Berlin

Kohl and his advisers liked this version better, but by now the chancellor had an election to face, and there was considerable sentiment in Germany against erecting a new Holocaust memorial at all in the future capital. The Social Democrats had adopted this stance, and their candidate, Gerhard Schröder, was ahead in the polls. Kohl therefore put the project on hold until after the elections.

Kohl of course lost that election, leaving Germany not only with a new chancellor, but with the irony that the man who had done the most to shape the planning for the new capital would not be leading the government when it moved to Berlin in 1999. As for the Holocaust memorial, Schröder opposed it on grounds that it was “backward-looking,” and thus little help to the new Germany’s need to “move on.” During an address delivered on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Reichs-kristallnacht at the New Synagogue in Berlin, Schröder said that the Germans must “look ahead without forgetting what happened.” He added that reunited Germany had come of age and felt “neither superior nor inferior to anyone.” The chancellor’s comments, when combined with novelist Martin Walser’s highly publicized complaint that the Holocaust was being used a “tool of intimidation” to induce “merely a compulsory exercise,” signaled to some observers a dangerous turn in German thinking. “Intellectual nationalism is spreading,” warned Ignaz Bubis, German Jewry’s chief spokesman, “and it is not free of an understated anti-Semitism.”

Stung by such criticism, Schröder quickly declared that he would subject the Holocaust memorial to further review. In January 1999 he approved yet another design, which combined Eisenman’s toned-down maze with a research center for scholars and a “House of Remembrance” featuring a 65-foot-high “Wall of Books.” The books, a million tomes in all, would be open to consultation by scholars, thereby accommodating the idea that the Holocaust memorial should not be just a thing to gaze at, or to get lost in, but an “interactive” center of education and research. Michael Naumann, Schröder’s minister of culture, declared himself satisfied with the new arrangement. “All statements pro and con have been taken care of,” he said. “This is a superb synthesis. It is not a compromise.”

Of course, this solution was a compromise, like virtually everything else in the new Berlin. Final approval awaited a vote in the Bundestag, which came on June 25, 1999. After more than a decade of debate, Germany had finally agreed to build a memorial in Berlin to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. “We are not building this monument solely for the Jews,” said Wolfgang Thierse, the speaker of the parliament. “We are building it for ourselves. It will help us confront a chapter in our history.”

A memorial devoted to the Holocaust is not the same thing as a museum devoted to the Holocaust. Some people thought that Germany ought to have such a museum, but this need had already been brilliantly addressed by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Instead of a museum focusing specifically on the Holocaust, Germany’s new capital ended up getting the “Jewish Museum,” which examines the role of Jews in German life, particularly in Berlin. Yet in many ways this institution is really about the Holocaust, too; its design is as discomforting as the original Eisenman/Serra Holocaust memorial proposal, and its principal purpose is to get people to reflect on the tortuous relationship between Germans and Jews that culminated in Auschwitz. Moreover, like the Holocaust memorial, it stimulated great controversy, and it very nearly did not get built at all.

The idea for a museum devoted to Germany’s and Berlin’s Jews was first floated in the late 1980s, and a design competition was held in 1988, the year before the Wall came down. According to the specifications, the building in question was to be an extension of the existing Berlin Museum on Lindenstrasse in Kreuzberg. The competition was won by the Polish-born American architect Daniel Libe-skind, who shortly thereafter moved his practice from Berlin to Los Angeles out of frustration over Hans Stimmann’s conservative building codes. Libeskind’s winning design, which with a few modifications was the one that actually got built, proposed a zigzag structure resembling a lightning bolt, or a distorted Star of David. Its interior contains a main passageway leading to a Chamber of Reflection resembling a chimney, as well as Caligari-like slanted walls, vertigo-inducing shafts, and empty spaces that the architect calls “voids,” which are meant to draw attention to the vacuum in Berlin left by the disappearance of tens of thousands of its Jews.

Garden of Exiles at the Jewish Museum, 1999