VOIDS
©Bettina Mathes 2009


Berlin. My first visit to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe built by Peter Eisenman takes place on a cool summer day in June 2005, three weeks after the memorial’s official ‘opening’. I don’t go unprepared to meet the field of more than 2,700 concrete pillars, conveniently located in the heart of 'the new Berlin' between Brandenburg Gate, the former Berlin Wall and Hitler’s Führerbunker. For years the media have supplied descriptions, explanations and critiques regarding the meaning, the political importance and the shortcomings of the memorial. From the very beginning, Eisenman’s design generated controversial debate among politicians, historians, cultural critics, and the architect himself. Was the field of concrete pillars the right choice? Could abstract architecture adequately represent the horrors of the Holocaust? Did Germany really need a national Holocaust memorial given the numerous smaller memorials that already existed all over Germany?

When I enter the memorial, I feel over-prepared. My mind is filled with information about the history of the site, the meaning of Eisenman’s design, its significance for Germany’s national identity. The information I gathered makes it hard for me to experience the memorial as it is, with fresh eyes and a fresh mind. My thoughts keep returning to a statement by Peter Eisenman I found online:

”The memory of the Holocaust can never be one of nostalgia. ... The Holocaust cannot be remembered in the nostalgic mode, as its horror forever ruptured the link between nostalgia and memory. ... The monument attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia.”[1]

I couldn’t agree more. But when I emerge from the memorial, I am awash with nostalgia. Not so much because (from above) the memorial looks like a gigantic cemetery (which it does). Rather, because the further I walk into the memorial, the more I am made to identify with a state of disorientation, loss and despair. Since the dark grey pillars contain no reference to the specific crimes of the Nazi perpetrators and their identity, it is almost impossible for a German visitor not to adopt a victimized position. According to the architect this is not a bad thing.

“[Once you enter the memorial] there is no abstraction there. There is a lot of feeling. … You will feel what it is like to be lost in space. When you walk in, this it is not an abstraction.”

I don’t like how the memorial affects me. I don’t want to identify with Jewish Holocaust victims. I find it presumptuous to put myself in the position of a Jewish woman about to be deported to Auschwitz. I don’t agree that the appropriation of a victimized position is an adequate form for the nation of perpetrators to remember its crimes. To me the memorial justifies Germany’s nostalgic investment in the dead Jew. I remain unconvinced by Eisenman’s design and leave the site, somewhat frustrated.

On my way home I remind myself that my frustration is larger than Peter Eisenman’s architecture. It is a frustration with monumentalization. Most national monuments invite a certain degree of nostalgia as they invariably fix memory, idealize history, and transform the past into a lost home. National monuments extend an invitation to inhabit the past and thereby repossess it. Seen this way, Peter Eisenman’s insistence on the anti-nostalgic nature of the memorial seems like a symptom of the memorials nostalgic rewriting of the past. But also a somewhat belated attempt to fend off the ghosts of nostalgia. Peter Eisenman is not the first architect or artist critical of nostalgia. There is Horst Hoheisel’s radical proposal for the Holocaust memorial: blow up the Brandenburg Gate, grind the rubble to dust, spread it across Pariser Platz and cover the site with granite plates.

If I remain unconvinced by Eisenman’s design, it is not because the architect ‘failed’. After all, it’s not Peter Eisenman’s task to take care of Germany’s memory problems. What concerns me is the place the memorial occupies in Germany’s national imaginary. I can’t believe that I am the only one who feels nostalgic at the Holocaust Memorial.

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On my second visit to the memorial, almost a year later, shortly before my departure for America, I am less preoccupied with myself. Instead, I try to observe as closely as possible what’s going on at the memorial. And there is much going on.

It’s a lovely Wednesday afternoon and the memorial is busy. There are many young people here. Children play hide and seek; teenage boys jump from pillar to pillar. Monitored by their teachers at least three different groups of high school students stroll through the memorial. Fidgeting with their cell phones, they seem absentminded, bored. There are also quite a number of Berliners (women and men, young and old, students and professionals, all of them white) lounging on the smaller pillars at the margins. Some of them are reading. Others are pick-nicking. Three bankers in grey summer suits are unpacking their lunch bags, deep in conversation about a new porn movie that’s just been released on some internet file sharing site. Two lovers kissing and hugging seem oblivious of what is happening around them. They are students at Humboldt University taking a break from classes. A middle aged woman is bathing in the warm afternoon sun. Her eyes closed, her body stretched out on the warm concrete.

