“Speaking in Silence”
My sister and I felt like two of the luckiest kids in the world. Summer break was ending, and school would be starting in two days, but we were busy touring the streets of Berlin with my parents who had managed to fit in one last family vacation. Walking along the busy streets near the center of the capital city, we approached a large plaza filled with thousands of concrete blocks. We stepped off the sidewalk and into this gray field without departing from the bustle of the tourist city. Locals were sitting on the lower concrete blocks eating lunch or talking, and my sister and I decided this would be the perfect place to play hide-and-seek. We immediately bolted in opposite directions before my parents could reel us back in. Walking deeper into plaza through the narrow corridors of the grid of concrete blocks, the light-hearted search for my sister was replaced with a sense of fear and disorientation. The gray columns rose high above my head and blocked out the sights and sounds of the city, and just as I began to feel hopelessly lost and alone, my dad came up behind me and told me that this was Germany’s National Holocaust Memorial. As I looked around, I saw other visitors looking just as helpless and disoriented as I had been. The memorial triggers an emotional reaction from its audience and engages feeling and memory where rational understanding is impossible.
The memorial is silent to passersby because it communicates its message through emotion and experience. Peter Eisenman is the American-Jewish architect who created and opened this memorial on May 12th, 2005, after 17 years of controversy surrounding its creation (About.com). His design mediated the controversy between the victims’ ancestors and Germans who felt a responsibility to remember, and Germans who did not want to recognize a source of national shame (“Frontline”). The message is not derived from the structure itself, but the feelings it evokes in its audience, therefore, without active experience the memorial’s message is not heard. The memorial provides “no indication of who is to be remembered” allowing it to become integrated with daily life (Wefing, and Zeitung). Eisenman said, “kids can jump on the stones…[and] I like the fact that people go to lunch there”(Ahr). The memorial’s design is passive and abstract; its message is only discovered through the feelings engendered when walking through its corridors. Its passive message grows from the controversial context of its creation and, therefore it can exist in the center of Berlin without pointing fingers while offering a chance for remembrance.
Eisenman’s memorial is constructed of 2,771 concrete blocks imposed on an undulating grid covering an area of almost five acres in the center of Berlin. The blocks rise just millimeters off of the ground as you enter the plaza from the street, but as you continue down one of the uneven pathways the columns reach heights of 3 and 4 meters (Ahr). The scale and structure of the memorial generates feelings of frightened disorientation, but the message that arouses these feelings’ meaning remains intangible. The monument consists of high, imposing gray blocks and its tilting, narrow walkways force visitors to experience their emotions alone. Eisenman’s design prompts feeling rather than rationalization. “To him its scale provokes fright…induce[s] disorientation and claustrophobia”(Ahr). The oppressive stones create a sense of fear and confusion, but remain flat, gray, and blank of a reason for these feelings. Families and visitors share their own interpretations of the meaning of the memorial with each other, and writer Peter Ringy recorded some of the explanations he heard as visitors struggled to find reasons for their intense emotional responses. “’It’s about the experience of being shipped off in cattle cars’, said one visiting American. His friend wasn’t convinced. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be more about the people?’…One elderly woman was clearly moved: ‘The innocent children. There was nothing they could do about it’”(Ringy). The abstract design of the memorial removes its audience from logical thought and leaves them reflecting on pure emotion.
The maze-like construction promotes reflection, but the absence of a clear entrance or exit induces a lack of catharsis. The monument’s massive plaza can be entered and exited from all sides and its structure, unlike most mazes, does not reveal a greater knowledge or understanding upon its completion. Eisenman comments on this characteristic of his design saying, “Even in traditional…mazes there is a space-time continuum between experience and knowing”(Eisenman). In Eisenman’s labyrinth the duration of experience does not lead to any new arrival in understanding of the past. Eisenman says, “we can only know the past through its manifestation in the present”(Eisenman). The current nature of the memorial implies that the condition of the Holocaust is not yet finished. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Imre Kertész describes the Holocaust as “a condition that cannot be worked through”(Thierse). Eisenman’s memorial augments this analogy of the unresolved nature of the Holocaust in human memories. Eisenman states, “I don’t want people to weep and walk away with a clear conscience” (Ouroussoff). His memorial enhances diluted emotions of the Holocaust and his audience experiences these emotions without a resolution. The maze-like design constructs a metaphor to the Holocaust because the way out was not clear. The audience experiences a simulation of order without rationality, a maze without an exit. The memorial lacks a purging experience because it ends without a resolution; the same way the Holocaust lacked a resolution to its end.
My family and I emerged from the bleak, gray world of Eisenman’s maze and were abruptly placed back in the context of the memorial’s location in the center of Berlin, Germany. The locals were sunbathing on the stones, and the monument was becoming part of their everyday scenery. Our experience at the memorial put a damper on our game of hide-and-seek, and I was left to wrestle with the mixed emotions I experienced in the memorial while grasping at questions I could not answer. The concrete stones and the narrow grid detached reason from my emotions as I was exposed to a watered down version of the feeling of the experience of the Jew’s in Nazi Germany. Logic could not guide my understanding because logic did not exist in the simulated world of the memorial. My family and I discussed the meanings of our emotions and the memories of the Holocaust began to manifest themselves in our lives. However, we were unable to reach a rational understanding by relying on our emotions. We left Eisenman’s memorial that day somberly carrying his silent message: the feelings experienced in the Holocaust can be understood on a diluted level through simulation, but the rationality behind why it happened can never be deciphered because it is beyond all reason.
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