May 11



GERMANY:

Germany unveils 'on the edge' Holocaust memorial


Germany unveiled a haunting new memorial in the heart of Berlin on
Tuesday that aims, through its controversial abstract design,
to preserve the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazi terror.

Speaking to an emotional audience that included Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder and Holocaust survivors, the head of the German parliament said
the fierce debate that has surrounded the project since its start 17 years
ago was bound to continue.

But he called the wrangling understandable given the historical weight of
a project that has forced Germans into tough decisions about how to
remember the darkest chapter in their history.

``It has been said that the Holocaust touches the very edge of our
understanding and this memorial is on the edge,'' said Wolfgang Thierse,
president of the Bundestag.

``It is an expression of the difficulty in finding an artistic form that
can convey the incomprehensible, monstrous Nazi crime of genocide against
Europe's Jews.''

Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial consists of 2,711
gray gravestone-like slabs of varying height that form a tight grid
pattern through which visitors can wander. It sits on a vast plot of land
between the Brandenburg Gate and the buried remains of Adolf Hitler's
bunker.

Since the idea for a memorial surfaced just before the Berlin Wall fell in
1989, a debate has raged in Germany over how best to remember the
Holocaust.

Critics have argued that the design is too abstract and attacked the
decision to put the memorial in such a prominent location. Others have
criticized it for honoring the Jews and not other victims of Nazi terror.

Lea Rosh, a journalist who led the campaign for a memorial, estimates
about half of Germans oppose the result.

COURAGEOUS

Still, supporters see it is a powerful symbol of Germany's readiness to
face up to its past and preserve the memory of Nazi crimes for future
generations.

``You can argue with how they went about it, but no other country has
erected a monument to its misdeeds. It's courageous,'' said Michael
Cullen, a Berlin-based U.S. architectural historian who has written
extensively about it.

Eisenman -- whose previous works include the Wexner Center for the Visual
Arts in Columbus, Ohio and the City of Culture in Galicia, Spain -- views
his latest work as a metaphor for the Nazi regime and the mad, systematic
nature of its genocide.

From a distance, the site looks like a dark, placid ocean. As visitors
descend on uneven, sloping ground into the memorial, street noise fades.
The unmarked concrete blocks, tilted at odd angles, rise around them to
heights of up to 4.7 meters (15 feet).

The experience is intended to create feelings of unease and loneliness,
encouraging discussion and reflection on the plight of the Jewish victims
of the Third Reich.

An underground information center, added to the original plan at the
request of the German government, complements the field of pillars with
personal stories of individual Jews across Europe that were killed by the
Nazis.

Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany,
called the memorial an important, necessary signal of the country's
determination to remember its crimes.

But he said the ``real'' places of memory were the concentrations camps
and other sites where Jews were killed.

``It would be regrettable, scandalous if these sites were to pay a price
because of the erection of this memorial,'' he told the audience. ``An
abstract memorial cannot take the place of those locations where the
crimes were committed.''

(source: Reuters)


*************************************


Holocaust Memorial Opens in Berlin


Germany's much debated and long-awaited Holocaust memorial was officially
opened Tuesday here in the very city where the genocide against the Jews
was conceived, planned and administered.

"Today we are opening a memorial that commemorates the worst, the most
atrocious of the crimes committed by Nazi Germany, the attempt to destroy
a whole people," said Wolfgang Thierse, president of the German
Parliament, which authorized the construction of the memorial six years
ago.

The inauguration ceremony, attended by all the senior members of Germany's
government, including Chancellor Gerhard Schrder, took place in a large
white tent set up on the edge of the memorial field itself, only yards
from the place where Hitler's underground bunker was.

The ceremony, which lasted two and a half hours, consisted of speeches, a
short film and a medley of Yiddish and Hebrew songs, apparently intended
to remind Berliners of the people and the rich Jewish-German culture that
were destroyed.

"The horror touches the limit of our comprehension," Mr. Thierse said.
"This memorial acts on the limits of our comprehension." It will serve, he
continued, "as a place of memory" for future generations, helping them "to
face up to the incomprehensible facts."

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, as it is officially called,
was designed by the New York architect Peter Eisenman. It consists mainly
of 2,711 gray concrete slabs of varying heights arranged in a tight,
waving grid that extends over more than five acres in central Berlin, only
a couple of hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate.

The debates over whether to have such a memorial and what form it should
take extend back 17 years, when a small group of private German citizens,
led by a television journalist, Lea Rosh, and a historian, Eberhard Jckel,
neither of whom is Jewish, first began pressing for Germany to honor the
six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Among the rejected proposals was one to inscribe the names of all six
million of the victims on an immense tilted concrete surface. Another was
to create a Holocaust museum. Other ideas involved a memorial not only to
the Jews but to all the victims of Nazism.

The decision in the end to build a field of steles dedicated to the memory
of the Jewish victims alone, accompanied by an underground information
center, has not been accepted by everybody, including members of Germany's
small Jewish community.

Reflecting the continuing disagreements, Paul Spiegel, the president of
the Central Council of the Jews in Germany and a speaker at the opening
ceremony on Tuesday, expressed what he called "reservations" about the
memorial, saying that it was "an incomplete statement."

Specifically, Mr. Spiegel said, by not including non-Jewish victims, the
memorial suggests that there was a "hierarchy of suffering," when, he
said, "pain and mourning are great in all afflicted families."

