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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Remembrance and Representation / Workshop 1 on Remembrance, "It Happened There: The Existence and Meaning of Historical Locations" / Presentation by Dr. James E. Young | |||||||||
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Report from Workshop 1 on Remembrance and Representation: "It Happened there: the Existence and Meaning of Historical Locations" Presentation by Mr. David Barnouw Presentation by Dr. Jan Munk Presentation by Dr. Robert Sigel Presentation by Dr. Teresa Swiebocka Presentation by Dr. Jonathan Webber Presentation by Dr. James E. Young Presentation by Dr. James E. Young Young, James E. Reflections on the Dedication of Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" Among the hundreds of submissions in the aborted 1995 competition for a German national "memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe," one seemed an especially uncanny embodiment of the impossible questions at the heart of Germany's memorial process. Artist Horst Hoheisel proposed a simple, if provocative anti-solution to the memorial competition: blow up the Brandenburger Tor, grind its stone into dust, sprinkle the remains over its former site, and then cover the entire memorial area with granite plates. How better to remember a people murdered in the name of the German nation than by destroying Germany's national monument? Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the construction of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with another. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people. Rather than concretizing and thereby displacing the memory of Europe's murdered Jews, the artist would open a place in the landscape to be filled with the memory of those who come to remember Europe's murdered Jews. A landmark celebrating Prussian might and crowned by a chariot-borne Quadriga, the Roman goddess of peace, would be demolished to make room for the memory of Jewish victims of German might and peacelessness. Of course, such a memorial undoing would never be sanctioned by the German government, and this, too, was part of the artist's point. Hoheisel's proposed destruction of the Brandenburger Tor participated in the competition for a national Holocaust memorial, even as its radicalism precluded the possibility of its execution. At least part of its polemic, therefore, was directed against actually building any winning design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here he seemed to suggest that the surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany actually lay in its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process could guarantee the life of memory. Like many others, I had been quite satisfied with the insolubility of Germany's memorial dilemma. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany, I wrote at the time, than any single "final solution" to Germany's memorial problem. But then I began to suspect that the never-ending debate over Holocaust memory in Germany was itself becoming a substitute for taking any kind of action on behalf of such memory. And like others, I also began to wonder whether the contemporary aesthetic obsession with absent Jews actually reflected the not-so-benign desire on the part of some Germans to assign a reductive unity to Jewish victims that did not exist when they were alive. As the Jews had been ascribed monolithically evil characteristics by their killers, I wondered whether a new generation of German mourners had begun to substitute one monolithic understanding for another, in which the victims' multiple and individual qualities would be lost. So when, in June 1997, the Berlin Senate invited me to serve as one of five members of a newly-appointed Findungskommission--its only foreigner and only Jew--I agreed, but only on several conditions. First, in our prospectus for Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe," we would ask potential designers not to answer Germany's Holocaust memorial question but to articulate it in their designs. How would a nation of former perpetrators mourn its victims? How would a divided nation reunite itself on the bedrock memory of its crimes? How to recall these events without redeeming them in any way? How to leave such events unredeemable yet still memorable, unjustifiable yet still graspable in their causes and effects? Rather than skirting these impossible questions, we hoped to put them at the very heart of the design process. In our precis for the memorial competition, we also stipulated that this memorial would not displace the nation's other memorial sites, many of them located on the former sites of concentration camps, but should only add more reason to visit them. Neither would this memorial to Europe's murdered Jews pretend to speak for the Nazis' other victims but would, in fact, necessitate further memorials to political prisoners, Soviet POW's, the handicapped, homosexuals, and the tribes of Sinti and Rom (Gypsies). Before proceeding, we also had to address a further concern shared both by us, as members of the Findungskommission, and the memorial's opponents: Should it be a ontemplative site only, or pedagogically inclined, as well? Because we did not see Holocaust memory in Germany as a zero-sum project, we concluded that there was indeed room in Berlin's new landscape for both commemorative spaces and memorial learning centers. In fact, Berlin and its environs were already rich with excellent museums and permanent exhibitions on the Nazi regime of destruction--from the Wannsee Villa to the Topography of Terror, from the new Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse and the proposed Institute for the Study of Anti-semitism, to the critical and insightful exhibitions at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The question was never whether there would be only a memorial or a museum. But rather, in addition to these already existing pedagogical houses of memory, was there room as well for a commemorative space meant for memorial contemplation and national ceremonies? We answered, Yes. For even though we were still suspicious of the monument as a form, we began to see how important it would be to add a space to Germany's restored capital deliberately designed to remember the mass-murder of Europe's Jews. This would not be a space for memory designed by the killers themselves, as the concentration camp sites inevitably are, but one designed specifically as a memorial site. As a deliberate act of remembrance, this memorial recognizes that memory must be created for the next generation, as well as preserved. In thus weighing the power of concept against formal execution in this final group of designs, the members of the Findungskommission unanimously agreed that the two proposals by Gesine Weinmiller