Controversial memorial to open
2005-05-06 10:48
Berlin - Sixty years after the end of World War 2, a memorial will open in central Berlin on Tuesday to commemorate the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis.
The product of an emotionally charged campaign lasting nearly two decades, the plans for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe were finally approved by Germany's Bundestag lower house of parliament in 1999 and construction began two years later.
There has been resistance to what is seen in some quarters, even by some Jewish groups, as an unfitting reminder to Germans of the worst chapter of their history.
But Lea Rosh, a German journalist who has led the fight to see it built, says it is essential that the country which attempted to exterminate an entire race be the site of a permanent memorial.
"It will be a reminder for the country of the aggressors," Rosh said.
The road to agreeing a final design was long and made longer in 1995 when former chancellor Helmut Kohl rejected the original plan to erect a concrete slab inscribed with the names of every one of the some six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
Eventually American architect Peter Eisenman designed a sea of 2 711 rectangular grey concrete blocks, or stelea, spread over an area equivalent to three football pitches.
Arranged in a grid pattern, the blocks rise in the centre of the site to a height of around five metres but melt into the ground around the outer edges.
Dark, quiet and disorientating
Eisenman says that as visitors walk into the centre of the memorial, it becomes darker, quieter and disorienting.
Its critics however dismiss it as ugly and impersonal and have asked why it fails to pay tribute to the Nazis' other victims.
While the blocks are unmarked, an underground visitors' centre contains the personal stories of Holocaust victims told in photographs and documents.
The location of the memorial is highly symbolic, just north of the now sealed bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide in 1945 and south of the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's best known monument.
Its inauguration takes place the day after commemorations in Moscow to mark the official end of World War 2.
The ceremony on Tuesday will include speeches from a Holocaust survivor, Sabina van der Linden, who now lives in Sydney, as well as the director of the foundation which built the memorial, Bundestag speaker Wolfgang Thierse, and Paul Spiegel, leader of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Young German and Polish musicians will provide the music for an audience of around 1 000 dignitaries, while more than 500 journalists have applied to cover the opening.
The public will be able to walk through the monument on Thursday, two days after the ceremony, and entry is free of charge.
The German state footed the €25m - about R193m - cost of construction.
New legislation has been introduced to prevent neo-Nazis from marching near the site on Sunday, during celebrations to commemorate Germany's surrender in World War 2, and also on the day of the memorial's inauguration.