The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is expansive, a large plot in the middle of Berlin (adjacent to the site of Hitler’s bunker, the American Embassy, and other socially and historically significant buildings), a sprawling field of 2711 gray stone stelae of varying heights. The ground is paved with small square cobblestones, also gray, and the terrain is uneven. Walking into the depths of the memorial, as you are encouraged to do, you quickly feel swallowed up; the ground slopes downhill and the stone blocks, ever more reminiscent of grave-markers, loom over your head. Organized along a rectilinear grid, the stones allow you to look straight ahead or directly to either side, staring down a long claustrophobic path only occasionally observing signs of life – fleeting glances of people appearing momentarily and swiftly disappearing behind another stone block.
The group’s consensus seemed to be that the designer, Peter Eisenmann, intended a walk through the memorial to simulate, in some small way, the experience of a Jew in the Shoah. I quickly became disoriented walking among the stone blocks and felt overwhelmed as they surged higher and higher above my head. The bumpy ground was difficult to traverse; I was unsure of my steps. Others in the group remarked on the experience of encountering the familiar face of another group member inside the memorial – they saw each other in passing and then not again for the remainder of their time in the memorial. Some felt the uniformed, unornamented nature of the memorial’s design reflected the Nazi’s systematic, impersonal approach to slaughter (Indeed, we learned that part of what propelled the shift from travelling firing squads to gas chambers inside of extermination camps was the Nazi soldiers’ inability to handle the psychological trauma of executing people at such a close range. Later developments in Nazi strategy would attempt to minimize contact between prisoners and SS personnel).
We discussed the merits of an earlier design proposed for the memorial, rejected by Germany’s then-chancellor, which included each of the approximately four million names of Jewish victims known to historians. The names were to be engraved on stones, many placed on the ground, and those in opposition to the design objected to the symbolic meaning generated by visitors’ stepping on victims’ names. Some families did not want their loved ones’ names included. Others worried the presence of four million names would obscure the existence of the two million as of yet anonymous Jewish dead.
I was looking forward to visiting the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, having studied it in a couple of undergraduate architecture and Urban Studies courses at the University of Pittsburgh. I struggled, both in class and while visiting the memorial, with the memorial’s almost painful openness to interpretation; there is little historical context provided above ground save the title of the memorial carved in German and English on a block facing the main entrance to the memorial, though the memorial can be approached and entered from all sides.
I find accounts of mass atrocities most moving when they manage to humanize and individuate victims. The six million number is ubiquitous in reference to the Shoah, and I’ve come to clear terms with my own mind’s inability to comprehend the magnitude of such a figure. Unable to zoom out far enough to appreciate the scope, I prefer to zoom in and find personal meaning in the details. I am more or less in a constant process of reckoning with cruelty – my resting state believes (perhaps naïvely) in human goodness, and when confronted with extreme brutality, I grapple with my mind’s instinct to glaze over; I am privileged in that I am able to ignore suffering which doesn’t touch my everyday life. In the information center beneath the memorial, designed by Dagmar von Wilcken, the familiar violence of the Shoah struck me anew.
What the aboveground memorial may lack in specificity, the museum makes up in eyewitness testimony and often wrenching personal detail. The museum does provide a macro-historical narrative of the Shoah’s precipitating events, but it is at its most effective when it speaks in survivors’ and victims’ own words:
A postcard from a mother sent to her daughter abroad the day before she was departed to and murdered at Auschwitz.
Accounts of the so-called “worker Jews” who were forced to operate the crematoria at Sobibor and Treblinka, read aloud by actors.
A description of the massacre at Babi Jar from a woman who was perhaps the shooting’s only survivor, who hid among thousands of corpses in a mass grave until the Nazis threw some dirt over the bodies and withdrew.
Returning to street level, the faceless stone blocks of the memorial conveyed even less meaning to me than they had before.
I much prefer the stumbling block memorials, a project by the artist Gunter Demnig memorializing individuals at their last freely chosen place of residence– small golden cubes embedded throughout German cities in the stone pavement in front of houses out of which Jews were deported. The blocks are engraved with a person’s name, birth year, and year and location of death. Walking alone in Mitte, I encountered three or four clumps of stumbling blocks on one street, Gipstrasse. I stopped and turned around to look over the city block which used to house these Jewish families; I felt I had a new sense of what had been – I could see the people represented by those gold cubes distributed across the space where they had chosen to live.
There are positives and negatives to each memorial, certainly. Specificity and inclusion often appear to be in near-irreconcilable tension. How can we convey both the individual and communal nature of this tragedy? How do we navigate the complex relationship between what is said and what is unsaid? Remembrance is an active process of retelling, and what we choose to remember impacts both how we understand the past and perceive the present. Far from a neutral process, the act of remembrance shapes and reshapes what is remembered.
Later that day, we visited Sachsenhausen, a former concentration camp. We were confronted with almost unspeakable brutality, from the stories our tour guide told of different forms of torture employed there to the remains of the crematorium and the museum panels on the camp’s stone walls detailing the approaches to the extermination of different groups – homosexuals, Roma, Red Army soldiers, political prisoners.
The weather was perfect for a concentration camp visit – gray and dreary. Once we entered the remains of the camp through gates that said “Arbeit mach frei,” – a phrase also present on the gates of Auschwitz and other camps, which struck me for the first time as a figurative truth rather than a lie. Sachsenhausen was an extermination-through-labor camp and guards are reported to have said that the only was out was to die – we encountered a vast open expanse, enclosed by stone walls, with dirt and browning grass stretching out beyond us. Different plots outlined on the ground marked the previous locations of barracks, the gallows, administrative buildings, etc.
My experience of visiting Sachsenhausen, of being on that land, was truly strange. The Shoah has been a part of my consciousness for almost as long as I can remember – unable to resist my macabre fascination with its horrors, they felt almost constantly present to me as a child. It was hard for me to understand that I stood on an actual site where those otherworldly stories of suffering and death took place. I stared at the dirt beneath my feet, wondering which pebbles might have borne witness and whether I could perceive any cosmic residue of prisoners’ pain.
I cried as I dislodged a rock from the earth with my shoe and placed it on a mass grave of the ashes of many of those burned at Sachsenhausen. I have always felt a deep need to visit concentration camps, and at Sachsenhausen, I wondered why. What was different about being physically present in that place? Was I actually any closer to the past or would the past never feel more real to me than it did there? Was I trying to make the Shoah more real to myself, to remember more actively, or to purge my need to remember?