April 6, 2012
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The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
One of the outside places I wanted to visit in Berlin was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It’s really close to the Brandenburg Gate area, so it wasn’t much trouble to walk there. I knew it was outside, but I didn’t know what to expect.
This is someone else’s picture of the memorial taken from above.
It took a year and a half to build it, and it was officially opened to the public in 2005. Wikipedia says, “It consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or stelae, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 7 ft 10 in long, 3 ft 1 in wide and vary in height from 8 inches to 15 feet 9 inches. According to Eisenman’s project text, 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.”
In addition to what Eisenman wanted, they made a wicked cool hide and seek tag area!
I was walking around through this orderly maze on an undulating pathway and thinking, “This would be an awesome place to play hide and seek!” Then, I noticed my kids WERE playing hide and seek tag. I felt guilty about this. Here we are, stupid Americans in a Holocaust memorial running around and playing tag. But then, I realized that is what every other visitor to the site was doing–teens, parents, grandparents, toddlers. And some were speaking German, so they weren’t all stupid Americans.
The passages were narrow and it was impossible to see around the stelae. You had to stay in the center where the slabs were the tallest, because it’d be easy to find someone in the 8 inch high area.
As the old saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets body checked into the side of a 15-foot tall concrete slab,” and that adage proved true for us. Libby and Rachel collided, and Libby’s leg and shoulder and side paid the price. Poor thing, it hurt so much, she had tears in her eyes. Some people wandered by and stared at her, probably wondering if she was overcome by the sorrow that the place should have evoked or if she had a bruise the size of a grapefruit forming on the side of her thigh. I just let them wonder.
