Germany dedicates Holocaust memorial
Berlin ? Germany dedicated its new national Holocaust memorial Tuesday with a rabbi’s prayer for the dead and a survivor’s plea for reconciliation, but disagreement surfaced even at its opening over how to remember the 6 million Jews killed under the Nazis.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined Jewish leaders and hundreds of other dignitaries in opening the memorial, a one-block-square undulating field of more than 2,700 charcoal-colored concrete slabs meant to evoke the helplessness of the Holocaust’s victims.
Backers had insisted on a place in the heart of reunited Berlin. The opening was timed to coincide with this month’s 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender.
“Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany’s worst, most terrible crime — the attempt to exterminate an entire people,” Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse said at the ceremony. He called it a sign that the reunited Germany that emerged at the end of the Cold War “faces up to its history.”
Holocaust survivor Sabina van der Linden riveted the audience with her account of loss, terror and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland.
An 11-year-old Jewish girl when the Wehrmacht occupied her town in July 1941, she was sheltered by a Christian family and later survived by hiding in a forest. Her parents and brother died in the Holocaust.
In a message of reconciliation that won the most applause of the afternoon, she said there could be no collective guilt for Germans and that her survival represented “a victory of all decent people over evil.”
“What have I learned?” asked van der Linden, who now lives in Sydney, Australia. “I have learned that hatred begets hatred. I have learned that we must not remain silent and that each of us must fight discrimination, racism and inhumanity.”
Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial in the former no man’s land of the Berlin Wall opens to the public Thursday after 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over its design and message.
Visitors will find themselves on an uneven, downward slope, their heads slowly disappearing amid the slabs as they walk.
Because of the abstract design, an information center was added with exhibits on Hitler’s campaign to wipe out European Jews. That was done out of fear that a memorial without context might come to be seen as a place where Germans could simply unload guilt.
The debate reignited at the ceremony when Paul Spiegel, head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, said the memorial failed to address a key question: “Why were members of a civilized people in the heart of Europe capable of planning and carrying out mass murder?”
He said the memorial and the debate showed that it is less a place for Jews to recall the Holocaust than for Germans.
Jewish places of remembrance are former concentration camps, mass graves and “the many places in Germany where synagogues and community centers went up in flames,” he said.