In addition, Mr. Spiegel criticized the memorial for providing no
information on the Nazi perpetrators themselves and therefore blunting the
visitors' "confrontation with the crime."

But in a partial response to Mr. Spiegel, Mr. Eisenman, who followed him
to the podium, said, "It is clear that we won't have solved all the
problems - architecture is not a panacea for evil - nor will we have
satisfied all those present today, but this cannot have been our
intention."

By far the most touching moment of the inaugural statement was a quiet
speech by Sabina van der Linden, who came with her husband, children and
grandchildren from Australia to represent the victims, or, as she put it,
to be "the voice of the lucky few, the voice of the survivors."

"Try to imagine me not as the elderly woman before you, but as an
11-year-old girl from a small town in Poland," she said. "As an
11-year-old child, I witnessed unbelievable cruelty."

Ms. van der Linden described how she and her mother tried to hide when the
Nazis began to select Jews for deportation, but they were found and
separated and her mother was taken away, never to be seen again. She lost
her father and her brother as well, she said.

The medley of Hebrew and Yiddish songs that followed the speeches was sung
by Joseph Malovany, cantor of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York,
accompanied by the choir of the White Stork Synagogue in Wroclaw, Poland,
and by the Lower Silesian German-Polish Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.

(source: New York Times)

********************


Jewish leader attacks new Berlin Holocaust memorial


The head of Germany's Central Council of Jews, Paul Spiegel, sharply
criticised Berlin's Holocaust memorial at its opening ceremony on
Tuesday for being too abstract and failing to confront the issue of German
guilt.

Spiegel, Germany's most prominent Jewish leader, pulled no punches in his
keynote speech at the inauguration of the German government's memorial for
the six million Jews murdered under the Nazi Third Reich.

"The 'Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe' honours the victims of
Nazism - but it does not refer directly to the perpetrators," he said.

Spiegel said the memorial designed by Peter Eisenman - comprised of 2,711
undulating concrete

blocks covering a site the size of three football fields - failed to ask
the question "Why?" and spared viewers any "confrontation on questions of
guilt and responsibility."

Instead, he complained, it merely showed the Jews "as a nation of victims
poured in 2,711 concrete pillars."

This leaves the Holocaust memorial with an "incomplete message," he
warned.

The memorial's columns resemble a field of gravestones sunk into the
ground to varying depths. Visitors are left on their own to wander through
the concrete blocks which have no set paths or signposts in what appears
to be a deliberate attempt by Eisenman to disorient viewers.

Spiegel said any abstract art work attempting to depict the Holocaust,
such as Berlin's memorial, was fated to lose out in the bid to prevent
people from forgetting past horrors.

He underlined that the real Holocaust memorials - aside from Yad Vashem in
Israel - were the former Nazi concentration camps, the mass graves and the
burned-down synagogues in Germany.

"Here we were humiliated and betrayed by our neighbours and millions of us
were murdered in the most gruesome manner," said Spiegel.

German Parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse defended the memorial as
"an expression of the difficulty of finding an artistic form for the
incomprehensible monstrosity of Nazi crimes.

"Today we are opening a memorial to the worst, the most horrible of Nazi
Germany's crimes - the attempt to destroy an entire people," said Thierse.

But this singular element of the memorial was also criticised by Spiegel
who said there was a danger of creating a "hierarchy of victims."

"Given torture and death there can be no ranking of the suffering of
individuals," said Spiegel, who won applause by calling for memorials to
be built for Roma and homosexual Nazi victims.

Spiegel welcomed the memorial's underground museum and a 'Room of Names'
where the names of 3.5 million known Holocaust victims are documented on a
computer database.

"But as experience shows, only some of the visitors will make the effort
to deepen their knowledge with facts after collecting impressions among
the columns," he said.

"The majority of the people in Germany, as in other countries, have the
mistaken idea they know enough about the Holocaust and are sated with
information on the Nazi period," Spiegel said.

While wishing the Holocaust memorial well in its bid to "reach hearts and
minds," Spiegel's concluding remarks were nothing short of damning.

"The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is not an authentic place,"
said the German Jewish leader.

Spiegel represents Germany's fast-growing Jewish community which has
expanded from about 30,000 in 1989 to over 100,000 today due to
immigration from the former Soviet Union.

The criticism by Spiegel came after almost two decades of bitter wrangles
over building the Holocaust memorial.

Critics say that the monument - which is opening exactly 60 years after
Nazi Germany's capitulation - comes far too late and is far too big.

This has been rejected by Thierse who said collective feelings needed for
such a memorial needed time to develop.

The Holocaust memorial is built almost on top of the Berlin bunker in
which Adolf Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945 as the Soviet Red
Army captured Berlin.

After construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the site became part of the
Cold War edifice's death strip with land mines and border guards armed
with submachine guns.

Among the controversies linked to the memorial was the revelation that
builders were using an anti-graffiti coating supplied by the German
company Degussa, whose forerunner made poison gas used to murder Jews in
Nazi concentration camp gas chambers.

Eventually the Degussa coating was accepted because it was deemed that the
company had made fair efforts to account for and own up to its Third Reich
past.

The memorial, which was fenced in during construction, will be open 24
hours a day and no longer have any protective barrier. An information
centre overlooking the construction site was daubed with anti-Semitic
slogans last year.

The memorial architect Eisenman, however, said he was relaxed about the
threat of graffiti and noted this might even make the memorial more
interesting.

(source: Expatica)