Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold. It consists of a site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but after the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are long, wide and vary in height from. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Building began on 1 April 2003, and was finished on 15 December 2004. It was inaugurated on 10 May 2005, 60 years after the end of World War II in Europe, and opened to the public two days later. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Mitte neighbourhood. The cost of construction was approximately.
Location
The memorial is located on Cora-Berliner-Straße 1, 10117 in Berlin, a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe before the Second World War. Adjacent east to the Tiergarten, it is centrally located in Berlin's historical Friedrichstadt district, close to the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate. The monument is situated on the former location of the Berlin Wall, where the "death strip" once divided the city. During the Third Reich a part of this area was the location of Joseph Goebbels' urban villa, with the nearby Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker in the south. The memorial is located near many of Berlin's foreign embassies.The monument is composed of 2,711 rectangular concrete blocks, laid out in a rectangular grid covering. This allows for long, straight, and narrow alleys between them, along which the ground undulates.
History
Beginnings
The debates over the existence and form of such a memorial extend back to the late 1980s, when a small group of private West German citizens, led by television journalist Lea Rosh and historian Eberhard Jäckel, first began pressing for West Germany to honor the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Rosh soon emerged as the driving force behind the memorial. In 1989, she founded a group to support its construction and to collect donations. With growing support, the Bundestag passed a resolution in favour of the project. On 25 June 1999, the Bundestag decided to build the memorial designed by Peter Eisenman. A federal foundation was consequently founded to run it.First competition
In April 1994 a competition for the memorial's design was announced in Germany's major newspapers. Twelve artists were specifically invited to submit a design and given 50,000DM to do so. The winning proposal was to be selected by a jury consisting of representatives from the fields of art, architecture, urban design, history, politics and administration, including Frank Schirrmacher, co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The deadline for the proposals was 28 October. On 11 May, an information colloquium took place in Berlin, where people interested in submitting a design could receive some more information about the nature of the memorial to be designed. Ignatz Bubis, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Wolfgang Nagel, the construction senator of Berlin, spoke at the event.Before the deadline, the documents required to submit a proposal were requested over 2,600 times and 528 proposals were submitted. The jury met on 15 January 1995 to pick the best submission. First, Walter Jens, the president of the Akademie der Künste, was elected chairman of the jury. In the following days, all but 13 submissions were eliminated from the race in several rounds of looking through all works. As had already been arranged, the jury met again on 15 March. Eleven submissions were restored to the race, as requested by several jurors after they had had a chance to review the eliminated works in the months in between the meetings.
Two works were then recommended by the jury to the foundation to be checked as to whether they could be completed within the price range given. One of them was designed by a group around the architect Simon Ungers from Hamburg; it consisted of 85×85 meters square of steel girders on top of concrete blocks located on the corners. The names of several extermination camps would be perforated into the girders so that these would be projected onto objects or people in the area by sunlight. The other winner was a design by Christine Jackob-Marks. Her concept consisted of 100×100 meters large concrete plate, seven meters thick. It would be tilted, rising up to eleven meters and walkable on special paths. The names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust would be engraved into the concrete, with spaces left empty for those victims whose names remain unknown. Large pieces of debris from Masada, a mountaintop-fortress in Israel, whose Jewish inhabitants killed themselves to avoid being captured or killed by the Roman soldiers rushing in, would be spread over the concrete plate. Other ideas involved a memorial not only to the Jews but to all the victims of Nazism.
Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had taken a close personal interest in the project, expressed his dissatisfaction with the recommendations of the jury to implement the work of the Jackob-Marks team. A new, more limited competition was launched in 1996 with 25 architects and sculptors invited to submit proposals.
Eisenman design
The date for the inauguration was scrapped and in 1997 the first of three public discussions on the monument was held. The second competition in November 1997 produced four finalists, including a collaboration between architect Peter Eisenman and artist Richard Serra whose plan later emerged as the winner. Their design originally envisaged a huge labyrinth of 4,000 stone pillars of varying heights scattered over. Serra, however, quit the design team soon after, citing personal and professional reasons that "had nothing to do with the merits of the project." Kohl still insisted on numerous changes, but Eisenman soon indicated he could accommodate them. Among other changes, the initial Eisenman-Serra project was soon scaled down to a monument of some 2,000 pillars.By 1999, as other empty stretches of land nearby were filled with new buildings, the vacant lot began to resemble a hole in the city's centre.
