Contested Public Space Memories and History

CONTESTED PUBLIC SPACE: MEMORIES & HISTORY

Contested Public Space: Memories and History

Das Denkmal fur Die Ermordeten Juden Europas

The Memory Landscape.

Mary's is a large old-style brick church belonging to the council of the Hanseatic city of Lubeck. 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 homeland are caught: 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 war time experience. If the physical evidence of war is wiped away, then memory lives only in that intangible, solo 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 the actual physicality, beliefs about how the contested space informs history, or deliberately decouples from it, and how stakeholders express their perceptions of the 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."[footnoteRef:1] [1: Dobrin, Sidney I. (2007). The Occupation of Composition. In Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weissner. The Locations of Composition. New York, NY: Suny Press.]

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung is one of those extraordinary compound words that baffle first by their sheer length and ability to stump a tongue not schooled in classic 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 means Bewaltigung "coming to terms with or mastering." Although the reader could fairly assume that the past that is referred to means history, that interpretation would be too broad. For contemporary Germans, the word conveys a very explicit meaning. Vergangenheitsbewaltigung refers to the process of digesting, analyzing, and finally learning to live with the Holocaust as part of Germany's history.

One of the ways Germany has come to terms with its past is to create a "memory landscape"[footnoteRef:2] in its cities and across the countryside, wherever Nazis and World War II left terrible traces. Journalist Lea Rosh worked dedicated 17 years of her life to an addition of the memory landscape that many Germans -- Jews and non-Jews -- did not believe necessary. Rosh first proposed the idea of a central memorial to Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1988. She set up a foundation and began to collect donations toward its construction. One year later, Berlin citizens turned their attention to the fall of the Berlin Wall. An intense focus on the present -- not the past -- occupied German citizenry. The tasks of rebuilding and reorganizing Berlin, 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. That the memorial is referred in several ways by Germans underscores this issue. [2: (n.a.) (2008, January 3).Germany's Jews:latkes and vodka, he Economist. Retrieved http://www.economist.com/node/10424406]

The Siting of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

The formal name for the memorial is Das Denkmal fur 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 memorial, while Denkmal refers to a large structure -- a monument. But to German, the word Mahnmal carries more meaning than just that of a remembrance memorial -- it conveys a sense of admonition and warning, an urging and an appeal. This quotidian phrase used to refer to the memorial indicates that Germans received Rosh's message. The memorial is not a cenotaph, or empty tomb, necessarily. In fact, designer / architect Peter Eisenman specifically stated he did not want names on the slabs because then the memorial would just be a cemetery.

In what apparently has been a tangible and practical way to address Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, Germany has established many memorials, museums, and monuments to mark the Holocaust on German soil and in German memories. 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 in paved areas that link to specific atrocities or record the names of murdered or Jews. "Opposition to the building of the memorial feared it would trivialize memory and encourage its misuses in adding yet another site to the already saturated ?eld of Holocaust Memory" (Young, 2003).[footnoteRef:3] [3: Young, J. (2003) "Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem and Mine." In Gabriel R. Ricci, "Justice and the Politics of Memory," Religion and Public Life, 33: 55 -- 70. ]

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 with the district of Berlin-Mitte. Mitte means middle or center in German, but this is more than just a geographic or cartographic designation. The Mitte area is the heart of Alt-Berlin, or old Berlin. Separated from the Brandenberg district in 1920, it became the first official district in the city. The Mitte, literally in the center of Alt-Berlin, was the hardest hit of all districts of Berlin, and it 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 was that of the location -- the site of the memorial itself. It was considered by many to be a built memorial that was not authentic.[footnoteRef:4] Many Germans felt that the Holocaust Memorial should not be located in the heart of Berlin -- just a short walk from the Brandenburg Tor, Potsdamer Platz, 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 bulls-eye. 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 sighting of the memorial, with its obvious centrality. [4: Dekel, Irit. Ways of looking: Observation and transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mount Scopus, Jerusalem]

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.[footnoteRef:5] [5: Thakkar, Sonali. Transnational memory and culture and the counter-monument today. Memory and Politics Workshop,, New York, NY: Columbia University.]

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 today in a different city in a different country. It is a legitimate question to ask how much Vergangenheitsbewaltigung paved the way.[footnoteRef:6] The ways of Berlin are not necessarily those of other large urban areas. As Thakkar pointed out, [6: Jordan, Jennifer. "Blank Slates and Authentic Traces: Memorial Culture in Berlin After 1945." In Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond. Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 23-58.]

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, relative sparse population, and underused and under-occupied 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 long years of debate were primarily devoted to the design).[footnoteRef:7] [7: Thakkar, Op. Cit.]

