Some of those who attacked the Holocaust memorial plan also attacked Rosh herself, who unquestionably offered an inviting target. Decked out in her trademark jeweled bifocals and raspberry-colored suits, she appeared on countless talk shows, hers and others, touting her project. She did not say “There’s no business like Shoah business,” but to her detractors she seemed to be exploiting the Holocaust for purposes of self-promotion. It hardly helped that Rosh is herself only part Jewish—her mother’s father was a Berlin Jew—and that she had changed her name from Edith to Lea. The name-change exposed her to accusations of “Jewish envy”—of wanting to assume for herself the role of persecuted victim.
The most trenchant criticism of Rosh’s project, however, had to do with the very idea of trying to capture the problematique of the Holocaust in the capital of the perpetrators via a physical monument. Theodor Adorno said famously that after Auschwitz there could be no more poetry. Could a piece of art, a symbolic representation in marble or brick, adequately convey the shame felt—if indeed it was always felt—by the perpetrators and their heirs fifty years after the fact? To some degree, of course, the objection of lack-of-punch applies to all commemorative monuments. “There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument,” wrote the Austrian novelist Robert Musil. Are monuments not in actuality more often abettors to forgetting than aids to remembering? By locating memory in a thing that is easily passed by and ignored, do not monuments allow us to let that memory lapse from our active consciousness? As sites of official observance, do they not often become, as the Germans say, “wreath-dumping places,” where politicians can perfunctorily absolve the tired rituals of their profession? And, aside from the politicians, are not monuments most loved by pigeons, who leave their signatures all over their surfaces? (André Malraux once advised a writer friend never to become so famous that he was honored with a monument, for that would mean a future of being shat upon.) But—and this is the main point—if all the difficulties of preserving or representing memory in a monument apply to relatively trivial or painless acts of commemoration, would this not be much more the case in the act of “remembering” the Holocaust? Andreas Nachama, a spokesman for Berlin’s Jewish Community, declared that the Holocaust memorial idea represented “an impossible assignment.”
Despite all the criticism of her plan, Rosh pushed forward, and in 1995 a design competition for a National Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was sponsored by the municipal authorities and the federal government. The competition attracted 528 entries, most of them convincing illustrations of the perils of trying to capture the Holocaust in an all-encompassing monument. One of them proposed an immense Ferris wheel equipped with freight cars like the ones in which Jews had been transported to the camps. Its designer explained that this would reflect “the tension between hope and hopelessness, between carnival and genocide.” Another entry proposed a giant oven, burning around the clock. Exactly what it would burn was not specified. Yet another called for erecting a blood-filled container 130 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Daniel Libeskind proposed an arrangement of raw-concrete walls 21 meters high and 115 meters long, which he entitled “Breath of Stone.” Then there was a Star of David sculpture crowned by a broken heart symbolizing German remorse. Another star-design featured a garden bordered in yellow flowers to evoke the yellow stars the Jews were forced to wear in the Third Reich.
Some of the entries, it should be admitted, reflected an understanding of the drawbacks of all representational memorialization. There were a number of anti-monument proposals that seemed to have been inspired by a famous antimonu-ment in Hamburg, which consisted of a metal tube covered with people’s comments that slowly shrank into an underground silo, thereby symbolizing the element of forgetting inherent in the process of remembering. Among the antimonument proposals for the Holocaust memorial was a block-long series of bus stops, where people could board buses to former concentration camps. (This was not a bad idea, since the authorities of Oranienburg refused to institute a bus line from the town’s train station to Sachsenhausen.) Another, rather less promising, entry suggested grinding up the Brandenburg Gate into fine powder, like crematorium ash, and sprinkling it over the memorial grounds.
The winning design, which was backed by Lea Rosh and her supporters, consisted of a football field-sized tombstone garnished with eighteen boulders brought to Berlin from Masada in Israel, where Jewish zealots had committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in the first century A.D. The boulders were meant to symbolize the small rocks placed by mourners on Jewish gravestones. (The symbolism was somewhat confusing, however, since the Jews who died in the Holocaust had hardly committed suicide.) In addition to the boulders, the tombstone would have engraved on its surface the names of all the officially recorded victims of the Holocaust, some 4.2 million of them. The idea for this apparently derived from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., though of course it was rather more ambitious.
Even many who favored a Holocaust memorial heaped criticism on this design. Not only was it bombastic and kitschy, it would, as Ignaz Bubis objected, heighten the victims’ anonymity rather than personalize their fate. “The name of Moses Rabbinowitch would appear a thousand times,” he pointed out. In the face of this barrage of criticism Kohl personally vetoed the selection and ordered a new competition.
In 1997 the government commissioned a second contest, this time by invitation only. The jury now included a distinguished American Jewish scholar, James E. Young, who had written an influential book called The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Interestingly, Young belonged to the school that was highly skeptical of monuments in general, and Holocaust monuments in particular. Yet eventually he and the other members of the jury found a proposal that they liked by the design team of Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra—a giant labyrinth of 4,000 concrete pillars on an undulating concrete field. The idea here was to pull visitors into a punishing maze: Not only would they be forced to “remember” the Holocaust; they’d have to remember how to get out. “Here there is no goal, no end, no path,” explained the artists. Young called this “the Venus fly trap of Holocaust memorials.”
Conceptually intriguing though it was, this design had a lot of problems. Parents might bring their kids there to permanently ditch them. People would undoubtedly climb up on the pillars to get their orientation, then fall off and hurt or even kill themselves. Was it appropriate for a Holocaust memorial to claim new victims? Once again Kohl intervened, demanding that the designers rework their proposal. Serra refused and dropped out. Eisenman modified the design by reducing the number of pillars and shortening their height. His amended creation was much less menacing: a kind of Holocaust-Lite.
Kohl and his advisers liked this version better, but by now the chancellor had an election to face, and there was considerable sentiment in Germany against erecting a new Holocaust memorial at all in the future capital. The Social Democrats had adopted this stance, and their candidate, Gerhard Schröder, was ahead in the polls. Kohl therefore put the project on hold until after the elections.
Kohl of course lost that election, leaving Germany not only with a new chancellor, but with the irony that the man who had done the most to shape the planning for the new capital would not be leading the government when it moved to Berlin in 1999. As for the Holocaust memorial, Schröder opposed it on grounds that it was “backward-looking,” and thus little help to the new Germany’s need to “move on.” During an address delivered on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Reichs-kristallnacht at the New Synagogue in Berlin, Schröder said that the Germans must “look ahead without forgetting what happened.” He added that reunited Germany had come of age and felt “neither superior nor inferior to anyone.” The chancellor’s comments, when combined with novelist Martin Walser’s highly publicized complaint that the Holocaust was being used a “tool of intimidation” to induce “merely a compulsory exercise,” signaled to some observers a dangerous turn in German thinking. “Intellectual nationalism is spreading,” warned Ignaz Bubis, German Jewry’s chief spokesman, “and it is not free of an understated anti-Semitism.”