Memorial to all Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial by architect Peter Eisenman with engineer Buro Happold.
This memorial is in Berlin and is dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. There is a great deal of controversy regarding the existence of the Memorial. We are not putting forward a point of view – we are simply relaying how we responded to it.
The 19,000 square-metre Memorial, which opened on May 12, 2005, consists of 2711 stones placed on sloping, uneven ground in an undulating wave-like pattern, giving visitors a feeling of insecurity as though the stones are unstable. Each of the pillars measures 95 x 237.5 centimeters with heights above ground varying from zero to over ones head.
Visitors can enter from all sides, day or night, and wander through the maze as though visiting a graveyard of nameless tombstones. There are no set paths or sign posts to guide viewers and it was designed to deliberately disorient visitors by having all the stones tilted slightly and paths that are not level.
When we walked out between the buildings and saw the memorial – our breath was taken away. It is a very powerful place. We do not know the area or the buildings around the site. We do know that this memorial covers a city block and we observed for a long time before we entered.
I am speaking only for myself.
I walked in from the end where the pillars were quickly over my head. It created some confusion for me – I had no idea where JJ was, nor where I was in relationship to where we had entered, nor how to find him again. The ground was undulating, not so you would fall, just enough to add to the confusion. It was a very sunny day and occasionally others walked across a path in my view, and were as quickly gone again. One could not hear what was outside or around the memorial – there is an other world soundlessness here. Odd times there was the murmur of a conversation somewhere.
Some people walked on the sunny paths across the memorial and others walked the shadows as I did.
One path looked like another and I felt alone, and somewhat disconnected. When I was in the shadows I had to make a decision to walk out into the sunlit path before quickly being hidden once more. It was at once eerie, frightening and powerful.
I know that this memorial has been called a sea of tombs and it is, but it is also for me much much more. This is a representation of what it must have felt like to be an unrequired group of people during the Nazi regime in Europe.
Conversations had to be muted
All activity out and about had to be discreet
All walking in daylight had to be managed
All shadows had to be feared
OR
Shadows safe
NO
daylight walking
NO
activity
OR
conversations
It also has great photographic opportunity with the scale, the strength of the pillars, light and dark, sun rays and shadows and the people.
Always the people.
experienced April 2009
Tags: Berlin, Buro Happold, Germany, holocaust, Holocaust Memorial, Jewish, Memorial Site, memorial to murdered Jews, Peter Eisenman, World War II
