Memory
Kanako Goto
10:30 p.m. in the middle of Berlin: I was lost by myself. Wherever I went, I would always ask random strangers for directions, but I felt somehow awkward to be a Japanese girl asking German people how to get to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, as known as Holocaust memorial. “Hi, my country was on your side and we both lost World War II. By the way, where is the monument for the people your ancestors massacred?” I knew it was way more complicated than that, and I was thinking too much without knowing details, but it was one of the most sensitive topics for me to talk about in Germany.
The park around the bus stop I got off at provided greenness and provided a relaxing area to the community during daytime, but at night the tall trees with rich leaves made tall and endless walls around me in the dark. After many attempts to find the monument on my own for about half an hour, I finally gave up and decided to be the awkward girl. People in Berlin spoke English pretty well, so, by asking, I easily found my destination just around the corner.
I was expecting to see the monument in a park, but it is literally in the middle of Berlin, close to the famous Brandenburg Gate. The whole 4.7 acre area is covered with 2,711 cuboids arranged in a grid; they represent steles whose height varies from the ground to three times as tall as my height. This installation, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and the British engineering firm Buro Happold, has been open to the public since May, 2005.
I was still recovering from the lost-and-alone feeling, and it was very scary to walk among the steles. Dark, narrow paths, and the ground was not flat – every step had to be taken carefully because I could easily run into someone else walking vertically towards me whom I could not see coming. Then I thought, as scary as this was to me, it was absolutely incomparable to what the Jewish people had experienced during wartime. I felt the need to get through all the way from one side to the other side. I could never understand the victims’ extreme pains, fears, and emotions fully, but I thought I could at least show respect by not escaping the fear I was facing, and being courageous enough to finish the path I had already entered. I stared at the goal, listened carefully, and moved towards the other side slowly. It did not make me feel better or worse about myself, but that was how I chose to communicate with the installation, or with the artist, or with the people whom this monument was dedicated to.
After completing my task, I was walking around the monument and accidentally stepped on one of the steles that partially invaded the sidewalk. I felt bad. At the same time I realized that everything was dead all over the city during the war. No matter where I stepped, this ground was once covered with blood, dead bodies and animals, burnt houses and trees.
Not all of my friends had the same memory from this memorial – some people got emotional and thought of their grandfathers who were in the war, while other people did not think it was a good representation of the war. Why was this installation chosen as a Holocaust memorial? Would it have been better if there were names or pictures of the victims and millions of words to explain what had happened? Art does not always reach everyone as it is intended to, but everyone perceives it and makes connections to it in her or his own way. We never know exactly why the designers chose all the specific details, but weeks, months, or years later, we remember the memorial and wonder about it, and rethink about what happened in Germany.