Berlin's Holocaust Memorial: Memory, Design, and Controversy

St. Mary's is a large, old-style brick church belonging to the council of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. On the floor at the rear of the church, broken pieces of two large bells remain where they fell during an air raid in World War II. The third largest church in Germany, it took 100 years to construct St. Mary's but just one Palm Sunday night in March of 1942 to nearly destroy it. As with so many churches ruined by bombing during the war, parishioners debated about restoration. Citizens living on war-torn homelands are caught in a difficult dilemma: there is a lingering desire to preserve physical destruction as a message or signal to subsequent generations, or as an effort to share the horror of wartime experience. If the physical evidence of war is wiped away, then memory lives only in that intangible, solitary world of the mind. No one can ever quite understand war who has not endured it. And there is also a defiant need to return everything to the way it was—or to an even more glorious state—to wipe out the ugliness, and hopefully the ugly memories along with it. Often the desire to preserve the memories dominates the wish to forget.

The study of how the public engages with the past through built space encompasses the fields of history, cultural and critical theory, and memory studies. This paper will explore a contested space through an examination of the dynamics that shaped its actual physicality, beliefs about how that contested space informs history or deliberately decouples from it, and how stakeholders express their perceptions of cultural memory. "Identifying the use of space in any given moment—the occupation of space in any given moment—provides the opportunity to reveal contrasting, contradictory uses of space, to identify the ideological struggles that look to inscribe meaning."

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is one of those extraordinary compound words that baffle first by their sheer length and ability to stump a tongue not schooled in classical German, and baffle again in the struggle to interpret an exact meaning. In English, the closest translation is "struggle to come to terms with the past." Vergangenheit means "past" in German, and Bewältigung means "coming to terms with" or "mastering." Although one might fairly assume that the past referred to means history in a broad sense, that interpretation would be too general. For contemporary Germans, the word conveys a very explicit meaning: Vergangenheitsbewältigung refers to the process of digesting, analyzing, and finally learning to live with the Holocaust as part of Germany's national history.

One of the ways Germany has come to terms with its past is to create a "memory landscape" in its cities and across the countryside, wherever the Nazis and World War II left terrible traces. Journalist Lea Rosh dedicated 17 years of her life to an addition to that memory landscape that many Germans—Jews and non-Jews alike—did not believe was necessary. Rosh first proposed the idea of a central memorial to Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1988. She established a foundation and began collecting donations toward its construction. One year later, Berlin's citizens turned their attention to the fall of the Berlin Wall. An intense focus on the present—not the past—occupied German public life. The tasks of rebuilding and reorganizing Berlin and the challenges of unifying two states were at the forefront. But in 1998, the idea of locating a Holocaust memorial in Berlin appealed to the Bundestag and a resolution to erect the memorial was passed. Rosh insisted, as she had all along, that the memorial had to be built for the Germans and not for the Jews. The fact that the memorial is referred to in several different ways by Germans underscores this tension.

The formal name for the memorial is Das Denkmal für die Ermordeten Juden Europas, which translates to "The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Significantly, the memorial is commonly referred to as Holocaust-Mahnmal. Mahnmal translates to the English word "memorial," while Denkmal refers to a large structure—a monument. But in German, the word Mahnmal carries more meaning than mere remembrance: it conveys a sense of admonition and warning, an urging and an appeal. This everyday phrase used to refer to the memorial indicates that Germans received Rosh's message. The memorial is not a cenotaph, or empty tomb, in the traditional sense. In fact, designer and architect Peter Eisenman specifically stated he did not want names on the slabs, because that would reduce the memorial to a cemetery.

In what has been a tangible and practical way to address Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Germany has established many memorials, museums, and monuments to mark the Holocaust on German soil and in German memory. In addition to the concentration camps and transit camps—most of which are frozen in time—many towns and some villages have plaques on buildings or brass bricks set into paved areas that link to specific atrocities or record the names of murdered Jews. "Opposition to the building of the memorial feared it would trivialize memory and encourage its misuse in adding yet another site to the already saturated field of Holocaust Memory" (Young, 2003).

