Facing Up To History
September 3rd, 2007 by Anindita Sengupta
A vast sprawl of 2711 stone slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin marks Germany’s tribute to victims of the Holocaust. The slabs are nameless, faceless, relentlessly grey and built on undulating ground to produce a disorienting effect on visitors. When this memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe was built in 2005, many criticized Germany for having taken so long to honour its victims. There were other controversies as well — the lack of religious symbolism, inadequate representation of all the victims, whether to use anti-graffiti agent or not and even, the fact that the anti-graffiti agent came from the same company that had once supplied poison gas to Nazi troops.
According to this site, which also has pictures of the memorial, at the opening ceremony on May 10, 2005, Paul Spiegel, the head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, sharply criticized the new Holocaust memorial, saying that it was too abstract and that it failed to confront the issue of German guilt.
In his speech, Spiegel said that the Memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe honors the victims of Nazism, but the Memorial does not refer directly to the perpetrators. According to Spiegel, viewers are not confronted with questions of guilt and responsibility. Spiegel complained that the Memorial leaves an “incomplete message” and merely shows the Jews “as a nation of victims poured into 2,711 concrete pillars.” Spiegel said that the Monument fails to ask the question “Why?”
This personal perspective on the memorial has some interesting things to say, however:
The field of stele first appeared small and insignificant and I did not see how this city block of rectangular concrete slabs could possibly impress me. But as I entered the memorial my perception began to change. At first, the stele were barely inches in height, but as I continued to walk the concrete paths between the slabs, suddenly the ground plunged down and the steles were soon well over my head a fact I could not know or see from where I first stood when I looked over the site. As I continued to walk paths without any forethought as to where I would end up, the ground rose and fell in a random undulation, and the stele towered above me and cut off my vision of the horizon and the sounds of life in the city.
Facing up to history is always tough for nations. It was only a few months ago that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized for the Japanese Army’s use of “comfort women” as sexual slaves in World War II very grudgingly and after being pushed to the wall multiple times on this issue. Earlier, he had spent a considerable amount of time denying that the estimated 400,000 women were kidnapped or forcibly coerced in any way. Experts say that the comfort women program “was the largest, most methodical and most deadly mass rape of women in recorded history”. More information on this here.
Our history is checkered with examples of human cruelty, depravity and barbarism. Acknowledging this is always hard, sometimes horrifying. But we cannot — must not — ignore, cover up or stop remembering. We must remember often and retell the horror again and again. Only in this lies the faint hope that such acts may not be repeated.