Q*Bert at the Holocaust Memorial
September 6th, 2007
This is not what architect Peter Eisenman had in mind when he designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs (or stelae) on a 4.7 acre site between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate: “The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” (Wikipedia)
It’s possible that the man hopping from stone to stone like Q*Bert in the photo above is enacting some sort of postmodern commentary on Eisenman’s intentions — after all, “losing touch with human reason” is second nature to some of us, and “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere” is what we like to call “the modern condition.” Either way, instead of remembrance, introspection, and grief, the 2,711 stones seem to invite inappropriate behavior. Visitors can be seen sunbathing on the stelae, playing hide-and-seek, or eating curry sausages.
Other scandals and failures accompanied the memorial: the stelae were covered in anti-graffiti paint by Degussa, a company that produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers, the stones are already beginning to crumble, light fixtures are broken, and Der Spiegel reports that in the darkness, drunkards from a nearby club come to urinate and horny couples screw in the maze.
Perhaps R. Mutt would have enjoyed the Stelenfeld’s playground repurposing, but there is a harsh lesson here about the disconnect between artistic intention and actual use; clearly, the memorial’s symbolism is too arbitrary, too wide open to interpretation, to produce the desired effect. I don’t know of another memorial that fails on such a spectacular scale.
September 9th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
There is nothing about this report that isn’t fascinating. Maybe they should just tear the thing down & start over.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:17 am
I thought this thing was pretty bad, but yesterday, we witnessed an even more breathtaking display of inappropriate behavior outside the House of the Wannsee Conference. It’s a beautiful villa, and the room where top Nazis agreed on the Final Solution in 1942 has a splendid view of the lake. Now the place has been turned into a museum illustrating the mass extermination that was ordered here, and the disconnect between the beauty of the place and the horrors of the Holocaust could hardly be more stark. It’s a haunted, eerie place.
In comes a group of Americans in their seventies and eighties, all wearing matching blue outfits and bike helmets. They’re breezing through, barely looking at any of the pictures and documentation on the wall, and they use the actual conference room for a little pow-wow of their own: hey, where’s Bob? Where are we going to get beer? What a wonderful time we’re having!
We run into them again at the gate leaving the villa. A van driven by their tour guide has pulled up, and they’re loading up their bikes. There’s some kind of salsa on the radio, and this eighty year old woman who didn’t even have the decency to take her helmet off when she was looking at piles of corpses starts dancing in the street.
I was too far away to say anything to her without actually yelling, but I sure wish I had. High school kids jumping between some symbolic stones is one thing, but these people, twice as old as me, were looking at photos and evidence documenting genocide, and it didn’t even faze them. Perhaps the bike tour people should to reconsider using the Haus der Wannseekonferenz as meeting place?
September 10th, 2007 at 7:41 am
All of this is making me think that I should really try and see Am Ende Kommen Touristen before we leave.
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
[…] Read the rest of my review of And Along Come Tourists on About.com. At the reception following the MoMA screening, I had the distinct pleasure of being mistaken for the director several times. MoMA is screening the film, which doesn’t have U.S. distribution yet, as part of its Kino! 2007 program. You can catch it tomorrow at 2pm. Related: Yella and Q*Bert at the Holocaust Memorial. […]