May 10



GERMANY:

Holocaust Monument Dedicated in Berlin

Sixty years after the end of WWII and 17 years after its inception, a
German memorial to the Jewish victims of WWII genocide has been dedicated
in Berlin.


The president of the German parliament, the monument's architect and the
head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany were among those who made
speeches as the 19,000 square meter (4.7 acres) memorial -- a field of
cement slabs situated at the Brandenburg Gate -- was officially dedicated.

Also present were some 1,500 guests from around the world, including many
Holocaust survivors.

"It is an honor to give this monument to the German people," American
architect Peter Eisenman told the assembled guests, who included German
President Horst Khler and German Chancellor Gerhard Schrder.

Paul Spiegel, the president of Central Council of Jews in Germany, took
the opportunity to praise the project, but also criticized it for focusing
on the victims rather than the perpetrators of the crime.

The monument consists of 2,711 cement pillars, or stelae, of different
heights, that visitors can walk among. The sculpture and underground
information and documentation center cost 27.6 million euros to build.
Starting on Thursday, it will be open to the public.

Symbol of 'incomprehensibility'

Addressing the invitees, Bundestag President Wolfgang Theirse called the
monument "a constructed symbol for the incomprehensibility of the crime."
He added that the German parliament's vote in 1999 to approve and fund the
monument was the first decision for a memorial project in a unified
Germany. As such, "it represents unified Germany's recognition of its own
history," he said.

Thierse added that the monument is not, "the stony finale of the public
debate of our Nazi history." With fewer and fewer survivors living to tell
Holocaust stories, monuments are increasingly important, Thierse said.
"What today can be hauntingly told by eye witnesses, in the future will
need to be told by museums and by art."

For Spiegel, the dedication ceremony was a chance to honor those who made
the monument reality (he named its initiators Lea Rosh and Eberhard Jckel,
among others) while sharply criticizing what he saw as a serious flaw.

Too much focus on victims

"By focuing on the Jews who were killed in WWII, the monument spares the
viewer from confronting questions of guilt and responsibility," Spiegel
told the assembled crowd.

Therefore, he said, the underground information center -- a concept added
late in the project's development -- was an "indispensable addition."

Still, he complained that "only a few of the visitors will bother to
gather additional facts. ... It would have been better if the
perpetrators' motives had been addressed" in the design of the sculpture
itself.

For his part, US based architect Peter Eisenman told the crowd he wanted
to leave behind a "lasting memorial to the killing of Jews by the Nazis."
The field of stelae is meant to be provocative in its simplicity, Eisenman
said.

Beneath one of the stelae, the monument's initiator Lea Rosh buried a
molar and a yellow cloth star that belonged to two murdered Jews; in doing
so, she made good on a promise to herself to put the objects to rest.

Indescribable horrors

Holocaust survivor Sabina van der Linden of Sydney, Australia, told of the
"indescribable horrors" that she had experienced as an 11-year-old child
in Nazi Germany. Her family's history is documented in the underground
information center.

One can't hold descendants responsible for their parents' acts, Van der
Linden said. "But you can hold them responsible for what they do with the
memories of their ancestors' crimes."

(source: Deutsche Welle)