New Holocaust Memorial Opens in Berlin

Read the Full Transcript

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Sixty years after Germany's surrender in World War II, a new memorial officially called The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, was dedicated today in the very heart of Berlin, only a short way from the buried remains of Adolf Hitler's bunker. Wolfgang Thierse, a member of Germany's parliament:

• WOLFGANG THIERSE (Translated):

  Today, we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany's worst, most terrible crime: The attempt to exterminate an entire people.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  The memorial is a field of concrete and stone, irregularly shaped pillars covering five acres, 2711 in all, though the exact number has no significance. It's a stark, abstract work that seeks to evoke the horror of the Holocaust, the industrial slaughter of European Jewry, six million men, women and children. It's designed by American architect Peter Eisenman.

• PETER EISENMAN, Architect:

  We were not trying to be provocative in itself but rather to attempt something that would simply convey the ordinariness, the mundane quality that all of those who suffered were about. And perhaps it's in this simplicity that it becomes provocative.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  The stone markers rise above the acreage at different heights, from just inches to twelve or more feet. Visitors have described walking through the silent grid as disorienting, even suffocating at points. Eisenman says people should take from it whatever they wish.

• PETER EISENMAN:

  I think people should be allowed to say whatever they think it looks like. It really looks like what it is: A memorial.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  But getting to this point wasn't easy. The plan went through 17 years of controversy over its location, its design and its focus on Jews and not other victims of the Nazis. Central to the debate, of course: How Germany would remember the past. We spoke today in Washington to historian Astrid Eckert of the German Historical Institute.

• ASTRID ECKERT:

  Holocaust remembrance has always been very controversial in Germany because it is the cornerstone of German identity to deal with the murderous past. And the particular debate has been controversial because it has a national significance to have a memorial in the national capital. And the question was, who would be remembered, how would the memorial look, and who would it speak to?

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  In fact, the new memorial takes the place in the German capital alongside other architectural landmarks, many haunted by the darkest days of the last century. There are sites of rebirth by Sir Norman Foster's Translucent Dome over the Reistag, and others of remembrance, like Daniel Leibskin's widely acclaimed Jewish museum. The head of Germany's parliament says the new memorial fits right into the new Berlin.

• WOLFGANG THIERSE (Translated):

  The German parliament decided to remember the darkest point ever in German history with this memorial. It is located in the very heart of the former and now again capital of Germany.

• ASTRID ECKERT:

  It was very much a debate — one can say a debate among elites — of how the Holocaust should be remembered and how the new capital should position itself and how the new unified German government should relate to this past.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  The memorial will be open to the public at all hours, and German officials worried out loud today that vandals could deface it. Parliament Leader Thierse said it was up to Germans to take care of the monument. Whatever the future brings, today at the memorial's dedication, Sabina Van Der Linden, a Holocaust survivor, saw in it triumph.

• SABINA VAN DER LINDEN:

  It means a lot to our people to confront evil in history. And yet, our oppressors have perished and we have survived. And from this perspective, we face a future confident in the ultimate triumph of human spirit of a brute force — a victory not only for Jewish people, but a victory of all decent people over evil.