white concrete pillar under blue sky

white concrete pillar under blue sky


The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe[1] (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000-square-metre (200,000 sq ft) [2][3] site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. Actually, the original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but before the unveiling a new law was passed mandating memorials to be wheelchair accessible.[citation needed] After the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 metres (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 metres (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres (7.9 in to 15 ft 5.0 in).[2] They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew.[4][5] An attached underground "Place of Information" (German: Ort der Information) holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.[6]

Building began on April 1, 2003, and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II in Europe, and opened to the public two days later. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Mitte neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately €25 million.[7] of the largest Jewish populations in Europe before the Second World War.[8] Adjacent to the Tiergarten, it is centrally located in Berlin's Friedrichstadt district, close to the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate.[9] The monument is situated on the former location of the Berlin Wall, where the "death strip" once divided the city. During the war, the area acted as the administrative center of Hitler's killing machine, with the Chancellery building and his bunker both nearby.[10] The memorial is located near many of Berlin's foreign embassies.[9]

The monument is composed of 2711 rectangular concrete blocks, laid out in a grid formation, the monument is organized into a rectangle-like array covering 1.9 hectares (4.7 acres). This allows for long, straight, and narrow alleys between them, along which the ground undulates.
Interpretations
According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.[11] The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe official English website[2] states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman said the number and design of the monument had no symbolic significance.[12][13]

However, observers have noted the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery.[14][15][16] The abstract installation leaves room for interpretation, the most common being that of a graveyard. "The memorial evokes a graveyard for those who were unburied or thrown into unmarked pits, and several uneasily tilting stelae suggest an old, untended, or even desecrated cemetery."[17] Many visitors have claimed that from outside the memorial, the field of grey slabs resemble rows of coffins. While each stone slab is approximately the size and width of a coffin, Eisenman has denied any intention to resemble any form of a burial site.[18] The memorial's grid can be read as both an extension of the streets that surround the site and an unnerving evocation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that kept the killing machine grinding along.[3] Wolfgang Thierse, the president of Germany's parliament, described the piece as a place where people can grasp "what loneliness, powerlessness and despair mean".[19] Thierse talked about the memorial as creating a type of mortal fear in the visitor. Visitors have described the monument as isolating, triggered by the massive blocks of concrete, barricading the visitor from street noise and sights of Berlin.[19]
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