BERLIN (EJP)---Between 7 and 8 million people have already visited the Memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, in the heart of Berlin, two years after its inauguration.
Most visitors stroll through the Memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in Europe, a 19,000 square meter field of 2,700 grey concrete blocks situated near the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag parliament building.
The Memorial, designed by US Jewish architect Peter Eisenman, was inaugurated May 10, 2005, sixty years after WWII.
Eisenman has said he wanted his design to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere that is open to interpretation. Visitors say it reminds them of different things, including a cornfield or a cemetery.
It lies within walking distance on the way between two of the city’s main attractions, the Postdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate.
“We ’never imagined that so many people would come,” said Lea Rosh, a Berlin journalist who initiated the Memorial.
In an adjacent underground information centre, and a ’Room of Names’ where 3.5 million known Holocaust victims are documented on a computer database, the one millionth visitor is expected by the end of this month or early next.
The 2,711 dark grey slabs that make up the monument look like an ocean that appears to rise and fall, depending on the light and weather conditions.
In the first few months after the opening, there were complaints of rowdyism and of tourists jumping from stone to stone in what was seen as an insult to the memory of the dead.
Things have since calmed down.
’I believe that people behave in a very respectable manner,’ said Rosh, who occasionally leads guided tours of the memorial, built just 100 metres from Berlin bunker in which Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 as the Soviet Red Army entered in Berlin.
Fears that the memorial, which is open to the public 24 hours a day, would be a target for vandals and neo-Nazi extremists have proved largely unfounded.
Few vandalism and graffiti
There has been almost no vandalism and very few cases of anti-Semitic graffiti on the stones.
The controversial memorial was 17 years in the planning before it was eventually completed. At the opening ceremony, the president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Paul Spiegel, complained the monument failed to confront the issue of German guilt and was far too abstract.
’The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe honours the victims of Nazism - but it does not refer directly to the perpetrators,’ said Germany’s most prominent Jewish leader, who died in April 2006.
In the meantime, critics have come to accept that the monument represents an uncomfortable place to reflect on the horrors of Nazi crimes and has become a big hit with visitors.
Eisenman said he wanted his design to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere that is open to interpretation. Visitors say it reminds them of different things, including a cornfield or a cemetery.
Today, Germany has a rapidly growing Jewish community which has expanded to 130,000 from about 30,000 in 1989, mainly due to immigration from the former Soviet Union.