In a breakthrough mediated by W. Michael Blumenthal and negotiated between Eisenman and Michael Naumann in January 1999, the essence of the huge field of stone pillarsto which the incoming German government led by Gerhard Schröder had earlier objectedwas preserved. The number of pillars was reduced from about 2,800 to somewhere between 1,800 and 2,100, and a building to be called The House of Remembranceconsisting of an atrium and three sandstone blockswas to be added. This buildingan archive, information centre and exhibition spacewas to be flanked by a thick, Wall of Books that would have housed a million books between an exterior made of patterned black steel and a glass interior side. The Wall of Books, containing works that scholars would have been able to consult, was intended to symbolize the concern of the Schröder government that the memorial not be merely backward-looking and symbolic but also educational and useful. Agreement was also reached that the memorial would be administered by the Jewish Museum.
On 25 June 1999, a majority of the Bundestag314 to 209, with 14 abstentionsdecided in favour of Eisenman's plan, which was eventually modified by attaching a museum, or "place of information," designed by Berlin-based exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken. Across the street from the northern boundary of the memorial is the new Embassy of the United States in Berlin, which opened 4 July 2008. For a while, issues over setback for US embassy construction impacted the memorial. It also emerged in late 1999 that a small corner of the site was still owned by a municipal housing company, and the status of that piece of land had to be resolved before any progress on the construction could be made.
In July 2001, the provocative slogan The Holocaust never happened appeared in newspaper advertisements and on billboards seeking donations of $2 million for the memorial. Under the slogan and a picture of a serene mountain lake and snow-capped mountain, a smaller type said: "There are still many people who make this claim. In 20 years there could be even more."
Construction
On 27 January 2000 a celebration was held marking the symbolic beginning of construction on the memorial site. The first provisional stelae were erected in May 2001. An international symposium on the memorial and the information centre was held by the foundation in November 2001 together with historians, museum experts, art historians and experts on architectural theory. In the spring of 2003, work began on the construction of the memorial. At the same time, an information point was erected at the fence surrounding the construction site.On 14 October 2003, the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger published articles noting that the Degussa company was involved in the construction of the memorial, producing the anti-graffiti substance Protectosil used to cover the stelae; the company had been involved in various ways in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. A subsidiary company of Degussa, Degesch, had even produced the Zyklon B used to poison people in the gas chambers. At first, these articles did not receive much attention, until the board of trustees managing the construction discussed this situation on 23 October and, after turbulent and controversial discussions, decided to stop construction immediately until a decision was made. Primarily it was representatives of the Jewish community who had called for an end to Degussa's involvement, while the politicians on the board, including Wolfgang Thierse, did not want to stop construction and incur further expense. They also said it would be impossible to exclude all German companies involved in the Nazi crimes, becauseas Thierse put it"the past intrudes into our society". Lea Rosh, who also advocated excluding Degussa, replied that "Zyklon B is obviously the limit."
In the discussions that followed, several facts emerged. For one, it transpired that it was not by coincidence that the involvement of Degussa had been publicized in Switzerland, because another company that had bid to produce the anti-graffiti substance was located there. Further, the foundation managing the construction, as well as Lea Rosh, had known about Degussa's involvement for at least a year but had not done anything to stop it. Rosh then claimed she had not known about the connections between Degussa and Degesch. It also transpired that another Degussa subsidiary, Woermann Bauchemie GmbH, had already poured the foundation for the stelae. A problem with excluding Degussa from the project was that many of the stelae had already been covered with Degussa's product. These would have to be destroyed if another company were to be used instead. The resulting cost would be about €2.34 million. In the course of the discussions about what to do, which lasted until 13 November, most of the Jewish organizations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany spoke out against working with Degussa, while the architect Peter Eisenman, for one, supported it.
On 13 November, the decision was made to continue working with the company, and was subsequently heavily criticized. German-Jewish journalist, author, and television personality Henryk M. Broder said that "the Jews don't need this memorial, and they are not prepared to declare a pig sty kosher."