as not enough, some too much. There are those that preach that the video played inside is too provoking, whilst others in the LGBT community appealed for the inclusion of footage depicting two women kissing as well so that they may also be remembered, with that then leading some to complain and claim that the memorial ' shouldn't include lesbians '.

Thankfully, the change was made and footage of homosexual men and women is now played.

The Words of George Santayana

Remembering the past so that we don't repeat it should be one of the first reasons we spare a moment at each memorial the world over, but it's especially important at a time when the persecution of so many victims continues to happen across the world, from religious persecution, to racial stereotyping, to the 81 countries where homosexuality is still illegal; it's important that we learn from the hard lessons for which so many lost their lives so that it stays where it belongs - in the past.

Please, should you be heading to Berlin any time in the future, take the time to remember not only the murdered jews, the murdered Sinti and Roma people, and the victims of euthanasia; spend a few moments at the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism and consider for a moment those who still suffer and how we can go let these lessons stay in the history books, and out of the newspapers.

Did you know about the memorial to the LGBT community?

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Remembering The Persecuted - Memorial To LGBT Community In Berlin

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" Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana Though the above quote is often repeated itself, it's not done so without reason; and our staying in Berlin has cermented that thought in our minds ever since we visited the city on our first holiday together in 2010.

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Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the Nationals Socialist Regime

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Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the Nationals Socialist Regime

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BERLIN - Germany paid tribute on Wednesday to the hundreds of thousands of Romany people killed in the Holocaust, opening a long-awaited place of remembrance for a minority still plagued by discrimination.

Addressing a crowd that included Holocaust survivors and prominent German politicians, Chancellor Angela Merkel noted that the site, called the Memorial for the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered in National Socialism, served to honor the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis' racial purge of Europe while reminding the living of their duty to shield minority populations from harm.

"Humanity means not turning a blind eye when another person's dignity is being violated," Ms. Merkel said. "In the commemoration of victims always lies a promise, and this is how I see our duty to protect our minorities.

"But let's not beat around the bush," she told the audience, which included the head of the German Central Council of Sinti and Roma, Romani Rose, and Joachim Gauck, the German president. "Sinti and Roma suffer today from discrimination and exclusion."

The ceremony took place in a leafy corner of the city's sprawling Tiergarten park, across the street from the Reichstag, Germany's Parliament building, and close to Berlin's other monuments to victims of Nazi persecution, including a sea of polished concrete slabs, unveiled in May 2005, that commemorates the millions of Jews who were killed during the Third Reich, and a smaller memorial for gay men and lesbians that opened three years later.

After Ms. Merkel's speech, somber violin music played as a young Sinti girl placed a single flower on a retractable, triangular stone pillar at the center of a circular pool of water.

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Memorial to Roma Victims of Holocaust Opens in Berlin

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BERLIN - Germany paid tribute on Wednesday to the hundreds of thousands of Romany people killed in the Holocaust, opening a long-awaited place of remembrance for a minority still plagued by discrimination.

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Liste, Karte, Datenbank / Landesdenkmalamt Berlin

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Sie finden Informationen des Landesdenkmalamtes Berlin zur Berliner Denkmaldatenbank.

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Albert Speer, architect

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jewish museum berlin, studio daniel libeskind 1280x544

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Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum - Berlin

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Platform of the National-Socialist German Workers' Party

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers Party

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If you're interested, here's a newspaper article I wrote about the history of the swastika.

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The images from Charlottesville, Va., of white supremacists marching with Nazi banners reminded us, as if we needed it, that the swastika remains a potent symbol of racist hate.

In Germany, where neo-Nazis also march, it's illegal to display the swastika, and citizens there initiate private or neighbourhood efforts to remove it from graffiti and other street art.

But attempts to eradicate the swastika can sometimes misfire, as happened recently in Quebec. Corey Fleischer, known by the Instagram handle erasinghate, was stopped by police when he tried to blot out swastikas embossed on salvaged anchors on public display in the small St. Lawrence River community of Pointes-des-Cascades.

Plaques suggested that the anchors were from the Third Reich, but a Radio Canada correspondent reported that they were made by the English company W.L. Byers before the Nazis came to power. The company used the swastika as a symbol of good luck, a common practice in the early 20th century.

Fleischer remained unmoved by this historical explanation. As he told CityNews: "The swastika is no longer a sign of peace. It's a sign attached to a party that literally almost wiped out an entire culture."

I come across this obsession with swastikas time and time again. In my university courses on German cultural history, students are repelled yet fascinated by the horror it symbolizes. When I ask whether the swastika should be banned in North America the way it is in Germany, some say yes, whereas others point to its innocent use in other cultures.

The debate is similar to the dispute between Pointes-des-Cascades and Corey Fleischer. Should the 25 years it was a symbol of Nazi racism outweigh its millennia-long use as a talisman of good fortune?