Are they all regulars? Or are they here for the first time? Nearby two little blond girls with ponytails, not older than five, are baking sand cookies on a pillar. How did they manage to bring the sand to the memorial?

I’m fascinated. Here I am at Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and Germans are using it as if the memorial was a café, a backyard, an adventure playground, an apartment, a bedroom. Aren’t there guards? As I look up I see Berlin’s signature hot air balloon -- colorfully striped like a beach ball -- hovering over the memorial.

A group of five elderly women approaches. Their accents reveal they are from Southern Germany. Perhaps from Austria? They sit down on a pillar to roost. Their faces are friendly and relaxed. But also serious, earnest and (in a way) empty, turned inwards. Their eyes are wandering across the memorial. Are they looking at the pillars or are the pillars looking at them? In their identical coats and with identical haircuts (only the hair color differs) the women mirror the uniformity of the concrete blocks. As if they wanted to be recognized by the monument, as if they had come to pay their respects as one body. Is this their way of commemorating the Holocaust? Are they afraid they might be singled out? They talk about how much they like the memorial. The pillars are beautiful, they say. Theirs is not a conversation. Their words are addressed to themselves, not to one another. Perhaps because they would not be able to explain the beauty of a memorial dedicated to the murdered Jews of Europe. Perhaps there really is nothing more to say than just that. What they see is what they see: a field of concrete slabs, quiet in the mellow afternoon sun.

This day at the Holocaust Memorial I begin to understand what Peter Eisenman means when he insists that the memorial is not about the Holocaust.

“I believe that when you walk into this place, it's not going to matter whether you are a Jew or a non-Jew, a German or a victim: you're going to feel something. And what I'm interested in is that experience of feeling something. Not necessarily anything to do with the Holocaust, but to feel something different from everyday experience. That was what I was trying to do. It's not about guilt, it's not about paying back, it's not about identification, it's not about any of those things; it's about being. And I'm interested, in a sense, in the question of being and how we open up being to very different experiences.”

If I translate Eisenman’s statement into my own vocabulary I would say there is no subtext to the Holocaust Memorial. No hidden meaning and no Überbau. What if it is true? What if the pillars are what they are: slabs of concrete. 2.700 of them. A broken wall. A wall to be. A wall to love.

What if the Holocaust Memorial allows Germans to indulge in now, on the quiet, what they haven’t had a chance to enjoy since that November 9, 1989 when the GDR opened its borders: the Berlin Wall. Not the real Wall, not the Wall as “Schandmauer” (“wall of shame” as West-Germans used to call the Berlin Wall) or “anti-faschistischer Schutzwall” (“anti-fascist protective barrier”, the East-German euphemism). Rather, a Wall that can be approached without guilt or fear for one’s life. A Wall that is not part of a dictatorial regime and a “cold war”. A Wall as screen, a Wall that protects a dream. A Wall that promises peace of mind, security, relief from guilt, the innocence of childhood.

A wishful fantasy? Perhaps. But also a psychic reality. Despite the real suffering the Berlin Wall inflicted, on a collective level it helped both West-Germany and East-Germany to split off feelings of guilt for the Holocaust and to move on into a brighter future untarnished by mass murder and war -- the Wall as ersatz therapy. For almost three decades, beginning on August 13, 1961, the two Germanys were united in the relief from guilt and shame offered by the Wall. A Schlußstrich (bottom line) turned stone, the Wall stood as an expression of Germany’s wish to distance itself from its past. As “anti-fascist protection barrier” the Wall ‘protected’ East-Germans from their own history of anti-Semitism and genocide turning the West-Germans into the perpetrators and those in the East into the Nazi’s former victims, the communists. As “Wall of Shame” it enabled West-Germans to deflect the shame caused by memories of the Shoah onto the ‘other’ German state, the one they referred to as a concentration camp as then mayor of Berlin Willy Brandt in his initial reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall on the morning of August 13, 1961 put it.