and Peter Eisenman/Richard Serra far transcended the others in their balance of brilliant concept and powerful execution. Though equally works of terrible beauty, complexity and deep intelligence, the proposals by Weinmiller and Eisenman/Serra derived their power from very different sources. The choice here was not between measures of brilliance in these two works but between two very different orders of memorial sensibilities: Weinmiller's was the genius of quietude, understatement, and almost magical allusiveness; the collaboration of Eisenman and Serra resulted in an audacious, surprising and dangerously imagined form. One was by a young German woman of the generation now obligated to shoulder the memory and shame of events for which she was not to blame; the other was by two well-known Americans, architect and artist, one of whose Jewish family left Germany two generations ago. Together, we felt, these two designs would offer the public, government and organizers of the memorial an actual and stark choice. Their cases were equally strong, but in the end one would have to gather the force of consensus over the other. Before long, in fact, consensus did gather around the design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra. It was reported that Chancellor Kohl also strongly favored the design by Eisenman and Serra and even invited the team to Bonn to hear them personally explain their proposal. In any case, during their January 1998 visit with the Chancellor, Eisenman and Serra were asked to consider a handful of design changes that would make the memorial acceptable to organizers. As an architect who saw accomodation to his clients' wishes as part of his job, Eisenman agreed to adapt the design to the needs of the project. As an artist, however, Richard Serra steadfastly refused to contemplate any changes in the design whatsoever. As a result, he withdrew from the project, suggesting that once changed, the project would in effect no longer be his. While we were sorry to see the Richard Serra withdraw from the project, we could also fully understand the artist's prerogative to resist recommended changes in what he regarded as a finished work. Here, in fact, the artist's and the architect's modes of operation may always diverge: where the architect generally sees an accomodation to the clients' requests as part of his job, the artist is more apt to see suggested changes, however slight, as a threat to his work's internal logic and integrity. This conflict, too, is normal in the course of collaborations between artists and architects. Despite our enthusiastic recommendation of Eisenman and Serra's design, in the sheer number of its pillars and its overall scale in proportion to the allotted space, the original design left less room for visitors and commemorative activities than we had wanted. Some of us also found a potential for more than figurative danger in the memorial site: at five meters high, the tallest pillars might have hidden some visitors from view, thereby creating the sense of a labyrinthine maze, an effect desired neither by designers nor commissioners. Therefore, among the modifications we requested of Peter Eisenman, now acting on his own, we asked for a significant downscaling of both the size of individual pillars and their number. In June 1998, I spent a day in Peter Eisenman's New York City studio to hear his rationale and to see the changes he had made, a day before he sent his newly designed model off to Berlin for safe-keeping. Shortly after, I could report to the other commissioners that our suggestions had not only been expertly incorporated into the design by Peter Eisenman, but that they worked, in unexpected ways, to strengthen the entire formalization of the concept itself. In fact, as I reported in my assessment of Eisenman's new design (Eisenman-II), the revised design is an even more powerful space of memorial contemplation than the original, one that suggests--however elliptically--both the scale of destruction and the void left behind, as well as the necessarily fraught relationship Germany will always have to the memory of crimes committed in its name. Instead of overwhelming visitors with memory on a super-human scale, these now humanly proportioned pillars (from .5m to 2.5m high) will invite visitors into a memorial dialogue of equals. Where the "monumental" has traditionally used its size to humble us into insignificance, or cow us into a kind of acquiescence or submission, this memorial in its human scale puts people on an even-footing with the forms of memory. A human dialogue is established between such forms and visitors. Neither our memorial aspirations nor our sense of human acountability is mocked here by the monumental. Visitors and the role they play in and among these pillars are not diminished by the monumental but are here made integral parts of the memorial itself. Visitors will not be dwarfed by their memorial obligation here, nor defeated by memory-forms, but rather enjoined by them to come face to face with memory. Now able to see over and around these pillars, visitors will find themselves knee-deep, waist-deep, or even shoulder-deep, in a waving field of other rememberers and forms. They will have to find their way through this field of stones, on the one hand, even as they are never actually lost in or overcome by the memorial act. In effect, they will make and choose their own individual spaces for memory, even as they do so collectively. The implied sense of motion in the gently undulating field also formalizes a kind of memory that is neither frozen in time, nor static in space. The sense of such instability will help visitors resist an impulse toward closure in the memorial act and heighten one's own role in anchoring memory in oneself. In their multiple and variegated sizes, the pillars are both individuated and collected: the very idea of "collective memory" is broken down here and replaced with the collected memories of individuals murdered, the terrible meanings of their deaths now multiplied and not merely unified. The land sways and moves beneath these pillars so that each one is some 3 degrees off vertical: we are not reassured by such memory, not reconciled to the mass murder of millions but now disoriented by it. Part of what Eisenman calls its Unheimlichkeit, or uncanniness, derives precisely from the sense of unease generated in such a field, the demand that we now find our own way into and out of such memory. And because the scale of this installation will be almost irreproducible on film shot from the ground, it demands that visitors enter the memorial space and not try to know it vicariously through their snapshots. What will be remembered here are not photographic images but the visitors' actual experiences and what they remembered in situ. In practical terms, the removal of some 700 pillars