Holocaust memorial confounds its critics
BERLIN’S Holocaust Memorial, controversial at its opening 10 years ago, has become one of the city’s top tourist draws and confounded fears that it would be targeted by neo-Nazis.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated on May 10 2005 after 17 years of emotional debate and six decades after World War 2, attracted nearly half a million visitors a year from across Germany and around the world, director Uwe Neumaerker said.
The monument includes a vast undulating labyrinth of more than 2 700 grey concrete blocks over an area equivalent to three football fields, as well as a subterranean museum dedicated to the testimony of Holocaust victims and survivors.
Critics of the project at the time called the design too abstract and worried that its prominent location in Berlin between the Brandenburg Gate and the site once occupied by Hitler’s chancellery would make it vulnerable to vandalism and exploitation by far-right skinheads.
“Nobody asks these questions any more – everybody just seems to accept that it’s there and that it’s going to be there,” its US architect, Peter Eisenman, said.
“I think that silence about the concerns is one of the most positive [examples] of the success of [the] memorial.”
German parliamentary speaker Norbert Lammert, who serves on the memorial’s board, noted that its approval was the last major decision taken by legislators before the government moved to Berlin from Bonn in 1999. – AFP