Protected by the Wall Germans were able to go to sleep, to dream. Dreams of a Wall that would not separate families and tear apart lovers. Dreams of Wall jumpers who would not be shot by border guards. Dreams of a life lived on the fence. Dreams of flying. Of crossing over the Wall in a hot air balloon and living to tell of it. (Once this dream came true. In 1979, after years of preparation, two East-German families escaped the GDR in a hot air balloon. They reached West Germany unharmed, unlike the many who were murdered when trying to cross the border into West-Germany.)

These dreams of 'the good Wall' were dreamed in both East and West Germany. In West-Germany (which I am more familiar with) the dream became manifest in Peter Schneider’s novella The Wall Jumper. In this satire, in which the Berlin Wall is featured as the main protagonist, jumping the Wall is among the favorite pastimes of Berliners from both Germanys. One of the regulars is Herr Kabe who, tired of having to circumvent the Wall when traveling across town, grows curious what the Eastern part of the city looks like. So he jumps. After his first jump into East Berlin Kabe is interrogated by the East German police who believe he has “several screws loose”, a euphemism for his “pathological desire to overcome the Wall” which the authorities decide, needs to be treated in a psychiatric clinic. Does Kabe not know how to distinguish between dream and reality?

“Released from the clinic, Kabe went straight back to the Wall. Altogether he jumped fifteen times and put a serious strain on German-German relations. Questions about the motives of his jumping drew nothing more from Kabe than this: “Sometimes it’s so quiet in the apartment and so gray and cloudy outside and nothing’s happening and I think to myself: hey, let’s go jump the Wall again.”

In East-Germany -- where one was not allowed to approach, photograph or publicly make fun of the Wall -- it was the state which sustained the dream. The dream went like this: the Wall stands for peace, freedom and security. The Wall allows the East-German homeland to flourish, undisturbed by National-Socialism and the degenerate forces of capitalism; the Wall protects the young socialist nation and its utopian aspiration of building a society where everyone would be free, equal and taken care of.

The enduring hymn of the Ernst Thälmann Pioniere (Ernst Thälmann Pioneers), the GDR youth organization, to which virtually every child between 4th and 7th grade belonged, conveys the wishful fantasy of an East-German state home to innocence and natural beauty, worthy of love, dedication, and protection. A children’s choir would spread the fantasy on the radio and at Party functions.

Unsre Heimat, das sind nicht nur die Städte und Dörfer,
Unsre Heimat sind auch all die Bäume im Wald.
Unsre Heimat ist das Gras auf der Wiese,
das Korn auf dem Feld, und die Vögel in der Luft
und die Tiere der Erde
und die Fische im Fluß sind die Heimat.
Und wir lieben die Heimat, die Schöne.
Und wir schützen sie,
weil sie dem Volke gehört,
weil sie unserem Volke gehört.
Unsere Heimat

(Our Homeland is not only the cities and towns;
Our Homeland is also all the trees in the forest.
Our Homeland is the grass in the meadow,
the grain in the field and the birds in the air.
The animals of the earth,
and the fish in the river are the Homeland.
We love the beautiful Homeland.
And we protect it
because it belongs to the People,
because it belongs to Our People.
Our Homeland.)

The concrete slabs of the Berlin Wall may have looked ugly. They certainly cannot compete with the cool elegance of Peter Eisenman’s stelae. Yet it wasn’t beauty Germans were looking for. In Germany’s national psyche for almost three decades the Wall stood as exquisite dream screen.

After its opening the Wall had to disappear as quickly as possible. Within less than a year the Wall was gone. So thoroughly have its traces been erased that even Berliners find it hard to tell where the Wall used to be. A bewildering erasure of history, for sure. But not for Germans. In a unified Germany the now useless Wall would have stood as a reminder of how thoroughly Germans on both sides had been in denial about the both physical and in some cases mental pain the Wall had caused. At the inner city Wall in Berlin at least 136 people were killed when trying to cross over. The total number of people who died along the German-German border between 1961 and 1989 is estimated to be more than a thousand. Its rapid dismantling seems like a desperate attempt to keep on dreaming. But once the physical remnants of the Wall had disappeared (the rubble was buried at a wall cemetery at the Northern outskirts of Berlin), the phantoms of the past returned.

