This is the boulevard in front of Saarbrücken Palace, the seat of the state parliament in the city of Saarbrücken, the capital city of the German Federal state of Saarland.
In 1990 the artist Jochen Gerz began a project called 2146 Stones – Monument Against Racism, 1993. Over a 3 year period Gerz realized the work in a collective project with art students from the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Saar (Saar College of Visual Art) in Saarbrücken. To quote Rudolf Freiling:
For this uncommissioned intervention in public space, research was done at the Jewish communities in Germany and then a list was drawn up of all the Jewish cemeteries that existed in the country before the Second World War and the Nazi regime's persecution of Jews. The names were engraved on the underside of pavement stones of the boulevard in front of Saarbrucken Palace – the seat of the state parliament. Over a period of several months, the original stones were exchanged at night until all 2,146 engraved stones were in place. When the measure was finally made public, the 'making visible' of an invisible installation in public space was discussed, including with the state government. This led to the decision to rename the square the 'Square of the Invisible Monument'. Jochen Gerz's work here was not only a temporal process, but also an interactive group process of forming.
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Square of the Invisible Monument
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This is an example of "placemaking" but based in the experience of a type of social knowledge, and of course the street sign, rather than a visible something or somethings.
REMEMBERING THE UNREMEMBERABLE – THE HARBURG MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM (JOCHEN AND ESTHER SHALEV GERZ, 2009):
A visitor to Harburg (a suburb of Hamburg) seeking the Mahnmal gegen Faschismus (Monument Against Fascism) by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev Gerz will find no more than an informative plaque – a text explaining the project and nine small images of its realisation. The plaque is situated next to a shaft, into which the monument, a column faced with lead sheeting, was progressively sunk in eight stages during the six years of its realisation between 10th October 1986 and 10th November 1993. Above, there is an empty plaza. This is not so much an absence in place of a monument, but more an empty place as monument, corresponding to the lack of place which this history – the history of fascism – had in German post-war public discourse. The column itself is as buried in its shaft, and will remain there, to recall the burying, so to speak, of the history it sought to represent. Today, as members of the generation which participated in fascism have for the most part died, memories of that period are more admissible to public debate. Distance in time allows renewed attention, safely beyond the scope of living memory, reliant on the excavation of the few texts written of the time, or of the material contained – buried, as it were – in such archives as survive.
The Monument Against Fascism was commissioned by the municipality of Harburg-Hamburg after a lengthy debate and a public hearing at which the artists were selected. It is sited near the S-Bahn station and a shopping precinct, hence in a site with a high level of public use. Such an intervention, with its uncomfortable historical references, might have been expected to arouse controversy. It takes the form of a twelvemetre high, one-metre square column, weighing seven (metric) tons, faced in lead sheeting. As well as the column, there were two styluses made in steel with which members of the public were invited to sign the monument, as endorsement of its purpose.
The Invitation stated: “We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here next to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site will be empty. In the end it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.”
As an area was filled, the monument was lowered into its shaft to allow a clear space for further endorsement.
Malcolm Miles continues in a section called THE PASTS REFERENCED:
To be clear, this is not a memorial to the victims of fascism; it is a monument against fascism, located in the present (the mid 1980s onwards) and not in the past to which it relates. That past is seen through the window of the present, of the moment in which the monument appeared – arousing controversy beyond the artists’ expectation. If the monument’s implied meaning is that fascism should not return and that such a return is prevented by agency of the publics endorsing the monument, still vigilant, in a Europe of migrations and contested urban identities and rights to space, this proved more problematic than at first imagined. Yet in seeking vigilance against the return of fascism the monument is inevitably a reminder of that history which a generation of Germans worked so hard mentally to forget, and which was replaced by the post-war rebuilding of the city.
