Thursday, March 1, 2007


About Art - The Holocaust Memorial

The Holocaust Memorial, also known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, is a memorial in Berlin, Germany, which is dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It was designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.3m (7.8”) long, .09m (3” 1.5”) wide and vary in height from 0.2m to 4.8m (8” to 15’ 9”).

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. An attached underground “Place of Information” list the names of all the known Jewish Holocaust victims (obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem).

Construction began in April of 2003 and was completed in December of 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005 and opened to the public a few days later. The location of the memorial is the former site of the Reich Chancellery of Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich with a construction cost estimated at 25 million Euros. It has been criticized for only singling out the Jewish victims of the Holocaust while making no mention of the Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, communists and political prisoners who were tortured and killed by the Nazi Regime too. Many feel the money could have been spent in supporting pre-existing memorials in Germany and abroad. Visit: www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/en.

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