There is a poetic recurring theme in Amie Siegel’s feature film DDR/DDR (2008) in which East-German actor Kurt Naumann -- the lead in Peter Kahane’s DIE ARCHITEKTEN (The Architects), a DEFA-film about East-German society in decay incidentally shot during and after the opening of the Berlin Wall -- follows the path of the disappeared Wall as if on a tightrope. Naumann’s balancing on the invisible crest of the Berlin Wall is not only a metaphor for the ghostly presence of the absent Wall. Even more so it is a statement about the precarious psychological balance of both East and West-Germans in post-Wall Germany. While it is certainly true that for West-Germans reunification felt more like an expansion of the old Federal Republic than a change or re-orientation, whereas the former citizens of the GDR were forced to (quite literally) abandon their ethical, moral, political and aesthetic values, it is equally true that with the opening of the Wall both Germanys lost the protective screen that had allowed the nation of perpetrators to sleep and dream safely. It was only natural that Germans would want their Wall back, if not for real than -- even better! -- in symbolic form. Since the building of the Holocaust Memorial, where the nation of perpetrators may ‘enjoy’ the memory of Auschwitz, Germans can rest assured that there will always be a wall to prop their dream and protect their sleep.

A line in Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall comes to my mind: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Not here, not in Germany. Not in this nation of Wall lovers.

What I object to about staging 'wall loving' on the site of the Holocaust memorial is not so much that it happens but the way it happens: the silent, unconscious routine with which the fantasmatic reification of the Wall is superimposed on the memory of the Holocaust. Unencumbered by any critical discourse Germany uses the memorial -- mute and patient as it is -- as an imaginary space to enjoy the psychic relief afforded by the Wall. It is neither a coincidence nor without significance that the name of the Holocaust survivor chosen to represent the forgiveness of the Jewish people at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial -- Sabina van der Linden -- recalls the near-by boulevard Unter den Linden, itself a monument to a certain perplexity regarding the fall of the Wall (with the demolished communist Palace of the Republic and the newly renovated facades of Prussian grandeur). It is telling that German newspapers did not use her full name which is Sabina van der Linden-Wolanski. Did the name sound too Polish or too Jewish? In either case it would have disturbed the pan-German dream of a past securely walled in.

At this point I realize that, of course, there is a subtext to the Holocaust Memorial: history, both literally and figuratively. Underneath the memorial, in an underground exhibition space and archive, the German state has established the Ort der Information (place of information) dedicated to providing historical information about the reality of the Holocaust. The reality of the Holocaust as substratum. Isn’t that exactly what the Berlin Wall stood for? Now that the Wall is gone, the Holocaust Memorial picks up the pieces.

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I leave the memorial heading for a street café on Unter den Linden boulevard. The image of the five elderly women in identical outfits lingers in my mind. One question remains. If the Holocaust memorial is not necessarily about the Holocaust, what does this say about the New Germany’s commitment to remembering Jewish-German history?

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I decide to revisit the Jewish Museum. A monument in its own right, which a few years ago used to attract as much attention as the Holocaust Memorial does now. What draws visitors to the museum is not so much the objects displayed and the history they speak of. They come to see the spectacular building designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.

According to Libeskind and architecture critic James Young‚ the defining idea behind the design of the building is the need to address the self-inflicted “void” the Holocaust left in the center of German culture and the conundrum resulting from that “void”. (Libeskind and Young are a well-rehearsed ‘couple’. Young has explained and defended Libeskind’s architecture on several occasions.) As Young explains, the architect (any architect) had to deal with the following challenge: “How to give voice to an absent Jewish culture without presuming to speak for it? How to bridge an open wound [in German culture] without mending it? ... How to give a void a form without mending it?” Libeskind's building is a response to these questions. This is why the shape and façade of the museum are broken in several places. There is also a “straight void-line running through the plan which violates every space through which it passes, turning otherwise uniform rooms and halls into misshappen anomalies.” The façade, as the architect explains, is meant to resemble a “house whose wings have been scrambled and reshaped by the jolt of genocide.” Libeskind’s approach is literal. He builds metaphors; translates metaphors into architectural form. What this approach to memorial architecture achieves is as obvious as it is problematic.

