CULTURAL STUDIES

AND MODERN LANGUAGES

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

WEEK 3 MONUMENTS
The Holocaust Memorial with Dr Debbie Pinfold
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The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a massive site in the heart of Berlin, and
is sometimes simply referred to as the Holocaust Memorial. As an academic, I am
fascinated by it as a symbol of how Germany chooses to remember the exceptionally
difficult parts of its national past. The monument consists of around 19,000 m of land
covered with concrete columns of varying heights, and it was finally opened after long, and
sometimes bitter, debates in 2005.
Of course, there had been many earlier memorials all over Germany to honour victims of
the Holocaust. But the Berlin memorial was the first central, national memorial to the
Jewish victims, in a country that had only celebrated its reunification in 1990, and so it was
particularly significant as a statement about the whole nations past.
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So why was planning this memorial so difficult?
First, there was the controversy about whom precisely the memorial should commemorate.
The Jews were certainly the largest group to be persecuted on racial grounds in Hitlers
Germany, but they werent the only such victims: the Sinti and Roma people suffered the
same fate, but like the homosexual and disabled victims of Hitlers policies, they were
excluded from this memorial: these groups would have to wait for their own separate
memorials in Berlin.
Secondly, even with this exclusive focus on Jewish victims, there was still the question of
how any single memorial could convey the magnitude of the Holocaust and the resulting
sense of loss.
Thirdly, concerns were raised that such a grandiose gesture might suggest that Germany
was attempting finally to draw a line under its past. It was felt that, whatever form the
memorial took, it should not be something that would simply blend into the background
like so many monuments; rather it should continue to provoke debate.
And finally, there were concerns arising from the unusual situation of a perpetrator nation
erecting a monument to its victims. Some German politicians and public intellectuals

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suggested that whereas normal nations erect monuments to commemorate their positive
achievements, Germany risked reducing its own history to the Holocaust and thus creating
a negative national identity.
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The design finally chosen in 1997 is highly abstract. Unlike a traditional memorial, there is
minimal information at the site to tell you what its function is; and if you do not know what
the site commemorates before you visit it, you wont get any real clues just from its form.
Eisenman emphasised that his work had no message and there was no right way to
engage with it there is no obvious entrance or exit, and visitors have to find their own
way through the site, putting the responsibility for what they experience or learn from it
firmly onto each individual.
Certainly the sites open form is an invitation to engage with it quite differently from the
way you might behave at a more traditional memorial: people frequently sit on the lower
stelae eating lunch, chatting, making phone calls and even sunbathing; teenagers enjoy the
(strictly forbidden!) challenge of leaping between columns; and younger children love
playing hide-and-seek in what looks to them like a giant maze.
Others, however, walk among the taller columns at the centre, deep in thought. The further
you go into the memorial, the more unsettling it is: the ground undulates beneath your feet,
the stelae tower above you, you have to walk the paths in single file, and though you are
always aware of bustling Berlin at the fringes of the memorial, you feel strangely cut off
from it. All this is physically disorientating, echoing the disorientation felt by German
Jews during the Nazi period.
However, critics of Eisenmans original design felt that this visceral, emotional visitor
response was not sufficient to convey the full meaning of the Holocaust and needed to be
supplemented by some historical context, hence the addition of an Information Centre
beneath the site. This provides extensive documentary material about the events of the
Holocaust, but especially about the fates of many named individuals, which encourages the
visitor to engage with the memorial quite differently when they re-emerge.
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The seriousness with which German politicians and public debated the need for this
memorial, and the form it should take, over many years was perhaps the best evidence of
just how far Germany had come in dealing with this dark chapter in its national past.
Indeed, some academics felt that the debate itself which is documented in this massive
tome was actually the best possible memorial. But Eisenmans creation has marked an
important watershed. Its location in the heart of Berlin, where it functions as a site of
remembrance and mourning, a tourist site, and even a short cut to work, suggests that an
awareness of this past is now securely integrated in the national consciousness not to
make Germans who had nothing to do with these events feel eternally guilty, but as a
marker of what was lost from both Germany and Europe in the Holocaust, an invitation to
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reflect on the meaning of that loss, and a warning to generations not just German
generations to come.
References:
Ute Heimrod, Gnter Schlusche, Horst Seferens (eds), Der Denkmalstreit das Denkmal?
Die Debatte um das Denkmal fr die ermordeten Juden Europas: Eine Dokumentation
(Berlin: Philo, 1999)
Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002)
Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (eds), Memorialization in Germany since 1945 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Brigitte Sion, Affective Memory, Ineffective Functionality: Experiencing Berlins
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Niven and Paver, (eds), Memorialization in
Germany since 1945, pp. 243-252
Home page for the foundation which administers the memorials to victims of the Third
Reich: http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/de/startseite.html (also available in English)

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