Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe

In Berlin this past weekend I visited the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. A few weeks prior we had discussed it in class through the essay Memory and Monument after 9/11 by James E. Young in the book The Future of Memory (Crownshaw and Rowland, 2010).  I want to revisit this text now in light of having experienced the monument in person. 

James E. Young writes of Peter Eisenman's design as:

...a waving field of stelae. Where the 'monumental' had traditionally used its size to humiliate or cow viewers into submission, this memorial in its humanly proportioned forms should put people on an evenfootmg with memory. Visitors and the roles they play as they wade knee-, or chest-, or shoulder-deep into this waving field of stones will not be diminished by the monumental but will be made integral parts of the memorial itself, now invited into a memorial dialogue of equals. Visitors will not be defeated by their memorial obligation here, nor dwarfed by the memory-forms themselves, but rather enjoined by them to come face to face with memory. Able to see over and around these pillars, visitors will have to find their way through this field of stones, even though they are never actually lost in or overcome by the memorial act. In effect, they will make and choose their own individual spaces for memory, even as they do so collectively. The implied sense of motion in the gently undulating field also formalizes a kind of memory that is neither frozen in time, nor static in space. The sense of such instability will help visitors resist an impulse towards closure in the memorial act and heighten one's own role in anchoring memory in oneself.

 My experience of the memorial on a crisp and cold January day echoes Young's words. I was not overcome or humbled by the physical size of the monument. Indeed I do not feel like this monument is designed to burden the visitor with the weight of Holocaust memory in its entirety but instead advocates a steady and personal working-through. As it stretched out before me I had an understanding that I could never gain a full personal experience of the entire monument at once, beyond the superficial. As my friends and I walked into the monument we instinctively chose different paths, reflecting our individual journeys through the memory, while as Young notes, also experiencing it collectively. As the path led through the undulations the city and other people would come and go around me, expressing memory as a dynamic and evolving process that constantly changes in relation to our understanding of the past and experiences in the present.

Below are some of the photos I took, though they do little to express the experience of being in that space of memory. The second to last picture in the series, which shows ice expanding out of a crack in the monument, has stuck in my head. It shows nature's slow erosion of the monument and occurs to me to be an apt (if admittedly cliche) illustration of the process of memory, both individual and cultural, itself. I am left wondering how (and if) our cultural memory of the holocaust will be eroded and changed by temporal distance and what the effects of this could be.

All photographs taken by Ruth Annett.