the dedication of the memorial did not include victim groups such as the Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, victims of the Nazi euthanasia program, prisoners of war, forced laborers, and others, the foundation was commissioned to find and support alternate ways to ensure that all victims of National Socialism were remembered and honored appropriately. This task was addressed by an additional advisory board. Members came from 15 different institutions and social groupings, including survivors’ associations, historical research institutes, museums, memorial centers, and youth groups. The main spokesperson was the historian Wolfgang Benz, formerly the director of the Centre for Research into Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin. In the process of planning and setting up the exhibition at the center, the advisory board was also involved in finding answers to the question of how to at least mention these victim groups in the exhibition context. Eventually, additional memorials for them would be erected. Today, there is a memorial dedicated to the homosexuals persecuted under the Nationalist Socialist regime located not far from the Holocaust Memorial, as well as one to remember the murdered Roma and Sinti. A third memorial, dedicated to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia program on Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse 4 has just been accomplished.
An underground location
The 1999 Bundestag resolution added to the memorial an “Information Center referring to the commemorated victims and the historical sites of remembrance.” This was a twofold compromise between, on the one hand, those who favored a house of remembrance with archives, library, and museum in combination with a smaller memorial and, on the other hand, supporters of a pure memorial with no or very little additional information. The fact that Michael Naumann (the newly established State Minister of Cultural Affairs) strongly emphasized the need to educate rather than simply to represent the Holocaust with an abstract sculpture, gathered considerable support among many people. Consequently, the Bundestag decision deliberately did not mention a Holocaust museum, but allowed for an information center on the victims of the Holocaust. The formal resolution produced by the Bundestag tried to incorporate within the concept the original historic sites where killings had taken place and to make sure that existing memorials in Berlin and other places would not be neglected as a result of a centralized national memorial (Carrier 2005, 122). However, the task of turning these concessions into a meaningful form and of developing an effective exhibition presented great challenges to all those involved. The first of these was the question of where the center was to be situated in relation to the memorial. This also touched on the relationship between the integrity of the artists’ concept for the memorial and the necessity of educating the public about the Holocaust. The decision of the Kuratorium to locate it underground was largely the result of Peter Eisenman’s wish to “effectively minimize any disturbance to the memorial’s field of pillars” (2005b, 11). For Eisenman, who was long opposed to the idea of an information center, it was clearly subordinate to the memorial. The center was not to draw visitors away from the memorial and, at the same time, it had to be integrated into the artist’s overall concept. The architect Salomon Korn, one of the representatives of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in the Kuratorium and chair of the Frankfurt Jewish Community, also advocated the construction of the center underground. However, this was not intended as a spatial demonstration of the center’s “subordination” but rather to secure its status as an integral part of the memorial that should not be isolated from the memorial nor artistically and formally regarded as an alien element. Korn anticipated that a building above ground would have competed with the memorial, which means that it could only have lost. The specific nature of Eisenman’s great design, its “lack of direction, missing axiality, regularity, and ubiquity” [“Richtungslosigkeit, fehlende Axialität, Gleichmäßigkeit und Ubiquität”] would have been disturbed by a building on its premises, irrespective of its location; visitors would hardly have noticed an intentionally small and neutral edifice “due to its lack of significance and selfevidence” (Salomon Korn, submission to the meeting of the Kuratorium on February 24, 2000, Archives of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin). Korn’s plea for subterranean construction could thus be understood as a plea in favor of the center. It was also Salomon Korn who, through his active participation in the working group Design, which had been established by the Kuratorium in January 2001, contributed significantly to the center’s successful realization when negotiations between the historians and exhibition designers involved in the process reached a stalemate.
Historians at work
Soon after the establishment of the foundation, the Kuratorium chose three members from its midst to develop a historical concept for the center. All three were historians with different agendas. Eberhard Jäckel, a historian of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, was one of the initiators of the memorial. Initially, Jäckel thought it sufficient to install a plaque at the memorial commemorating the number of six million murdered people; he had been opposed to the idea of creating a memorial in combination with a museum or information site. Then there was Reinhard Rürup, a prominent historian of Jewish social history. He had a very hard time because his own project, the exhibition Topography of Terror, located on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (now Niederkirchnerstrasse), with its new building under construction seemed to be somewhat neglected by the Berlin municipal government. Funding had become very difficult. Indeed, to many it was a scandal that the preservation of this particular historical site, where the Nazis had developed their murderous plans for the Holocaust, had taken so long, and was not funded by the federal government equally as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews. Was it easier for contemporary German politicians to honor and identify with the victims than to face and remember the country’s past as perpetrators? This has, of course, been part of the controversy surrounding the memorial and was an ongoing issue until finally, in 2010, the new building and exhibition Topography of Terror, after years of delay, was opened (Topography of Terror 2012). Unfortunately, Rürup’s suggestions for the center’s exhibition concept seemed to be dominated by his fear that the project Topography of Terror could be damaged by the creation of a competitive site. He tended to reduce the center to a small adjunct to the memorial and not consider it as an important institution in its own right which would probably attract the interest of millions of visitors. His goal was to provide comprehensive information on the Holocaust only in the nearby Topography of Terror exhibition. Jäckel agreed with him on this. The third and youngest member of this group of historians was Andreas Nachama, then chair of the Jewish Community in Berlin and on leave from his position as the executive director of the Topography of Terror project. He was more open-minded to the multiple tasks of the new center underneath the memorial and, in contrast to Jäckel and Rürup, he was willing to address pedagogical issues such as the needs of younger visitors. However, because he did not participate in all the meetings, his input was less influential in comparison with that of Jäckel and Rürup. As managing director, I was also a member of the group and joined the discussions, as did some of the younger historians who worked for my office.
The basic concept
An important framing for the exhibition concept was established by the Kuratorium’s decision that the main function of the center, as regards content, was “to personalize and individualize the horrors of the Holocaust” (Third meeting of the Kuratorium, February 24, 2000, Archives of the Foundation). The exhibition would make it clear that behind the almost inconceivable number of six million murdered Jews lay the reality of individual lives which were to be commemorated here. The second framing came from the architect: there would be 800 square meters of space for the exhibition, four square exhibition rooms of equal size, and several lobby areas. For those who wanted to minimize the role and tasks of the future center, this was more than enough. But for those who wanted to provide historical context and information about its victims at this central place of Holocaust commemoration in the German capital, it was quite limited.
Between its introduction of the basic concept to the members of the Kuratorium in July 2000 and the report of March 7, 2001, the small working group of historians developed a first draft that was quite minimal. The underlying perception was that
