Impatience on a monument
Peter Carrier on how Berliners cannot agree on plans to build a memorial to Holocaust victims Nearly every street or square in Berlin bears the scars of 20th-century history: gap- ing holes between buildings, rows of monotonous high-rise blocks from the GDR, but also monumental sculptures, inscriptions, memorials, museums and information centres marking sites of the Wilhemine Empire and Weimar Republic, Nazi crimes and resistance, or the 1948 air- lift and the Wall. In 1993, the Neue Wache, or central memorial `to victims of war and tyranny', was inaugurated, and a new Jew- ish museum will be opened this year.
The idea to build a central monument to Jewish victims of the Holocaust was launched in 1988, and an area of 20,000 square metres (the approximate dimen- sions of Trafalgar Square) has been reserved in the heart of Berlin between the Brandenburg Gate and Leipziger Platz.
But does Germany need another war memorial? After a decade of painstaking negotiations, few people today seem to want the monument, apart from the three promoters (the initiator and campaigner for Jewish affairs Lea Rosh, and commis- sions from the local Berlin and federal gov- ernments). At a time when existing museums are under-funded, it is consid- ered too big and too expensive at DM16 million (£6 million). It will be financed half by the federal and local governments joint- ly, and half by private donations. It has provoked the wrath of representatives of other victim communities, including gyp- sies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally handicapped.
Not even Helmut Kohl is convinced. He personally intervened to reject the model designed by Christine Jackob-Marks (a bronze slab inscribed with names of Jewish victims of the Holocaust) which was select- ed in 1995. The second batch of proposals, currently on show at the Marstall Gallery in Berlin, testifies to the city planners' cau- tious attempt to find a form of urban art which causes as little political fuss as possi- ble. But there is much opposition in the art world and Jewish community. The presi- dent of the Academy of Arts, Gyorgy Kon- rad, condemns the 'didactic kitsch, arrogant insinuations, pretentious symbols, ideas, concepts'.
Despite public and political resistance, Berlin is nevertheless destined to receive this 'Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe', situated only a few yards from the future British embassy in Wilhelmstrasse. Keen to avoid the humiliation of another postponement of the project ten years after its inception, the senate has announced a stringent set of deadlines. The final winner will be announced this month, the founda- tion stone laid on 10 June, and inaugurated on 20 January 1999, the 56th anniversary of the Wannsee conference. Rosh is adamant that 'we cannot afford to repeat the fiasco of the first competition'.
The hot favourite is the project put for- ward by the architect Peter Eisenman and artist Richard Serra: a forest of 4,000 square concrete pillars with regular gaps of 92 cm between each of them. Its abstrac- tion is designed to neutralise any political aspirations. 'Our monument,' claim its pro- ponents, 'has no goal, no end, and no path can be found in or out .. . It evokes no nos- talgia, no memory, no commemoration of the past, but only the living memory of individual experience.'
The three other short-listed proposals include a fragmented star of David made of 18 concrete panels (Gesine Weinmiller), an assembly of concrete 'voids' cast from the symbolic inaccessible spaces of the new Jewish Museum (Daniel Libeskind), and a collection of 39 lampposts each bearing the word 'why' in different languages (Jochen Gerz).
Further interest is given to the exhibition by the conflicting camps occupied by sec- tions of the selection committee. The group of experts, which includes the histo- rian James E. Young and architect Joseph Kleihues, has opted for the projects of Weinmiller and Eisenman/Serra, while Rosh favours Gerz, and the Berlin Senate backs Libeskind. The conspicuous politici- sation of the selection procedure has `My parents don't understand the nuances of Winnie The Pooh like you, Gran.' turned this monument into a key barome- ter of national self-understanding.
This exhibition is therefore a form of plebiscite, giving the public an opportunity to decide for itself (or at least a reason not to protest if it does not). It shows how artists and architects respond when thrust into the centre of a political row. The chal- lenge facing candidates is not the task of representing unrepresentable horrors of the second world war, therefore, but of assuaging the irascible emotional claims provoked by the monument itself. An impossible task? Gerz evades these prob- lems by means of his 'counter' or 'interac- tive' monument: visitors are required not only to read the 39 lampposts, but to visit `The Ear', a small building where they may read documents, watch videos, listen to oral witness accounts and record their own impressions. Motto: art is not to be con- templated, but read, touched and written on in order to stimulate reflection on one's own memories and emotional involvement in the past.
Between the opposing paradigms of abstraction (Eisenman/Serra) and interac- tive pedagogy (Gerz) lies the symbolism of Libeskind and Weinmiller, containing allu- sions to Jewish iconography and items of Berlin's historical urban topography such as the nearby Reichstag or Goethe memo- rial. Most runners-up also opt for symbol- ism ranging from Rebecca Horn's 'Soul Flag' (a forest garden with a symbolic grave and a 27-metre-high flagpole) to Markus Liipertz's kitsch statue of a giant Rachel.
This exhibition is the culmination of a ten-year-long process of public enlighten- ment on the relation between art, history and politics. Many are dismayed by the challenge: 500 artists and architects took part in the first competition in 1995, and not one was considered suitable; 25 took part in 1997, and one will grudgingly be pushed through at all costs. 'There simply is no appropriate monument,' argues Matte Lehming in the Tagesspiegel, concluding that the only solution is to build just such an inappropriate monument quickly, if only to 'put an end to this horrific debate'. Yet the debate has released a surge of creative energy in the German press. 'That was the best seminar on public art about the mem- ory of the Holocaust that I have ever expe- rienced,' explained James E. Young after the selection committee meeting.
Where consensus is impossible, as it is here, because of conflicting political lean- ings, historical understandings and artistic tastes, perhaps the best solution would be to build nothing. Why not abandon the pro- ject, as many recommend? Or fence off the site as it now stands, rubble and all, and let grass grow as testimony to the passage of time, and as a fitting memorial to a monu- mental folly of the 1990s? This, after all, was how Berlin inadvertently commemorat- ed history during much of its 44 years isola- tion under Allied command: by managing wasteland and the rubble of historic sites.
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