Remembrance and Reflection: Commemorating the Shoah – Berlin and Budapest

My visits to Berlin and Budapest offered me the opportunity to see how these cities deal with commemorating a troubled and violent recent past. Such commemoration involves not only memorialisation but also acceptance of accountability with the promise of redemption. In addition, there is a need to indicate a sense of scale alongside the personalisation of a tragedy. How do we give shape to absence to generate an emotional yet thoughtful response and frame it as a warning from history? Various architects and artists have contributed works that try to encompass all of these elements, creating commemorative, artistic responses to absence that are participatory and inclusive, enabling remembrance and reflection at collective and individual levels. Naturally, context affects meaning. Emotional resonance is achieved partly through expectation and associations of place and time. However, some form of manifestation is required to commemorate absence, even to counter it. In some cases, artists have chosen to create the presence of a void in a space connected with deliberate eradication. Unconventional forms of commemoration are used to engage the viewer and encourage reflection. Focus is given to both lines and spaces, underscoring the violence that penetrated and destroyed lives and the resulting absence.

above and below: Exterior of Daniel Libeskind's 'Between the Lines' design for Berlin's Jewish Museum.

Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Between the Lines’ design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin makes use of constricted spaces and jagged lines to create feelings of disquiet and anxiety. The shapes used evoke the triangular lines of the Star of David, which were distorted into the Nazi iconography of persecution through the enforced wearing of yellow badges. It is explained in the museum that Libeskind deliberately left empty spaces or voids in the building to ‘represent the absence of Jews from German society’. When I visited, I walked from the so-called ‘Axis of the Holocaust’, containing many personal objects connected with victims, into the ‘Holocaust Tower’, a void exposed to the outside air temperature and light from a slit above on one side. This means the environment is subject to the time of day and season. Concrete walls surround the visitor on all sides in a sort of triangular prism with a ladder on one elevation, the bottom rung of which is unreachable. The acoustics make for a lot of echo, and when someone enters or leaves, there is a resounding bang of the door. The experience is something of an assault on the senses as the architecture engenders feelings of entrapment, helplessness, and futility. The slit of natural light counteracts these, possibly symbolising a faint glimmer of hope.

above: Window in Libeskind's Jewish Museum building.

above and both pictures below: Inside the 'Holocaust Tower'.

In what is known as the ‘Memory Void’ in the Jewish Museum is Menashe Kadishman’s Fallen Leaves, an art installation comprising 10,000 open-mouthed iron faces representing absence through presence, forcing realisation of the sheer scale of the Holocaust. A visitor can walk on the faces, generating an uncomfortable sensation heightened by the noise produced by stepping on the layers of iron. Dedicated to ‘all innocent victims of war and violence’, the work highlights the tragically pervasive nature of bloodshed in human history, which continues today.

above: 'Memory Void' with Fallen Leaves installation.

above and below: The faces of Kadishman's Fallen Leaves, on which the visitor can walk.

Also in Berlin is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened in 2005. It is a forbidding sight of 2,711 massive concrete blocks that look like tombs. As with the spaces in Berlin’s Jewish Museum, the visitor is encouraged to enter the memorial and walk its narrowing and descending pathways. The effect can be almost overwhelming as one feels hemmed in and unsettled, maybe even lost, within what seems like a maze of looming sarcophagi.

above and three photos below: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin.

The impersonal character of many of these monuments emphasises and warns against the detachment accompanying acts of violence. A counter to this is Budapest’s ‘Shoes on the Danube’ memorial, created in 2005 to commemorate the murder of 20,000 Hungarian Jews between December 1944 and January 1945. The victims were required to remove their (valuable) shoes before they were shot and their bodies cast into the river. Now, sixty pairs of iron shoes—small, personal objects—placed along the Danube Promenade poignantly evoke their memory. The viewer is urged to reflect on the fact that such items were once considered by some more valuable than those who wore them.

above and below: 'Shoes on the Danube', Budapest.

The names of the missing are returned to them via the ‘Tree of Life’ memorial, erected in 1991 in a garden next to Budapest’s Great Synagogue and paid for by the late Tony Curtis (who had Hungarian-Jewish ancestry). The leaves of this metal tree are engraved with the names of Holocaust victims, with some left blank so that as new names come to light, they may be added. This monument, at once robust and delicate, manages to convey the magnitude of the tragedy it commemorates whilst also personalising it, distinguishing individual victims and returning their identities to them in the place where they were lost.

above and below: 'Tree of Life' memorial, Budapest.

When it comes to warnings from history, it is worth bearing in mind the insidious, incremental steps on the road to catastrophe. Attacks on culture often presage something far worse and are therefore worthy of remembrance in themselves. Israeli artist Micha Ullman created the Bibliothek memorial in 1995 to commemorate the burning of around 20,000 books on 10 May 1933 on the same site in Bebelplatz, Berlin. These were works deemed, for various reasons, incompatible with Nazi ideology, so they were destroyed en masse. Known as The Empty Library in English, the memorial is exactly that: a series of bare bookshelves underground. An accompanying plaque shows a quote by nineteenth-century writer Heinrich Heine, which reminds the viewer that the burning of books is a prelude to burning human beings. Its position beneath the plaza makes the memorial awkward to look at, giving rise to physical discomfort appropriate to the subject. This is a memorial inverted, symbolising a world turned upside down, its nature as a void once again commemorating absence and, in this case, the obliteration of ideas acting as a precursor to the extermination of millions of people. Perhaps it is an inversion that, separated from the viewer by glass, is intended to suggest a glimpse into the other side of the mirror, so to speak, inciting a look into the emptiness alongside seeing oneself as both a potential destructive force and, conversely, a vessel of knowledge and of hope. Which path will you choose? How disturbing is it to think such opposing potentialities can co-exist in all of us?

above and below: Micha Ullman's Bibliothek, Bebelplatz, Berlin.

These monuments fulfil several functions simultaneously, commemorating lives lost but also creating a sense of disturbance, especially in countries where a sense of guilt remains and redemption is needed. Lastly, they provide a focus for reflection on the past to try to prevent repetition of atrocities. Without wishing to end on a somewhat negative note, looking at the world today and mindful of human nature, I must say that despite the best efforts of artists, achievement of this final objective sadly seems something of a vain hope.

For more information: Jewish Museum Berlin