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The Memorial's Return to History Now that Germany's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe" has been dedicated, is this the end of Germany's Holocaust memory-work, as I had initially feared? No, debate and controversy continue unabated. Moreover, once the parliament decided to give Holocaust memory a central place in Berlin, an even more difficult job awaited the organizers: Defining exactly what it is to be remembered here in Peter Eisenman's waving field of pillars. What will Germany's national Holocaust narrative be? The question of the memorial's historical content began at precisely the moment the question of memorial design ended. Memory, which had followed history, would now be followed by still further historical debate. Indeed, as so brilliantly conceived by the architect and Dagmar von Wilcken, the exhibition designer for the "Orte der Information," this site's commemorative and historical dimensions interpenetrate to suggest an interdependent whole, in which neither history nor memory can stand without the other. As one descends the stairs from the midst of the field into the "Orte der Information," it becomes clear just how crucial a complement the underground "information center" is to the field of pillars above. It neither duplicates the field's commemorative function, nor is it arbitrarily tacked onto the memorial site as an historical after-thought. But rather, in tandem with the field of stele above it, the place of information reminds us of the memorial's dual-mandate as both commemorative and informational, a site of both memory and of history, each as shaped by the other. While remaining distinct in their respective functions, however, these two sides of the memorial are also formally linked and interpenetrating. By seeming to allow the above-ground stele to sink into and thereby impose themselves physically onto the underground space of information, the underground Information Center audaciously illustrates both that commemoration is "rooted" in historical information and that the historical presentation is necessarily "shaped" formally by the commemorative space above it. Here we have a "place of memory" literally undergirded by a "place of history," which is in turn inversely shaped by commemoration, and we are asked to navigate the spaces in between memory and history for our knowledge of events. Such a design makes palpable the Yin and Yang of history and memory, their mutual interdependence and their distinct virtues. Like the mass murder of European Jewry it commemorates, Eisenman's memorial design provides no single vantage-point from which to view it. From above, its five-acre expanse stretches like an Escherian grid in all directions and even echoes the rolling, horizontal plane of crypts covering Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. From its edges, the memorial is a somewhat forbidding forest of stele, most of them between one and three meters in height, high enough to close us in, but not so high as to block out sunlight or the surrounding skyline, which includes the Brandenburger Tor and Reichstag building to the north, the renovated and bustling Potsdamer Platz to the south, and the Tiergarten across Ebertstrasse to the west. The color and texture of the stele change with the cast of the sky, from steely-gray on dark, cloudy days; to sharp-edged black and white squares on sunny days; to a softly rolling field of wheat-colored stele, glowing almost pink in the sunset. As one enters into the waving field of stele, one is accompanied by light and sky, but the city's other sights and sounds are gradually occluded, blocked out. From deep in the midst of the pillars, the thrum of traffic is muffled and all but disappears. Looking up and down the pitching rows of stele, one catches glimpses of other mourners and beyond them, one can even see to edges of the memorial itself. At the same time, however, one feels very much alone, almost desolate, even in the company of hundreds of other mourners nearby. Depending on where one stands, along the edges or deep inside the field, the experience of the memorial varies-from the reassurance one feels on the sidewalk by remembering in the company of others, invigorated by life of the city hurtling by; to the feelings of existential alone-ness from deep inside this dark forest, oppressed and depleted by the memory of mass murder, not reconciled to it. Only when moving back out toward the edges, toward the streets, buildings, sidewalks, and life, does hope itself come back into view. Neither memory nor one's experience of the memorial is static here, each depending on one's own movement into, through, and out of this site. One does not need to be up-lifted by such an experience in order to remember and even be deeply affected by it. The result is that the memory of what Germany once did to Europe's Jews is now forever inflected by the memory of having mourned Europe's murdered Jews here, of having mourned the Holocaust together with others and alone, by oneself.
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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