With its “voids”, disrupted linear structures, broken walls, with its many rooms “too small to hold anything, others so oblique as to estrange anything housed within them” (Young’s description) the Jewish Museum lends solidity to the nostalgic notion that Jewish life does not exist in today's Germany, that in Germany Jewish equals absent. That this assumption is false should be obvious given the numerous, if small Jewish communities in cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Dresden, and Hamburg.

Libeskind's notion of Jews as lack may be explained by his lack of experience with contemporary Germany. The architect, who had not spent much time in Germany before being invited to build the Jewish Museum, was uninformed about the life and politics of German Jews in unified Germany. Perhaps he did not know about the awkward silences that surround Jews and Jewish life in Germany. Perhaps he was unaware that the nostalgic fetishization of Jews as absence has been a defining characteristic of postwar Germany.

Describing Jewish life in Germany as void is both a careless use of metaphor and a gesture of evasion and avoidance that plays into the German preference to embrace the idea of Jewish culture as dead rather than embracing the Jews living among us. Similar to the Holocaust Memorial the Jewish Museum conceives of the memory of the Holocaust in abstract terms and as abstraction, liberating -- as Irit Rogoff points out -- the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators from having to “deal with the effects of the histories […] on the cultures that perpetrated these elisions and remained seemingly inviolate in their wake.“ All of this may be obvious to a critical observer. However, insisting on the obvious is important because the building and the rhetoric that supports it has provided a powerful theoretical foundation for the culture of avoidance that concerns me. When a Jewish architect describes Jewish traditions in Germany as (beautified) void then who are we Germans (who am I?) to contradict him? With this in mind let me revisit this architecture of voids.

The building -- not the museum -- was opened in the summer of 1999 before it was closed again in late 2000 for installation, and then reopened as museum in 2001. During those first 18 months trained tour guides ‘explained’ the meaning of the building (as prescribed by the architect) to its numerous visitors. In the empty building thousands of visitors were instructed in applying the rhetoric of the void to all things Jewish.

What struck me most when I walked through the empty building in the fall of 1999 was the obsession with walls. Walls everywhere. Apart from the many unexpected and non-functional walls within the museum -- walls that block the way, obstruct the visitor's vision, create claustrophobic, prison-like spaces -- it was the alluring facade and the twisted, jagged, zig-zag shape of the whole building that captured my attention. Unconvinced by the literal translation of history into architectural form, to me the empty building bespoke an obsession with blockage and barricade, a fetishization of walls and screens (authoritative and awe-inspiring, but also broken, opened up, punctured) that reminded me of something else, something I could not name at first. Only later, when I looked at an aerial view of the building, did I understand that the twisted shape of the museum echoes the zigzag shape of the Berlin Wall which used to stand in the immediate vicinity of the museum. The empty Jewish Museum, a beautiful, ‘dressed up’ monument to the disappeared Berlin Wall, this other “void” defining Berlin’s urban landscape.

(The official, much lesser known, Wall Memorial at Bernauer Straße in Berlin is plagued by a similar self-satisfaction. It consists of a partly preserved and partly reconstituted stretch of the original Wall, complete with Hinterlandmauer (hinterland wall), death strip and Vorderlandmauer (outer Wall, facing West).4 The ensemble is framed on both ends by a giant ‘mirror’ eight meters in height, which creates the illusion of an infinite continuation of the Wall. Access to the memorial is restricted to a zone behind the Hinterlandmauer where visitors may try to get a glimpse through a slit between the concrete segments of what is left of the original ‘death strip. In 2003 a viewing platform was added allowing visitors a view of the memorial from above. In its attempt to recreate an authentic encounter with the Wall as it stood during Germany’s division, the memorial satisfies the nostalgic desire for repetition but does not provoke critical reflection upon the relationship between past and present, then and now. The cleanliness and immutability of the site precludes any questions as to how the meaning of the wall might have shifted over time, both before and after its fall.)

