The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, is the central German national Holocaust memorial. It was opened on 10 May 2005, sixty years after the end of the Second World War, on a 19,000-square-metre site in central Berlin between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, two blocks from the site of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. It consists of 2,711 concrete stelae of varying heights arranged in a grid on a slightly undulating ground, with an underground Place of Information beneath the south-east corner of the site. The memorial has been a major Berlin landmark since opening and is one of the most-visited memorial sites in Europe.
The long road to building it
The proposal for a German national Holocaust memorial in central Berlin had been first made by the journalist Lea Rosh in 1988. The proposal was contested through the 1990s on a series of questions: whether such a memorial should exist, what form it should take, who should be commemorated (whether Jews specifically or all Nazi victims), where it should be located and who should fund it. The German federal parliament voted in June 1999, after a decade of public debate, to commission the memorial in the form of a competition-winning design by the American architect Peter Eisenman in collaboration with Richard Serra (Serra subsequently withdrew). The construction was carried out between 2003 and 2005.
The memorial is dedicated specifically to the murdered Jews of Europe rather than to all Nazi victims; the decision was contested at the time and led, subsequently, to the construction of separate German federal memorials to other victim groups (the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism, opened 2008; the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism, opened 2012; the Memorial to the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia” Killings, opened 2014). All four memorials are within walking distance of each other in central Berlin and constitute, together, the German national memorial landscape on the Holocaust and Nazi-era killing.
The Eisenman design
The Eisenman design has been the subject of substantial architectural and critical writing since 2005. The 2,711 stelae are arranged in a strict grid of 54 rows of varying numbers, each stele 0.95 metres wide and 2.38 metres long, with heights ranging from 0.2 metres at the edges of the field to 4.7 metres at the centre. The ground beneath the stelae is uneven, sloping and undulating, so that the visitor walking through the field finds themselves at different levels relative to the surrounding stelae and, in the centre of the field, walking through tall corridors that block out the surrounding city. The intended effect, on Eisenman’s stated account, was to produce in the visitor a sense of disorientation and unease in a structured field that gives no clear narrative, no inscribed names and no explicit symbolism.
The choice not to inscribe names on the stelae was a deliberate departure from the standard memorial convention exemplified at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and at Yad Vashem. The names of the murdered are recorded instead in the underground Place of Information, where the four exhibition rooms include the Room of Names (in which the names of all known Jewish victims, drawn from the Yad Vashem database, are read continuously in audio recordings), the Room of Dimensions (which presents the scale of the killing through documentary panels), the Room of Families (which follows fifteen specific Jewish families through the persecution), and the Room of Sites (which documents the killing across the European geography).
The reception and the continuing argument
The memorial has been substantially admired and substantially criticised since opening. The admiration has principally been for the architectural form and for the underground Place of Information, which is widely regarded as one of the most carefully constructed Holocaust documentation exhibitions in any European capital. The criticism has principally been of the abstract form of the stelae field, which some critics (including some survivor representatives) have argued is too removed from the documented specifics of the killing to function as a memorial, and of the absence of named victims at the surface level of the memorial.
The wider public reception has been complicated by the use of the memorial site as a tourist attraction. Visitors climb on the stelae for photographs; selfies and tourist behaviour at the memorial have produced ongoing public discussion about whether such use is compatible with the memorial’s purpose. The Israeli-German artist Shahak Shapira’s Yolocaust project in 2017, which superimposed historical Holocaust photographs onto selfies taken at the memorial that had been posted to social media, brought the question to wide public attention; the project was widely covered and many of the original selfies were taken down by their posters.
The memorial is part of the wider German Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) that has been a defining feature of German public life since the 1960s. It is the most prominent single physical expression of that process and has been treated by visiting heads of state and by the German political class as the standard site for public engagement with the German Holocaust legacy.
See also
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Adolf Hitler
- Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
- Anne Frank House Amsterdam
- Jewish Museum Berlin
- Treblinka Memorial
Sources
- James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, 2000 (chapters on the design competition; Young served on the original Findungskommission)
- Peter Eisenman, Holocaust Memorial Berlin, Lars Müller Publishers, 2005 (the architect’s own book on the design)
- Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, University of Minnesota Press, 2005
- Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, University of Chicago Press, 1997
- Caroline Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France, Cornell University Press, 1999
- Jürgen Habermas, “Letter to Lea Rosh”, in Die Zeit, 31 March 1999
- Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de