A diverse and ancient history

The swastika wasn't always an odious symbol of hate. Far from it. The word svastika is Sanskrit in origin and means "conducive to well-being."

As a symbol, the swastika's power resides in its simplicity and balance. Graphic designer Steven Heller notes that "the swastika's geometric purity allows for legibility at any size or distance, and when on its axis, the whirling square gives the illusion of movement."

Its form, according to Heller, is "sublime," so it's no wonder that it has found a place in so many cultures.

In Buddhism, the swastika is thought to represent the footprints of the Buddha. It takes on a liturgical function in Jainism, and in Hinduism the clockwise symbol (the swastika as we know it, with the arms pointing right) and the counterclockwise symbol, the sauvistika, pair up to portray opposites such as light and darkness.

In Mesopotamia it was used on coins, and the Navajo nation wove it into blankets. It has been found on ancient pottery in Africa and Asia. It was sometimes used as a single element, but often it was repeated as a series of interlocking swastikas to form a border on a garment or in architecture, as was common in Roman times.

It made an appearance in Germanic and Viking cultures, and you can find it in medieval churches and religious vestments across Europe.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the swastika became well-established in western culture as a good luck symbol, similar to a four-leaf clover or a horseshoe.

Companies used it as logo; it adorned birth announcements and greeting cards. American Boy Scouts could get a swastika badge, and the Girls' Club published a magazine called The Swastika. Finland, Latvia and the United States have all used it as a military insignia.

In Canada, a mining community in northern Ontario was named Swastika, just as you might name a town New Hope or Bounty. Windsor, N.S., and Fernie, B.C., both had hockey teams called the Swastikas. In 1931, Newfoundland issued a $1 stamp commemorating important moments in transatlantic aviation; each corner had a swastika.

The late 19th century saw the newly formed German empire caught up in an era of unrestrained nationalism. Some nationalists sought to prove German racial superiority, subscribing to a now discredited idea that an ancient Aryan race - the original Indo-Europeans - were their ancestors. Evidence was needed to connect the Germans with the Aryans.

Nazis appropriated the symbol

The swastika provided the necessary link.

In the early 1870s, when German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann thought he had discovered the ancient Greek city of Troy, more than 1,800 instances of the swastika were unearthed. Since the swastika was also present among the archaeological remains of the Germanic tribes, it didn't take long for nationalists to jump to the conclusion that the Germans and the Greeks were both descendants of the Aryans.

And if you believe that Germans form a separate "race" superior to other ethnic groups around it, it becomes easier to claim that you need to keep that "race" pure. In that context, anti-Semitism followed.

The Thule Society, an anti-Semitic organization promoting the superiority of German Volk (folk in English), was founded at the end of the First World War. It used a stylized swastika as its logo. The society sponsored the fledgling Nazi party, and in a bid for greater public profile, the party created a banner that incorporated the swastika as we know it today.

Hitler was convinced that a potent symbol would rally the masses to his xenophobic cause. With a black swastika (called the Hakenkreuz in German, or hooked cross) rotated 45 degrees on a white circle set against a red background, the Nazi banner modernized the ancient symbol while evoking the colours of the recently defeated German empire.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler took sole credit for the design and attempted to give it meaning: "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man." Tortured symbolism aside, the swastika banner did what it was supposed to do -it gave visual identity to the Nazi movement.

When the Nazis assumed power in 1933, they sought to unite the country behind their racist Aryan ideology, and the use of their symbol infiltrated all aspects of German life.

You can still see it sometimes, including in mosaic ceiling tiles at Hitler's Haus der Kunst in Munich. The banner became the official flag of the country in 1935, and although it wasn't everywhere as Hollywood might have you believe, it was very much present.

The way forward

Steven Heller subtitles his book, The Swastika, with a simple but pertinent question: Symbol Beyond Redemption? In those cultures where it's been used for centuries in religious practices or in the decorative arts, this question is unnecessary. The symbol doesn't carry any negative connotations there.

But objects like the swastika do not have any inherent meaning; the symbolism is constructed by the people who use them. In our western society, the swastika is tainted. The Nazi movement's violent crimes against humanity gave the Hakenkreuz a meaning that can't be concealed or erased.

In places like Pointes-des-Cascades, where pre-Nazi swastikas exist, extra care must be taken to contextualize their presence. But in all other instances the symbol really must be shunned.

Its hate-filled racist intentions are clear. It wasn't an innocent symbol for the Nazis, nor is it for latter-day neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

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How Nazis twisted the swastika into a symbol of hate

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The images from Charlottesville, Va., of white supremacists marching with Nazi banners reminded us, as if we needed it, that the swastika remains a potent symbol of racist hate. In Germany, where neo-Nazis also march, it's illegal to display the swastika, and citizens there initiate private or neighbourhood efforts to remove it from graffiti and other street art.