Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

Opened in 2005, this is a memorial in Berlin, Germany to honor the victims of the Holocaust. It was designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. This memorial consists of a 200,000 sq ft site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs. These are arranged in a grid pattern, organized in rows. 54 of them go north to south and 87 head east to west.

An attached underground “place of information” holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims. The debates about whether this memorial should have been built range back all the way to the 1980s when a small group of German citizens began pressing for Germany to honor those who had been murdered. On the 25th of June 1999, they started building. Three years after the official opening of the memorial, half of the blocks started to crack. Some interpret this defect as an intentional symbolization of the immortality and durability of the Jewish community, but this is denied by the memorial’s builders.

Some analyze the lack of individual names on the monument as an illustration of the unimaginable number of murdered Jews in the Holocaust. In this way, the memorial illustrates that the number of Jewish individuals murdered in the Holocaust was so colossal that is impossible to physically visualize. After an amendment on the 3rd of July, 2009, this memorial also pays tribute to the homosexuals persecuted under the national socialist regime and the memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma of Europe. Between the slabs, on the floor, is a cobblestone pathway. Architect Eisenman explained that he wanted visitors to feel the loss and disorientation that Jews felt during the Holocaust. All of the stone slabs at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial have been coated with a special solution to prevent graffiti. However, Eisenman was against this from the start as he said “If a swastika is painted on it, it is a reflection of how people feel... What can I say? It's not a sacred place."