Holocaust Memorial

9. The Jewish Museum

Jews have lived in Germany for over seventeen-hundred years, through periods of tolerance and outbursts of antisemitic violence, but did not have a separate museum to represent their history. Discuss why Berlin decided to build the largest museum in Europe by exploring the history of Berlin’s Jewish Museum on its website. 

10. The Holocaust Memorial

While the Jewish Museum was warmly welcomed, the Holocaust Memorial encountered more critical responses, although criticism eventually subsided as the memorial gradually found its space in Berlin’s cityscape. Respond to the central arguments in critiques by Alex Cocotas and Richard Brody quoted below. The full articles can be found in the link at the bottom of the page. 

“The Holocaust memorial, detached from geographic reality, replaces an active memory of the Holocaust, informing our actions and decisions, with a monument to memory. It is a pilgrimage of performative guilt, a pilgrimage for performative contemplation of theoretical guilt; it expiates your imagined sins, leaving the real sins, and the potential for real sins, unperturbed. It allows its builders and visitors to wallow in self-regard, which, in part, explains the visitors’ behavior, the spectacle surrounding the memorial: They have already paid their penance; their presence is their penance. The memorialization of the Holocaust encourages external shows of remorse, external shows of enlightenment, external shows of sorrow, tailored and edited for an intended audience. It is selfies instead of self-examination. The internalization of the Holocaust’s lessons, conversely, engenders no immediate political or social capital.”

Alex Cocotas, “Blow Up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. What’s the right way to remember both victims and perpetrators of great crimes?”

“Without the title Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe it would be impossible to know what the structure is meant to commemorate; there’s nothing about these concrete slabs that signifies any of the words of the title, except, perhaps, “memorial”—insofar as some of them, depending on their height, may resemble either headstones or sarcophagi. So it’s something to do with death. And as for the title itself—which murdered Jews? When? Where?” (Richard Brody, The Inadequacy of Berlin’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”)

Richard Brody, “The Inadequacy of Berlin’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe'”

Blow Up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Inadequacy of Berlin’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”