BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
"Holocaust Memorial - Berlin" by Plano Light is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Experiencing the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a powerful transformational space, had a huge impact on us as designers and architects. The space is simultaneously a very serious memorial, an interactive sensory art space, a feat of engineering and a well designed built public environment. Verity found the site had great personal resonance when she experienced the powerfully multidisciplinary memorial. The space has had a lasting impression on us at WOOLF, in particular the shifting perspectives of the stela .
The project was designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. Completed in 2004, the 19,000 m2 site is covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.
Stele (plural steles, from Greek: στήλη, stēlē[1]) or stela (plural stelas or stelæ, from Latin) is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected as a monument, very often for funerary or commemorative purposes. Traditional Western gravestones are technically stelae, but are very rarely described by the term.
Each stone slab is a unique shape and size, put in place according to the architect's design. In so doing, architect Peter Eisenman points out the uniqueness and the sameness of the people who were murdered at the time of the Holocaust, also known as Shoah. The site lies between East and West Berlin, within sight of the Reichstag Dome designed by British architect Norman Foster.
"holocaust memorial, berlin" by amdolu is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The site is remarkable from the ground. On the approach it resembles a graveyard like the old Jewish cemeteries seen in many other great European cities. In these older Jewish cemeteries layers of gravestones are piled high and protrude from beneath the ground like jagged sharks teeth. The Berlin Stalea stones by contrast appear to have been laid in a measured somber order and yet transform on mass into a space more akin to an epic modern art installation.
Walking through the Stelae the visitor is struck by the scale and size of the stones. They have a refined elegance and due to the very clever positioning, light is thrown around them into a variety of linear angles. The play of light at various times of day is mesmerizing and contemplative. Ones own sense of personal scale is played with, as the stones move from small to large around you. At one moment you feel like mouse and another a giant.
"Holocaust Memorial Berlin - L1100368" by wwwYnand! is licensed under CC BY 2.0
On a site covering 19,000 square metres, Eisenman placed 2711 concrete slabs of different heights. The area is open day and night and from all four sides you can fully immerse yourself in the fully accessible spatial structure. The memorial is on a slight slope and its wave-like form is different wherever you stand. The uneven concrete floor gives many visitor a moment of giddiness or even uncertainty. Its openness and abstractness give you space to confront the topic in your own personal way. The sheer size of the installation and its lack of a central point of remembrance call into question the conventional concept of a memorial. This creates a place of remembrance, but not with the usual means.
"Jewish Holocaust Memorial, Berlin" by maha-online is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
"Holocaust Memorial Berlin" by kmardahl is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
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 in as much 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.
"Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, Germany" by K. Peter Schmidt is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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”—in so far as some of them, depending on their height, may resemble either headstones or sarcophagi. So it’s something to do with death.
The stelae are designed to produce “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.”
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 neighbouring 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.
"Man Smoking a Pipe in the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin" by ChrisGoldNY is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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 unfavourably 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. Watch Peter Eisenman’s compelling interview where he talks in detail about the “Field of Otherness”.