It seems more difficult to find appropriate signs, or to issue appropriate invitations, for present vigilance than to mark the histories of victims. The latter tends to generalising abstraction but the former requires an uncomfortable recognition that many ordinary Germans were complicit, even active in, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and in anti-semitism.Making a useful comparison between Gerz's approach to memorial and place as an artist instigating a process and a practice with an institutional or state sponsored memorialization
Comparing these works co-instigated by Gerz with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) is an exercise in evaluating the meaning of a public art work through an analysis of how a monument is used, and how that it is the use of a space that in the end creates the placeness of a place and the meaning of that place.
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| Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) |
Also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), this is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold.
Wikipedia describes it as consisting of;
a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 m (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 m (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 m (8 in to 15 ft 9 in).
According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.
A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. However, observers have noted the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery.
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| Jewish tombstones at New Jewish Cemetery in Brody, Ukraine |
With growing support, the Bundestag passed a resolution in favour of the project. When the seat of government was moved from Bonn to Berlin in 1999, an extensive "Holocaust memorial" was planned as part of the vast development of new official buildings in the district of Berlin-Mitte. So, in the end the German state is the instigator not the artist, so one would expect that the project and its ramifications would have been thought through extensively regarding the practical, political, ethical and public relations considerations. However, the disconnection of power from practice often results in very interesting and unintended consequences.
The design was to be the result of a competition with an announcement made in Germany's major newspapers in April 1994. Twelve artists were specifically invited to submit a design and given 50,000 DM (€ 25,000) to do so. The only rules and guidelines given were that building the project could only cost up to 15 million DM (€ 7.5 million). The winning proposal was to be selected by a jury consisting of representatives from the fields of art, architecture, urban design, history, politics and administration.
In all 528 proposals were submitted. The jury met on January 15, 1995 to pick the best submission. All but 13 submissions were eliminated from the race in several rounds of looking through all works. As had already been arranged, the jury met again on March 15. 11 submissions were restored to the race as requested by several jurors, after they had had a chance to review the eliminated works in the months in between the meetings. Two works were then recommended by the jury to the foundation to be checked as to whether they could be completed within the price range given. One was designed by a group around the architect Simon Ungers from Hamburg; it consisted of 85x85 m square of steel girders on top of concrete blocks located on the corners. The names of several extermination camps would be perforated into the girders, so that these would be projected onto objects or people in the area by sunlight. The other winner was a design by Christine Jackob-Marks.
Her concept consisted of 100x100 m large concrete plate, 7 meters thick. It would be tilted, rising up to 11 meters and walkable on special paths. The names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust would be engraved into the concrete, with spaces left empty for those victims whose names remain unknown. Large pieces of debris from Massada, a mountaintop-fortress in Israel, whose Jewish inhabitants killed themselves to avoid being captured or killed by the Roman soldiers rushing in, would be spread over the concrete plate.
These plans would eventually be vetoed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Peter Eisenman and the artist Richard Serra collaborated on a plan that emerged as the winner of the next competition in November 1997. Richard Serra, however, quit the design team soon after, citing personal and professional reasons. On June 25, 1999, a large majority of the Bundestag decided in favor of Eisenman's plan, modified by attaching a museum, or "place of information," designed by Berlin-based exhibition designer Dagmar von Wilcken.