Berlin's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" has long been plagued with delays. In the planning for over 15 years, there have been disputes over its location, design, cost and building materials. The debates have centered on the legitimacy and functionality of the memorial. Over a period of many years, heated arguments about the necessity of building a memorial and to whom it should be dedicated criss-crossed the newspapers. In 1991, a dispute broke out between the Roma / Sinti survivors of the Holocaust and Jewish survivors. The Roma argued that dedicating the Holocaust Memorial to Jews was a "selection" not unlike that in the camps, but this time viewed as choosing between first-class and second-class citizens.[footnoteRef:8] Issues about the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust 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] an hierarchy of suffering…pain and mourning are great in all afflicted families."[footnoteRef:9] [8: Historic Sites -- Berlin, Holocaust Memorials and Public Memory, Kennesaw University, GA: Public History Program / Holocaust Education Program, Retrieved http://www.kennesaw.edu/holocaustmemorials/berlin.shtml#09] [9: Berstein, Richard. (2005, May 11) Holocaust Museum opens in Berlin, The New York Times. Retrieved http://www.nytimes.com/2005/0511/international/europe/11germany. ]

Jennifer Jordan has written extensively on urbanism and memory in Berlin, and has provided analysis about the relations between the landscape of a space and the sociological and political process that bring out its realization. She argues that land ownership and land use influence the types of memorials that get built and where they are built.[footnoteRef:10] Further, she suggests these dynamics may determine which memorials are forgotten and which are left "unmemorialized."[footnoteRef:11] 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."[footnoteRef:12] [10: Jordan, Jennifer (2006) Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond. Berkeley, CA: Stanford University Press.] [11: Jordan, Op. Cit., 2006.] [12: Jordan, Op. Cit., 2006.]

The Holocaust memorial was located on a prime piece of real estate in the heart of a unified Berlin, but it is essentially a deterritorialized place. [footnoteRef:13] Cosmopolitan memory, argue Levy and Sznaider, attempts to deterrritorialize its memory and the site of the Holocaust Memorial fosters this process. The location of the memorial was part of the no-man's land that stood between West Berlin and East Berlin. It was a desolate space that did not belong to anyone, was not identified with anyone, and could not be built upon by anyone. It was essentially a non-territory. "In part, it is because of the former emptiness of the space, and the particularly disjointed geography of a reunified Berlin, that the space can be given over to memorialization in this fashion."[footnoteRef:14] When he visited the Holocaust Memorial, Julius Schoeps, head of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam, was reported to have said that the time for public memorials has passed, and that "They stand in the landscape, and people don't even know what they recall. I find it regrettable that they decided on a design that can stand for everything and for nothing."[footnoteRef:15] [13: Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. (2002) "Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory." European Journal of Social Theory 5: 87-106] [14: Thakker, Op. Cit.] [15: Julius Schoeps, in an interview for Die Tageszeitung, Germany's daily newspaper. ]

The Holocaust Memorial was opened on May 10, 2005. The designer / architect Peter Eisenman says of it, that there is nothing about the memorial that symbolizes or evokes the soil or the land because "the soil was for the Germans."[footnoteRef:16] The architectural style of the memorial effectively decouples the structure from its historical basis. This decoupling can "convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality -- showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion," explains Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for The New York Times. There are no signs -- no names, no dates -- and all information is buried underground in the information center. This space, decoupled from history, has the ability to "psychically weave the Holocaust into our daily existence in a way that the painstaking lists [of victims' names] cannot."[footnoteRef:17] The effect is to destabilize the cultural memory.[footnoteRef:18] The Holocaust Memorial serves as a countermemorial, that is to say, a memorial built with the aim "not to console but to provoke, not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passerby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation desantification…" [footnoteRef:19] The countermemorial, to Young, is a critique of institutional memory.[footnoteRef:20] Heinrich Wefing, a preeminent architecture critic and expert on the post-war reconstruction of Berlin, recalled the years of controversy that had to be overcome in order for the Holocaust Memorial to become a reality. He gave credit to Eisenman's ability to create "a new type of memorial": a beautiful abstraction that "does not dictate what its observer should think or experience," but is nonetheless thoughtful and moving."[footnoteRef:21] [16: Thakker, Op. Cit.] [17: Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for The New York Times. Historic Sites -- Berlin, Holocaust Memorials and Public Memory, Kennesaw University, GA: Public History Program / Holocaust Education Program, Retrieved http://www.kennesaw.edu/holocaustmemorials/berlin.shtml#09] [18: Thakker, Op. Cit.] [19: Thakker, Op. Cit.] [20: Thakker, Op. Cit.] [21: Eisenberg, Peter in an interview for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.]

The Construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

A competition for the design of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was held in April of 1994. Twelve artists were invited to submit a design and a stipend of 50, 000 German Marks was provided to each candidate. The proposals would be reviewed by a jury with representatives from architecture, urban design, art, history, administration, and politics. Interest in the project grew and at the end of the competitive period, 528 proposals had been submitted. Rounds of reviews commenced and 13 proposals were selected. But during the interim period between meetings, the jurors -- who ostensibly were then able to review the critiques of their fellow jurors -- asked that 11 proposals be put back in the running. Two proposals were finally recommended to the foundation for feasibility study. One proposal was designed by Simon Ungers architectural group from Hamburg, and one proposal was designed by Christine Jackob-Marks. Jackob-Marks' work included names of murdered Jews engraved in a large concrete plate, with empty spaces signifying Jews who could not be identified by name. Her proposal also included debris from Massada where the Jewish inhabitants avoided capture by invading Romans by killing themselves. Chancellor Helmut Kohl vetoed this proposal. It was considered too "German" and too similar to the Nazi death rosters. The controversy continued under many different guises.