Berlin полностью

Whether or not they worried about this confusion, some of the victims of the Nazi terror had their own objections to the Rosh project. The Nazis, as we know, had targeted a number of groups besides Jews in their mass killing, and survivors from these groups, such as Gypsies (called Sinti and Roma in Germany), homosexuals, and the mentally disabled, complained about being left out of Rosh’s scheme. If they were to be excluded from the Holocaust memorial, these groups wanted memorials of their own. The Sinti-Roma agitated for a spot at the Brandenburg Gate, so as to be on an equal footing with the Jews, but in 1993 the Berlin Senate vetoed this idea. Homosexual groups likewise agitated for a separate memorial, which spawned a quarrel within Berlin’s gay community, since some of its members believed that the commemoration should focus exclusively on the roughly 50,000 gay men who had been persecuted under National Socialism, while others wanted to include lesbians, who were not specifically targeted by the Nazis. The memorial’s possible location also inspired a dispute. Some wanted it in the Nollendorfplatz, a meeting point for Berlin gays in the 1990s (and Christopher Ish-erwood’s old haunt in the early 1930s), where there was already a triangle-shaped plaque reading: “Beaten to death, silenced to death—to the homosexual victims of Nazism.” Another faction insisted on having the monument near the Brandenburg Gate. Such close proximity to the proposed Jewish memorial, however, provoked opposition from local officials, who worried that it would suggest an “equality of oppression.”

In response to the criticism of an exclusivity in Germany’s politics of memory, backers of a memorial specifically for Jews argued that what was being memorialized was not only the loss of millions of lives, but the destruction of “a thousand-year culture belonging to the heart of Europe,” as Peter Radunski, Berlin’s Senator for Science, Research, and Culture, put it. The unspoken implication here, of course, was that the loss of Jewish creativity through the Holocaust represented a far more significant blow to German culture than did that of the other groups.

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.”