Berlin's Holocaust Memorial: Memory, Design, and Controversy

St. Mary's is a large, old-style brick church belonging to the council of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. 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 homelands are caught in a difficult dilemma: 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 wartime experience. If the physical evidence of war is wiped away, then memory lives only in that intangible, solitary 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 its actual physicality, beliefs about how that contested space informs history or deliberately decouples from it, and how stakeholders express their perceptions of 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."

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

One of the ways Germany has come to terms with its past is to create a "memory landscape" in its cities and across the countryside, wherever the Nazis and World War II left terrible traces. Journalist Lea Rosh dedicated 17 years of her life to an addition to that memory landscape that many Germans—Jews and non-Jews alike—did not believe was necessary. Rosh first proposed the idea of a central memorial to Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1988. She established a foundation and began collecting donations toward its construction. One year later, Berlin's citizens turned their attention to the fall of the Berlin Wall. An intense focus on the present—not the past—occupied German public life. The tasks of rebuilding and reorganizing Berlin and 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. The fact that the memorial is referred to in several different ways by Germans underscores this tension.

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