Above you can browse through images of the memorial from the travel website, http://www.sacred-destinations.com/germany/berlin-holocaust-memorial.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter Eisenman, 2005) is dedicated to the millions of lives that were lost during the Holocaust. This memorial had a difficult start in its beginnings because of the concern for appropriately representing the murders of so many innocent lives. Due to the wide range of ideas of what the design should look like and wanting to be sensitive to the country’s controversial national history, it took many years to come to a final decision. Around the time of the competition, Holocaust “countermonuments” were responding to the question how the victims of the Holocaust should be remembered by challenging the authoritarian guidelines and rules of existing memorials and creating more temporary memorials to promote action and self-remembrance among German citizens. As the prominent countermonument artist Jochen Gerz wrote on one his pieces, “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”[1] Even James Young, one of the judges for the contest, was concerned that having a memorial of the Holocaust would allow Germany to push it away and it would no longer be necessary to remember.[2] However, it was felt that Peter Eisenman’s design best fit the needs of Germany in dealing with their troubled past and offering something new for the future.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is located within the city of Berlin. It is made up of almost 3,000 rectangular concrete pillars of varying in height from one and a half feet to ten feet, but all with the same neutral color.[3] They are not representative of anything, but one cannot help but think of gravestones or a cemetery when looking at the site as a whole. However, whatever associations one makes with the memorial is up to the individual. The layout of the memorial allows visitors to create their own path throughout the space as they walk in between the numbers of rectangular blocks. This represents ideas about the fluidity of memory. Young has described Eisenman’s memorial as “a deliberate act of remembrance, a strong statement that memory must be created for the next generation, not simply preserved.”[4] The design allows for a high level of hybridity since its aim is to promote remembrance and the continuation of memory, rather than the end of memory just because it happened in the past. Just as there is no single correct way to honor the victims of the Holocaust, the nature of this memorial is left open ended so that each visitor can create new memories and promote the remembrance of the victims. Each time the visitors pass through the site they can potentially explore a new part of the memorial and never have the same exact experience twice.
