Holocaust memorial _ Peter Eisenman

Holocaust Memorial : Invoking emotions through a banal narrative In a city with history as tumultuous as Berlin, there are myriad of things that you want to see and understand, you are bound to oversee certain of them. Such is the nature of irony that surrounds the locale of Holocaust Memorial, constructed in vicinity of the bunker in which perpetrator of all heinous crimes against the Jews took his own life as he had taken of millions before him.

A few strides away from the famed Brandenburger Tor, this memorial couldn't have asked for a better location to attract the ever-growing tourism in Berlin. As a matter of fact, anyone would simply pass by this site thinking that it's illustration of an Architect's insanity just like I did, except I knew it was more than what met my eyes. Covering an area of 4.7 acres, 2711 concrete protrusions - stelaes, of varying heights from 0.2m - 4.7m are placed in a ground - Field of Stelae, at an equal distance of 0.95m.

On my first encounter, my curiosity was piqued enough for me to venture in to this labyrinth maze of evenly laid out stelaes and the first few steps in and my impression was that of a failed attempt to commemorate the six million victims of Holocaust. While walking deeper I was pondering about the architect's ideology of how 'transforming the primary perception of architecture - visual reality into a tactile experience will work' that I failed to notice the stelaes' taking on lofty proportions slashing my visual perspective into a narrow band of pavement leading to a tree and the sky beyond. An eeriness had settled in, a feeling of being engulfed by this constricted space created by the slightly jagged-somber grey concrete forms and

the undulating topography of the land and it did take me a moment of realization to push away the claustrophobic emotions that the memorial had evoked in me. It was as if I had walked in to a Field of order but the uncertainty imposed while walking through the grid threw me off guard and exposed my inherent fears of disorientation and the potentiality for a state of chaos.

In other words, as architect Peter Eisenman would put it, 'The enormity and the scale of horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is evidently inadequate. Our memorial seek to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia. We can only know the past through the manifestation in the present.' The memorial does present one an opportunity to explore our own interpretations that are triggered as imminent responses of us being confined under this environment.

To supplement the absence of facts presented in the Field of Stelae, we are made to delve deep underground from Cora-Berliner-StraĂ&#x;e in to the personal and emotional trauma the Jewish community and its pupil embarked through a series of rooms designed by Dagmar von Wilcken.

We are invited in to the foyer by the wavy terrain of the roof with slits corresponding to their respective stelae over the ground. According to her, ' By altering the function of the stelae into a bearer of information, a formal link is forged between the Field of Stelae and the Information Centre, a transition from the abstract plane to that of concrete content.'

Walking past the line of images dealing with the persecution and murder of European Jews and a huge portrait of six people, both male and female of different age groups, we enter the Room of Dimensions - showcasing an extent of the victims in each of the then 20 countries in Europe.

Room of Families lays out the fate of 15 different families representative of various hierarchy of lifestyle the Jewish community had before the Holocaust. Room of Names has a continuous audio of biographies of individuals(name displayed on walls) collected in association with Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel. The various atrocities carried out by the National Socialist regime are displayed depending on their location in the Room of Sites. The design is reminiscent of everything that we have seen and observed above and leaves a mark that we are still beneath the Memorial.

Returning the audio guide and climbing up the stairs, I saw the last rays of evening sun reflected from the stelaes and couldn't help but wonder at the reality of what Germans have done. They have given the innumerable Jews murdered at the time of Socialist power a place here, where every human belong to after his death, in the earth. A grave in his memory - a Stelae, bearing a striking semblance to the Jewish cemetery in Prague even though it was unintentional.

Fact File Address

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Cora-Berliner-StraĂ&#x;e - 1. 10117 Berlin

Admission Fee

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Free

Information Centre :

Apr-Sept: Tue-Sun, 10-20; Oct-Mar: Tue-Sun, 10-19; Closing days

(Opening Hours)

Dec 24 to 26, Dec. 31 from 16.

The Information Centre is open on all the other holidays including Easter Monday, Pentecost Monday and May 1