Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany
Dec 17 2004
Setting the last stele
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin finished after years of debate
By Michael Jeismann
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The last steles of the central Holocaust Memorial in Berlin were
erected on Wednesday. There was a small celebration, and the group
parted in the knowledge that something had been accomplished after
years of debate.
Although it was a slow journey from the initial steps in the 1980s,
the context in which this symbol of remembrance stands appears to
have changed equally rapidly, almost secretly. Maybe architect Peter
Eisenman would have been well-advised not to set the last stele into
the ground at all – in the same way that the master builders of the
Middle Ages used to incorporate a little fault into their perfect
buildings, in order not to be accused of arrogance against God.
Meanings will soak in yet between the steles that we can at best
guess today. And a small irregularity could have shown how little
even the best architect is a master of remembrance.
Doubtless the most important change is the one which turned the
German memorial into a European one. Unlike back in the 1980s,
Eisenman’s field of pillars will no longer be able to be understood
sufficiently as a place of German remembrance. The memorial has been
made international. It hardly points implicitly at all to German
omissions and memory gaps – after all, the remembrance of the murder
of the Jews did not begin with this memorial.
Rather, the completed memorial unexpectedly refers of all things to a
historical gap and is directly connected, not only chronologically,
to the European integration process. The historical gap did not open
up in German or another European national history, but rather is
yawning in the community of states which is the European Union.
There is no doubt that up to a short time ago, the EU managed very
well without a history, and sometimes one might almost have thought
that the absence of history was a prerequisite for the functioning of
the community. If that was once the case, however, it is no longer
so. The European free trade zone has become a political community
where it is not only a question of the states’ budget balances.
Although historians like Jacques Le Goff or Wolfgang Reinhard have
carved out equally vividly and productively the common
characteristics of a European history, they too would not assume that
the structural common ground could be politically stylized in
symbolic acts and used for the widespread consolidation of
identities. What determines what the most recent European memory is?
After the fall of the Wall, the European unification process at the
political level and through national educational theories promoted
the remembrance of the genocide of the Jews, which functions like a
medium. It is unquestionably a means of the “assimilation of all
Europeans” of which Nietzsche spoke. A common European memory of the
extermination of the Jews received binding institutionalization at
the Stockholm Holocaust Forum four years ago. This was only feasible
because the persecuted and murdered Jews were understood in their
totality as belonging to the third category, something which could
not be defined in purely national terms.
Thus, since the 1980s, the policy of remembrance in Europe made the
Jews European. National governments thereby gained a common,
supranational point of reference for at least a theoretical added
value. It appears strange that the Holocaust memory is now to be
similarly cross-national and have a tendency to create unity, as
anti-Semitism did in certain epochs.
At least, in the past 20 years, a positive exclusion of the Jews took
place through which they were utilized as a means of Europeanization
which, unlike all other imaginable historical points of reference,
did not cause old national differences to resurface.
Every effort to cash in symbolically on a European history of
dispossession would in all likelihood lead to the greatest
calamities, for the dispossessed have not let themselves be stylized
as a third category up to now. Nor can they be denationalized, even
from a great distance – for the simple reason that their nationality
was, after all, the reason for their dispossession.
One only has to listen to what Armenians and Turkish people say and
demand with regard to the Holocaust for it to become clear how
differently, indeed, conversely, one can refer to the Europeanized
memory of the extermination of the Jews. The final stele is the first
stone in a fledgling European history.