Building began on April 1, 2003, but according to Wikipedia:
On October 14, 2003, the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger published a few articles presenting as a scandal the fact that the Degussa company was involved in the construction of the memorial producing the anti-graffiti substance Protectosil used to cover the stelae, because the company had been involved in various ways in the National-Socialist persecution of the Jews. A subsidiary company of Degussa, Degesch, had even produced the Zyklon B gas used to poison people in the gas chambers. At first these articles did not receive much attention, until the board of trustees managing the construction discussed this situation on October 23 and, after turbulent and controversial discussions, decided to stop construction immediately until a decision was made. Primarily it was representatives of the Jewish community who had called for an end to Degussa's involvement, while the politicians on the board, including Wolfgang Thierse, did not want to stop construction and incur further expense. They also said it would be impossible to exclude all German companies involved in the Nazi crimes, because — as Thierse put it — "the past intrudes into our society". Lea Rosh, who also advocated excluding Degussa, replied that "Zyklon B is obviously the limit." In the discussions that followed, several facts emerged. For one, it transpired that it was not by coincidence that the involvement of Degussa had been publicized in Switzerland, because another company that had bid to produce the anti-graffiti substance was located there. Further, the foundation managing the construction, as well as Lea Rosh, had known about Degussa's involvement for at least a year but had not done anything to stop it. Rosh then claimed she had not known about the connections between Degussa and Degesch. It also transpired that another Degussa subsidiary, Woerman Bauchemie GmbH, had already poured the foundation for the stelae. A problem with excluding Degussa from the project was that many of the stelae had already been covered with Degussa's product. These would have to be destroyed if another company were to be used instead. The resulting cost would be about €2.34 million. In the course of the discussions about what to do, which lasted until November 13, most of the Jewish organizations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany spoke out against working with Degussa, while the architect Peter Eisenman, for one, supported it. On November 13, the decision was made to continue working with the company, and was subsequently heavily criticized. Henryk M. Broder said that "the Jews don't need this memorial, and they are not prepared to declare a pig sty kosher."The project was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public two days later. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately €25 million.
So, on inauguration the meaning of the memorial was already being shaped by controversies relating to material matters that are not visually evident, in this instance the coating of the stelae. Perhaps because Eisenman and Happold's design positively rejects symbolism through abstraction, the project immediately invites various kinds of cultural, political, aesthetic and ideological projections to occur.
Under this monument, below ground, "buried", is the "Place of Information", holding the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a composite German word that describes processes of dealing with the past (Vergangenheit = past; Bewältigung = coming to terms with, mastering, wrestling into submission), which is perhaps best rendered in English as "struggle to come to terms with the past". It is a key term in the study of post-1945 German literature and culture. Perhaps because of the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery Eisenman's abstraction quickly becomes symbolic of burial, and therefore a burial of the past ahead of its submission. Burying the the unresolved is hiding the past, but hiding leads to seeking and finding.
The informal name of this memorial, the "Holocaust-Mahnmal" is significant. It does not translate easily: "Holocaust Cenotaph" would be one sense, but the noun Mahnmal, which is distinct from the term Denkmal (typically used to translate "memorial") carries the sense of "admonition," "urging," "appeal," or "warning" rather than "remembrance" as such. The work is formally known as das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (English translation, "The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe"). Some controversy attaches to it precisely because of this formal name and its exclusive emphasis on Jewish victims. As Eisenman acknowledged at the opening ceremony, "It is clear that we won't have solved all the problems — architecture is not a panacea for evil — nor will we have satisfied all those present today, but this cannot have been our intention." But as shown in the photo above the memorial has been transformed in its meaning by its use. Photographing the memorial obviously results in photographic images (look at around 952,000 results when you google Holocaust Memorial Berlin), but photography does not merely represent realities, photography substitutes itself for realities. The memorial is situated in photographic space.
One of the images used on the Wikipedia page for the memorial suggests the potential for play, a game of hide and seek, running through a maze of spaces, and evoking the innocence of childhood! Or the presence of evil stalking the vulnerable. Here's Johnny! Weird!
The legacy for Lea Rosh seems to include some controversy as well as official recognition for her selbsttherapeutisches Lebenswerk' (lit. 'self-therapeutic life's work'). The debates and soul searching continue, which is by many accounts, to the good. Meanwhile the memorial as a permanent structure remains a hostage to fortune, history and the use that people make of it. Is it possible, can you imagine, that sometime in the future, this site will be re-developed? Will this work survive? Be loved and cherished? Or are we stuck with it along with the retrospective monuments erected after the unification of Germany in 1871 whereby the ruling class manifested their historical and ideological views? The Hermannsdenkmal and Völkerschlachtdenkmal for example.
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