the victims of the Holocaust, but also fulfills the center’s aspiration to provide information about those responsible for the crimes. This aspect of Germany’s Nazi past becomes visible in the historical presentation of the different stages in the escalation of violence and the naming of the perpetrators in the entry foyer. Another important element of the center is the portal of memorial sites located in the exit foyer. This enables visitors to find their way to other exhibitions and institutions, particularly those located at the original historical sites in Germany and abroad. In an adjacent room visitors can view videos from an archive of interviews with survivors which the foundation has established in cooperation with the Fortunoff Archives at Yale University (Baranowski 2009; Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 2010, 14–54). The last of the four exhibition rooms, the Room of Sites, shows films and images of places where European Jews were persecuted and killed, and of ghettos, deportation routes, and death marches. Between showcases in the shape of stelae, there are niches in which one can hear individual eyewitness reports from these sites.
Reactions
Since its completion, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has become a tourist magnet. Visitors from all over the world stroll through Eisenman’s sculpture and have their pictures taken lying or sitting on one of the stelae in front of the Brandenburg Gate. There is a surprising uninhibitedness even gaiety at this place dedicated to the mourning and remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. While the earlier tendency of people jumping from stela to stela is less and less tolerated, playing hide and seek is still widespread, especially among younger visitors. It appears that in most cases a visit to the information center conveys the meaning of the memorial and provides visitors with an opportunity for further reflection and contemplation. The Austrian cultural scientist Heidemarie Uhl has pointed out that this surprising constellation, “the actual Memorial as a tourist attraction and ‘hands-on’ sculpture in public space and the subterranean Information Center as the actual place where remembrance takes place,” strongly contradicts the expectations and intentions that prevailed at the memorial’s inception (Uhl 2008, 2). Other authors have also witnessed an “unexpected reversal”: While the center has become the site of Holocaust remembrance, the field of stelae “expresses the ephemeral and fragile nature of memory as it is experienced in the presence” (Sion 2008, 171).
How do visitors see this? A new study by Marion Klein (2012) investigates how secondary school students perceive the memorial and the information center. This study has shown that at least the majority of German students has already learned quite a bit about the Holocaust in school and is well aware of the “normative expectations regarding appropriate remembrance.” However, this generation in particular tends to regard the expectation to feel grief and empathy as “imposed from the outside” and “put on” (Klein 2012, 35). Eisenman’s abstract memorial leaves more leeway as to how one should react and remember. This is surprising for many. On the one hand, it is liberating and opens up the possibility of finding one’s own individual approach to a difficult subject. On the other, the memorial’s openness bears the risk of being perceived merely as an attractive perhaps even adventurous space in the city center, hence forfeiting its “function as a cultural representation of the Holocaust.” In this sense, the Holocaust Memorial, or rather its being used in this way, represents the forgetting of the Holocaust in today’s society (Klein 2012, 138, 141). However, the interviews Klein conducted among her sample group show that this forgetting is frequently disrupted, for instance by stumbling on the uneven ground in the deepness of the sculpture, which often triggers contemplation quite unexpectedly (151). The students also perceive the center in various ways: Klein’s study indicates that the individual and family histories presented in the exhibition do elicit emotions and sympathy. At the same time, they provide an opportunity for some of the students to find a connection with their own world. Others regard the exhibition merely as a presentation of facts that prescribe how they should think and feel (144). Female students in particular, however, tend to react positively to the personalized portrayal in the center; they regard the focus on individual fates as more “moving” than the abstract memorial (for gender-specific perceptions, see Klein 2012, 354). According to a survey of 824 secondary school students conducted by Christian Saehrendt in 2007, two-thirds of respondents are much more impressed by the information center than by the actual memorial (Saehrendt 2007).
Not only German adolescents visit the memorial and the information center. A visit to the Holocaust Memorial has become an integral part of tours of Berlin, and it appears that many tour groups from Germany and abroad plan a quick stop at the memorial from Potsdamer Platz, and then depart for the government district and the Brandenburg Gate. Here, the memorial appears as just another tourist attraction, at which people do not spend much time, nor are they very well prepared. The center’s guest book, however, shows that many visitors come especially for the memorial and the center. The exhibition has audio guides in various languages, and leaflets are available in 20 languages. The texts of the exhibition are only in German and English because of spatial limitations, but the foundation offers regular guided tours in several languages. These tours contain information on the history of the memorial’s inception and realization, the history of the site, the architecture of the field of stelae, and an introduction to the main themes of the exhibition. One visitor wrote: “At the beginning, I thought the memorial was strange, even devoid of meaning, but after the tour of the underground part, I was overwhelmed” (Guest book, June 24, 2008, Archives of the Foundation).
A moving experience
This is what happens to many people who have passed through the memorial and then visited the center. After returning from the subterranean exhibition to daylight and into the memorial visitors often feel changed. Many are moved to tears. It might be a common experience that people, after they have visited the center, are able to really feel the essence of the site, which Agamben (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) described in a poetic way. As architect Peter Eisenman (2005a), who was originally opposed to the center, put it in an interview with the the Nation: “It’s not just the columns and it’s not just the archive it’s the fact that they stand together, and you have to see them apart and together and understand the edge between the two.” The interaction of both, the memorial and the underground center, makes this a unique and very special place of Holocaust commemoration in the German capital. Would the memorial have the same effect without the center and vice versa? Both would not be the same. The memorial would probably be perceived by many who have no knowledge of the Holocaust as an adventure playground; the information center discreetly hidden underground “needs the attraction of the field of stelae to draw visitors and to be properly valued,” Brigitte Sion observes (2008, 216). In the center, the presence of the great memorial above can be felt. When we leave the exhibition and go up to the memorial, we have more knowledge, and above all take images and traces of the victims with us while we experience the memorial anew. Together, these two parts of the ensemble “offer an original and moving experience of Holocaust memory, but not separately” (Sion 2008, 216).
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. “Die zwei Gedächtnisse” [The two memories]. Die Zeit 19, May 4. Accessed April 7, 2014. http://www.zeit.de/2005/19/Mahnmal_2f_Agamben/komplettansicht.
Baranowski, Daniel, ed. 2009. “Ich bin die Stimme der Millionen”: Das Videoarchiv im Ort der Information [“I am the voice of the million”: The video archive at the Information Center]. Berlin: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas.
Baumann, Ulrich. 2011. “‘Sinn aus der Tiefe’: Der ‘Ort der Information’ am Holocaustdenkmal in Berlin” [“Meaning from the depths”: The Information Center at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin]. In Die Verfolgung der Juden während der NS-Zeit: Stand und Perspektiven der Dokumentation der Vermittlung und der Erinnerung [The persecution of the Jews during
