Berlin

Despite all the criticism of her plan, Rosh pushed forward, and in 1995 a design competition for a National Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was sponsored by the municipal authorities and the federal government. The competition attracted 528 entries, most of them convincing illustrations of the perils of trying to capture the Holocaust in an all-encompassing monument. One of them proposed an immense Ferris wheel equipped with freight cars like the ones in which Jews had been transported to the camps. Its designer explained that this would reflect “the tension between hope and hopelessness, between carnival and genocide.” Another entry proposed a giant oven, burning around the clock. Exactly what it would burn was not specified. Yet another called for erecting a blood-filled container 130 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Daniel Libeskind proposed an arrangement of raw-concrete walls 21 meters high and 115 meters long, which he entitled “Breath of Stone.” Then there was a Star of David sculpture crowned by a broken heart symbolizing German remorse. Another star-design featured a garden bordered in yellow flowers to evoke the yellow stars the Jews were forced to wear in the Third Reich.

Some of the entries, it should be admitted, reflected an understanding of the drawbacks of all representational memorialization. There were a number of anti-monument proposals that seemed to have been inspired by a famous antimonu-ment in Hamburg, which consisted of a metal tube covered with people’s comments that slowly shrank into an underground silo, thereby symbolizing the element of forgetting inherent in the process of remembering. Among the antimonument proposals for the Holocaust memorial was a block-long series of bus stops, where people could board buses to former concentration camps. (This was not a bad idea, since the authorities of Oranienburg refused to institute a bus line from the town’s train station to Sachsenhausen.) Another, rather less promising, entry suggested grinding up the Brandenburg Gate into fine powder, like crematorium ash, and sprinkling it over the memorial grounds.

The winning design, which was backed by Lea Rosh and her supporters, consisted of a football field-sized tombstone garnished with eighteen boulders brought to Berlin from Masada in Israel, where Jewish zealots had committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in the first century A.D. The boulders were meant to symbolize the small rocks placed by mourners on Jewish gravestones. (The symbolism was somewhat confusing, however, since the Jews who died in the Holocaust had hardly committed suicide.) In addition to the boulders, the tombstone would have engraved on its surface the names of all the officially recorded victims of the Holocaust, some 4.2 million of them. The idea for this apparently derived from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., though of course it was rather more ambitious.

Even many who favored a Holocaust memorial heaped criticism on this design. Not only was it bombastic and kitschy, it would, as Ignaz Bubis objected, heighten the victims’ anonymity rather than personalize their fate. “The name of Moses Rabbinowitch would appear a thousand times,” he pointed out. In the face of this barrage of criticism Kohl personally vetoed the selection and ordered a new competition.

In 1997 the government commissioned a second contest, this time by invitation only. The jury now included a distinguished American Jewish scholar, James E. Young, who had written an influential book called The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Interestingly, Young belonged to the school that was highly skeptical of monuments in general, and Holocaust monuments in particular. Yet eventually he and the other members of the jury found a proposal that they liked by the design team of Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra—a giant labyrinth of 4,000 concrete pillars on an undulating concrete field. The idea here was to pull visitors into a punishing maze: Not only would they be forced to “remember” the Holocaust; they’d have to remember how to get out. “Here there is no goal, no end, no path,” explained the artists. Young called this “the Venus fly trap of Holocaust memorials.”

Conceptually intriguing though it was, this design had a lot of problems. Parents might bring their kids there to permanently ditch them. People would undoubtedly climb up on the pillars to get their orientation, then fall off and hurt or even kill themselves. Was it appropriate for a Holocaust memorial to claim new victims? Once again Kohl intervened, demanding that the designers rework their proposal. Serra refused and dropped out. Eisenman modified the design by reducing the number of pillars and shortening their height. His amended creation was much less menacing: a kind of Holocaust-Lite.