out of an originally-proposed 4200 or so has dramatically opened up the plaza for public commemorative activities. It has also made room for tourist buses to discharge visitors without threatening the sanctity of the pillars on the outer edges of the field. By raising the height of the lowest pillar-tops from nearly flush with the ground to approximately a half-meter tall, the new design also ensures that visitors will not step on the pillars or walk out over the tops of pillars. Since the pillars will be tilting with the roll of the ground-level topography, their angled positions will also discourage climbing or clambering-over. In fact, since these pillars are neither intended nor consecrated as tombstones, there would be no actual desecration of them were someone to step or sit on one of these pillars. But in Jewish tradition, it is also important to avoid the appearance of a desecration, so the minor change in the smallest pillars is still welcome. In their warm, sandy tone, the concrete-form pillars will reflect the colors of the sun and sky on the one hand and remain suggestive of stone, even sandstone, on the other. The concrete will not have the rough lines of their pour forms but will be smooth, close to the texture of sidewalk. They can also be impregnated with an anti-graffiti solution to make them easy to clean. Over time, it will be important to remove graffiti as it appears, in order not to allow it to accumulate. The crushed-stone ground surface is also an excellent idea, in that it inhibits running, frolicking, or lying on the ground, even as it marks the visitors' own footsteps in both sound and space. The architect prefers that the pillars, though stone-like, remain under-determined and open to many readings: they are alternately stones, pillars, blank tablets, walls and segments. This said, in their abstract forms, they will nevertheless accomodate the references projected onto them by visitors, the most likely being the tombstone. This is not a bad thing and suggests the need to keep these pillars blank-faced. With written text, they might begin to look very much like tombstones, in fact, and so might generate a dynamic demanding some sort of formal treatment as tombstones, even symbolic ones. For this reason, I suggested that a permanent, written historical text be inscribed on a large tablet or tablets set either into the ground or onto the ground, tilted at a readable angle, separate from the field of waving pillars. Their angled position will bring visitors into respectful, even prayerful repose as they read the text, with heads slightly bowed in memory. These could be placed at the entrance or on the sides, under the trees lining the perimeter of the field, leaving the integrity of the field itself formally intact, while still denoting exactly what is to be remembered here. Thus placed, the memorial texts will not create a sense of beginning or end of the memorial field, leaving the site open to the multiple paths visitors take in their memorial quest. This, too, will respect the architect's attempt to foster a sense of incompleteness; it will not be a memorial with a narrative beginning, middle and end built into it. On 25 June 1999, the German Bundestag took a series of votes on the matter of the memorial. It finally passed three principal motions: 1) The Federal Republic of Germany will erect in Berlin a "memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe"; 2) The design for this memorial will be the field of pillars proposed by Peter Eisenman, to which an information center will be added; and 3) A public foundation made up of the directors of other memorial institutions, as well as representatives from the organization of Jews in Germany, will be established by the Bundestag to oversee both the building of the memorial and its information center in the year 2000. Now that Germany's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" has been dedicated, is this the end of Germany's Holocaust memory-work, as I had initially feared? Obviously not. Debate and controversy continue unabated. Moreover, now that the parliament has decided to give Holocaust memory a central place in Berlin, an even more difficult job awaits the organizers: Defining exactly what it is to be remembered here in Peter Eisenman's waving field of pillars. What will Germany's national Holocaust narrative be? Who will write it and to whom will it be written? The question of historical content begins at precisely the moment the question of memorial design ends. Memory, which has followed history, will now be followed by still further historical debate. So on Thursday's dedication of the memorial, fittingly fraught as always, let the debate continue. Some, like Mayor Eberhard Diepken, will stay home like a petulant child who didn't get his way; others will stay home out of the deeply-felt conviction that no memorial will ever be adequate to the task. Of those who come to the dedication, most will come to remember, some to mourn, and some to share in the memorial's unflattering political lime-light. Had I been able, I surely would have come --both to mourn and to watch with some satisfaction as Berlin continues to wrestle with its memorial demons. From this American Jew's perspective, this last year has been a watershed for German memory and identity. No longer paralysed by the memory of crimes perpetrated in its name, Germany is now acting on the basis of such memory: it participated boldly in NATO's 1999 intervention against a new genocide perpetrated by Milosevic's Serbia; it has begun to change citizenship laws from blood- to residency-based; and it is about to dedicate a permanent place in Berlin's cityscape to commemorate what happened the last time Germany was governed from Berlin. Endless debate and memorialization are no longer mere substitutes for actions against contemporary genocide but reasons for action. This is something new, not just for Germany but for the rest of us, as well. For whether Germans like it or not, in addition to their nation's great accomplishments over the last several centuries, they will also always be identified as that nation which launched the deadliest genocide in human history, which started a world war that eventually killed some 50 million human beings, and which used this war to screen its deliberate mass murder of some 6 million European Jews. It is not a proud memory. But neither has any other nation attempted to make such a crime perpetrated in its name part of its national identity. For this space will always remind Germany and the world at large of the self-inflicted void at the heart of German culture and consciousness--a void that at once defines national identity, even as it threatens such identity with its own implosion. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars
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