In 1999, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the seat of government shifted from Bonn to Berlin. An idea ripened: to some, it was logical and right that the Holocaust memorial become part of the expansive new development of official buildings within the district of Berlin-Mitte. Mitte means "middle" or "center" in German, but this is more than a geographic designation. The Mitte area is the heart of Alt-Berlin, or old Berlin. Separated from the Brandenburg district in 1920, it became the first official district of the city. The Mitte, literally in the center of Alt-Berlin, was the hardest hit of all Berlin's districts and was nearly enclosed by the Berlin Wall. Reclaiming the Mitte was a matter of significant civic pride to Berliners.

Seventeen years of dispute surrounded the design, construction, and location of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. A fundamental objection concerned the location itself—the site of the memorial was considered by many to be inauthentic as a built memorial. Many Germans felt that the Holocaust Memorial should not be located in the heart of Berlin—just a short walk from the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, the Tiergarten, the office of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and the site of Adolf Hitler's Chancellery and bunker—in the middle of the tourist's Berlin. A 20,000 square meter plot was designated as the construction site, right in the middle of unified Berlin's new governmental city center. The site itself prevents the memorial from being considered authentic in the narrow sense of the word. However, significance is derived from the siting of the memorial and its obvious centrality.

The memorial's direct proximity to the most important institutions of the nation, including the Reichstag, serves as effective shorthand to convey the centrality the German state accords the Holocaust in the nation's history and contemporary political life.

What was surprising is that most of the debate occurred after the decision had formally been made by the Bundestag to erect the memorial. The nature of the debate was much different in Berlin than it would have been in another city in another country. It is a legitimate question to ask how much Vergangenheitsbewältigung paved the way. The ways of Berlin are not necessarily those of other large urban areas. As Thakkar pointed out:

While the site of the Berlin memorial may indeed be prime real estate, there is no question that building such an expansive memorial in Berlin—with its sprawling urban geography, relatively sparse population, and underused urban infrastructure—is on a different order, economically and politically speaking, than building similarly "empty spaces" in New York. One need only compare the nature of the political squabbles in New York, where private interests and capital seek to limit the space afforded to memorialization at the WTC site, to the debate in Berlin, where the scope of land use was determined relatively quickly and the long years of debate were primarily devoted to the design.

Berlin's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" was long plagued with delays. In planning for over 15 years, there were disputes over its location, design, cost, and building materials. The debates centered on the legitimacy and functionality of the memorial. Over a period of many years, heated arguments about the necessity of building the memorial and to whom it should be dedicated crisscrossed the newspapers.

In 1991, a dispute broke out between Roma and Sinti survivors of the Holocaust and Jewish survivors. The Roma argued that dedicating the Holocaust Memorial solely to Jews was a "selection" not unlike that in the camps—only this time viewed as choosing between first-class and second-class citizens. Issues about dedicating the Holocaust Memorial to Jewish victims surged for years. Eventually, a monument to people persecuted for their sexual orientation was located across the street from the memorial, in the Tiergarten park. Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany, spoke at the opening ceremony of the Holocaust Memorial, saying that he had "reservations… [it is] an incomplete statement… [suggesting] a hierarchy of suffering… pain and mourning are great in all afflicted families."

Jennifer Jordan has written extensively on urbanism and memory in Berlin, providing analysis of the relationship between the landscape of a space and the sociological and political processes that bring about its realization. She argues that land ownership and land use influence the types of memorials that get built and where they are built. Further, she suggests these dynamics may determine which memorials are forgotten and which are left "unmemorialized." The process of building a memorial—an authentic memorial, as some would have it—brings stakeholders into a personal and deep engagement with a place that may have a difficult, if not violent, history. A built place in such a location must challenge stakeholders to determine "how to treat real estate with a difficult past."