Holocaust Memorial, Berlin 3

Yesterday, I criticized the memorial as too abstract, but its abstractness does suggest a metaphor that is intriguing and disturbing...

When you stand at the edges of the 4.7-acre memorial, it seems to rise up before you as the granite steles get taller and taller as they recede in the distance. Looking at it, you almost feel you could hop from one stele to the next to the next, climbing higher and higher, until you reach the modest summit somewhere in the distance.

But that is an illusion, just as the idea of a Thousand Year Reich was an illusion. The spaces between the steles are a little too wide for carefree hopping. What's more, as you walk between the steles, exploring the grid, the ground beneath your feet does not rise or even stay level.

There is no climbing higher, in any sense of the word.

Instead, the ground dips down and you find yourself plunged between the ever higher, more imposing steles. In other words, what at first looks like a mountain one can climb to commanding heights becomes a dark forest that pulls you down and deeper and deeper into its belly. Very quickly, you're in over your head, literally and figuratively.

A pretty apt metaphor for the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

This way of looking at the memorial didn't hit me right away. At first I was more underwhelmed by the abstractness (see the last two Plain Sights). But after thinking about it (and interesting that the German word for memorial, Denkmal, starts with a piece of the verb denken, meaning to think) I finally reached the point of a shudder.

And a shudder is what any memorial to a slaughter, a devastating loss of life, let alone a genocide, should leave you with. I still think it takes too long for the shudder of the Holocaust Denkmal to sink in. And maybe it isn't even what Eisenmann had in mind. A friend of mine, who once interviewed Eisenmann and asked him about the Berlin memorial, said that Eisenmann told him the visitor is supposed to get lost and disoriented in the grid, as my friend put it, "like wandering in an Iowa cornfield." Except that the Holocaust was no field of maize.

That cornfield comparison raises another issue--the possibility that all memorials to atrocities are doomed to be inadequate. Because if they were too vivid, suggested too faithfully even a thousandth of the true individual terror and suffering (or, in this case, even one six-millionth) they would be unendurable, nightmare-producing and, in a sense, obscene.

Yet the Holocause Museum in Washington, DC walks the fine line between horrified engagement and tolerable learning as well as anything I've seen. I doubt anyone who has witnessed it--and a memorial should be about bearing witness--will ever forget the huge glass displays filled with eyeglasses and luggage confiscated from people bound for the death camps. The same applies to anyone who has walked through the railroad car later in the exhibit--an actual car that the victims were herded into on their way to annihilation

Present too much of this and you risk going beyond unbearable into a perverse realm of the sickeningly titillating, especially dangerous for sick minds.

All this said, there is one memorial in my experience which manages to be both abstract and moving--powerfully, tear-streamingly moving--and that is the children's memorial at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

First one follows a path that descends, and inside the memorial you descend even further, in darkness, until you enter a room and find yourself standing on a kind of circular cat walk. There are tiny flickering candle flames hovering in the darkness all around you, including above and below you.

As your eyes adjust, you realize you are surrounded by glass panels, some of which may be mirrors. As you look into the center of the space, within the circular catwalk, you see--or I saw--what looked like one single actual burning candle, hovering somehow. I got the idea that all the other tiny flames were reflections of this one flame--which itself suggested the Ner Tamid, the eternal light that burns above the ark in every Jewish synagogue.

A million murdered children, and here, in cool, peaceful darkness, a small, vulnerable but still flickering flame for each one of them. Though the Vietnam Memorial in Washington comes close, the Children's Memorial in Jerusalem is the most profoundly moving and poignant testament to a loss that I have ever seen.

Tags: photography