I am getting ahead of myself. When the Jewish Museum re-opened in 2001, I was not alone in complaining that the objects on display ruined the ‘aura’ of the building, interfered with its self-contained ‘message’ of absence and lack. The museum seemed cluttered, stuffed with too many awkwardly placed items. Intent on maintaining the notion of Jewish traditions as void, I could barely tolerate the traces of Jewish history introduced into this kingdom of nothingness. Overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the void, I was unable to see how problematic it was that Germany chose to build a museum dedicated to documenting the rich tradition of German-Jewish exchanges that would resist its very purpose. Bitte nicht stören. Do not disturb the voids.

Do we always have to follow orders? Why not take advantage of the voids? Instead of trying to turn the resisting building into a museum filled with objects that are bound to seem out of place, it could be more productive to actively and explicitly engage the voids, confront them with evidence of Jewish presence. This approach would allow visitors a new, more subjective, less prescribed view on German-Jewish history. So far the curatorial concept has been symptomatic of the awkwardness with which Jews and Jewish traditions are treated in Germany. I still remember the display of a Shabbat dinner table set for eight people. The table was covered with a white embroidered tablecloth, plates, glasses, silverware, two candles, a goblet of wine, two loaves of challah, all the things that are needed to celebrate Shabbat. The ensemble was arranged on a pedestal and put under a large glass cage. Although not intended by the curators, the ensemble stood as perfect metaphor for the invisible wall that exists between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans in Germany.

There are voids. And then there are Über-voids. Libeskind constructed so called “voided voids” -- sealed empty spaces that stand as the building’s backbone -- which he describes as “an emblem wherein the invisible, the void, has made itself apparent as such.” (In the same vein, Eisenman claimed the abstracted field of pillars represented the absence the murder of European Jewry left in German culture.) For many critics those “voided voids” are the most important feature of the whole building. But representing nothing still means to represent something, as Derrida pointed out in his response to Libeskind’s and Eisenman’s architecture of voids. Because they are meant to represent the “loss” and “absence” of Jewish life, the “voided voids” are not void at all.

My question is: what does the infatuation with terms like ‘absence’, ‘void’ and ‘loss’ used to describe the memory of the Holocaust mean? What does it mean that Germany is so much invested in representing nothing, when it comes to the memory of the Holocaust? Is it a testimony to the belief in the “final solution”? An annihilation of history? It is inadequate to conceive of the effects of the Holocaust as “void”. Not only does it liberate the culture that perpetrated the genocide from dealing with the aftermath of this crime, there are no consequences, the “voids” seem to say, there is just NOTHING.

And then there is the Wall. In promoting an ‘aesthetics of lack’ the voids resemble the death strip at the Wall: creating an untouchable space, an area beyond the reach of criticism, inaccessible to reason, precluding grief and mourning. And has the Jewish Museum not positioned itself in and as such a death strip? A piece of architecture that eludes criticism and commands respect. A hermetic, bunker-like, and perfectly self-satisfied building. Berühren verboten. Do not touch.

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In 1997, two years before the completion of the Jewish Museum, Daniel Libeskind was awarded an honorary doctorate from Humboldt University for his design of the Jewish Museum. Humboldt is the former East Berlin university, situated in the district of Mitte where former East and West meet, and whose now East- and West-German faculty to this day have been haunted by their inability to overcome the Wall in their heads. In his acceptance speech “Beyond the Wall”, Libeskind talked about the importance of transgressing the wall and the straight line in his architecture. Of course, he did not mention the Berlin Wall. The honored architect knew better than to perturb his German audience. His language remained vague, more like a string of associations and metaphors than a lecture.

“Lines of history and of events; lines of experience and of the look; lines of drawing and of construction. These vectors form a patterned course towards the ‘unsubsided’ which paradoxically grows more heavy as it becomes more light. I think of it as that which cannot be buried; that which cannot be extinguished: Call it Architecture if you want.”

"Architecture," Libeskind said in Berlin, "is and remains the ethical, the true, the good and the beautiful.” Unlike the real Wall, the museum’s glistening facade may not be sprayed with graffiti. An immaculate reproduction of that Wall that sustained Germany’s dream of innocence. Call it Architecture if you want. I call it nostalgia. The empty kind.