After years of controversy and delay, Germany opened its Holocaust memorial on Tuesday — a vast field of concrete slabs in the historic heart of Berlin only a few hundred metres from the site of Hitler’s bunker.
The opening is a landmark step in Germany’s postwar evolution, and in the slow and often painful process of coming to terms with its Nazi past.
Unlike Russia and Japan, Germany has — in recent decades at least — confronted its history with a relentless honesty. No other country had erected a monument to ”the biggest crime in its history” in the middle of its capital, Wolfang Thierse, the President of Germany’s Parliament, said on Tuesday. He pointed out that although the Holocaust was carried out in German-occupied Poland it had been ”planned and administered” from Berlin.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was officially unveiled before an audience of Holocaust survivors, Jewish leaders and Germany’s President, Horst Köhler, and Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.
The memorial, which opens to the public on Thursday, is made up of 2 711 concrete slabs framed by the green canopy of Berlin’s Tiergarten and the neoclassical grandeur of Germany’s Parliament building, the Reichstag.
The centre focuses on individual stories — documenting 15 Jewish families from across Europe who were killed during the Holocaust, together with six haunting photographs of Jewish victims, one for each of the six-million Jews who were murdered. It also includes postcards and letters flung from the train as victims were transported to their deaths.
The size of two football fields, much of the memorial has been erected over surviving underground tunnels used by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s infamous propaganda chief.
Germans gave mixed verdicts on the memorial.
”The idea is brilliant. But I find the design a bit empty,” Ruth Schlette (72) said.
”Germany could have done something like this earlier, that’s true,” Wolfgang Hillier, from Bavaria, added. ”But this is the perfect spot next to the Brandenburg Gate. It’s impressive.”
During Tuesday’s ceremony, Sabine van der Linden, a Polish Holocaust survivor, described how the Nazis murdered her entire family.
Praising the memorial as ”magnificent”, she said the Nazis arrived at her small Polish town in July 1941. After a pogrom they deported her and her mother, who was murdered in a camp.
She spent months in hiding with a Polish family and in the forest. Her father and brother were shot dead in a nearby work camp after trying to escape, days before the Red Army liberated it.
”I have learned that hatred begets hatred,” she said. ”We must not remain silent. Each of us must fight the evil of racism and prejudice and inhumanity.”
She added that she did not believe in ”collective guilt” but that the new generation of Germans had a responsibility to ”remember” their elders’ crimes.
Tuesday’s ceremony marks the end of nearly two decades of wrangling over how far Germany should go in recognising the unique crimes of the Nazi era. A group of German citizens led by a TV correspondent, Lea Rosh, first had the idea of a monument 17 years ago. Germany’s then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, supported the idea but later threw out the winning design.
After Kohl lost power, and with the capital’s move from Bonn to Berlin, Germany’s new Social Democrat-Green government revived the concept. German MPs finally gave the go-ahead a year later.
The project was mired in further controversy, however, when it emerged that the firm Degussa, which had supplied gas for the Nazis’ death camps, had won the contract to graffiti-proof the memorial’s slabs. The architect, Peter Eisenman, a secular Jew, meanwhile, got into trouble for making jokes about his New York dentist extracting gold teeth.
OnTuesday Eisenman that visitors to the memorial were free to interpret the undulating slabs however they wished.
”I had the idea of silence,” he said. ”What was taken away from people was their ability to speak. I wanted a memorial that spoke without speaking.” – Guardian Unlimited Â