Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

of Degussa; and the debate has become part of the complicated history of the memorial. The history of this process is documented in the memorial’s information center. (See also Quack 2007, 49–75.)

Politics behind Memory: Underlying tensions

In the course of the Degussa debate, tensions between members of citizens’ groups and state and government officials became visible. Members of citizens’ groups were suspicious that political administrators and state officials could not adequately deal with the difficult and complex subject of Holocaust commemoration. Some representatives of citizens’ initiatives who were actively engaged in the preservation of original historical sites in Germany, and who viewed these places as the correct means of keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust, were especially critical of a central memorial in Berlin. Not only did they mistrust state and governmental officials, but they suspected that the memory of the victims would be exploited for ideological and political purposes. They also feared competition, the loss of visitors, and, last but not least, the loss of government funding for the original sites. These conflicts were also at the heart of the process of developing the historical concept for the center.

      A brief introduction to the structure of the memorial foundation is necessary at this point. Funding for the project was fully provided by the government. The board of trustees (Kuratorium) was headed by Wolfgang Thierse, president of the Bundestag at that time, and consisted of 23 individuals representing the major political parties, the political administrations of the federal government and of the city of Berlin, and other groups, such as the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Jewish Community of Berlin. Representatives from other memorial sites and museums, including the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen and the Jewish Museum of Berlin, were also in the Kuratorium. The civilian group headed by the journalist Lea Rosh, who had initiated and promoted the idea of the memorial together with the historian Eberhard Jäckel, also played an important role on the board. (See the list of members of the Kuratorium in Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas 2002.) This composition of the Kuratorium clearly expressed the wish of the Bundestag to integrate representatives of as many lobby groups concerned with the subject as possible, and not to exclude anybody. Since board members were at odds on a couple of questions carried over from the decade-long debate, and the Kuratorium included people who were reluctant even to accept a memorial, it was not easy for the president of the Bundestag to arrive at useful decisions.

      The Kuratorium was eager to meet as often as possible to discuss the newest developments and to make decisions on every detail (or delay them). However, federal law required that the Kuratorium elect from its members a board of directors and establish an executive director with an administrative office for day-to-day operations. I was the director of the administrative office under the board of directors and carried out decisions made by the Kuratorium and the board of directors, which was also headed by Thierse. It would go beyond the scope of this chapter to describe in detail the various challenges faced by our small office, composed of a handful of academics and administrators. Caught between competing groups, administrations, politicians, and bureaucratic hierarchies, we tried to stay on course and to ensure the realization of the memorial. One of the major tasks, in addition to technical, legal, and public relations questions, involved establishing the historical concept for the projected exhibition about the Holocaust in the center. As was the case with the building process of the memorial, every detail of the exhibition concept encountered high sensitivities and generated contention.

Often diverse opinions clashed, and it was a great challenge to reconcile the multifaceted obligations to present horrific historical facts, remember and honor the dead, and point out the perpetrators.

      Furthermore, the Bundestag, in a move that was criticized by many, decided to dedicate only the central memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust (Niven 2002; Leggewie and Meyer 2005). The decision acknowledged the uniqueness of the Shoah and the willingness of Germany always to remember its historic responsibility. Since the dedication of the memorial did not include victim groups such as the Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, victims of the Nazi euthanasia program, prisoners of war, forced laborers, and others, the foundation was commissioned to find and support alternate ways to ensure that all victims of National Socialism were remembered and honored appropriately. This task was addressed by an additional advisory board. Members came from 15 different institutions and social groupings, including survivors’ associations, historical research institutes, museums, memorial centers, and youth groups. The main spokesperson was the historian Wolfgang Benz, formerly the director of the Centre for Research into Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin. In the process of planning and setting up the exhibition at the center, the advisory board was also involved in finding answers to the question of how to at least mention these victim groups in the exhibition context. Eventually, additional memorials for them would be erected. Today, there is a memorial dedicated to the homosexuals persecuted under the Nationalist Socialist regime located not far from the Holocaust Memorial, as well as one to remember the murdered Roma and Sinti. A third memorial, dedicated to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia program on Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse 4 has just been accomplished.

An underground location

The 1999 Bundestag resolution added to the memorial an “Information Center referring to the commemorated victims and the historical sites of remembrance.” This was a twofold compromise between, on the one hand, those who favored a house of remembrance with archives, library, and museum in combination with a smaller memorial and, on the other hand, supporters of a pure memorial with no or very little additional information. The fact that Michael Naumann (the newly established State Minister of Cultural Affairs) strongly emphasized the need to educate rather than simply to represent the Holocaust with an abstract sculpture, gathered considerable support among many people. Consequently, the Bundestag decision deliberately did not mention a Holocaust museum, but allowed for an information center on the victims of the Holocaust. The formal resolution produced by the Bundestag tried to incorporate within the concept the original historic sites where killings had taken place and to make sure that existing memorials in Berlin and other places would not be neglected as a result of a centralized national memorial (Carrier 2005, 122). However, the task of turning these concessions into a meaningful form and of developing an effective exhibition presented great challenges to all those involved. The first of these was the question of where the center was to be situated in relation to the memorial. This also touched on the relationship between the integrity of the artists’ concept for the memorial and the necessity of educating the public about the Holocaust. The decision of the Kuratorium to locate it underground was largely the result of Peter Eisenman’s wish to “effectively minimize any disturbance to the memorial’s field of pillars” (2005b, 11). For Eisenman, who was long opposed to the idea of an information center, it was clearly subordinate to the memorial. The center was not to draw visitors away from the memorial and, at the same time, it had to be integrated into the artist’s overall concept. The architect Salomon Korn, one of the representatives of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in the Kuratorium and chair of the Frankfurt Jewish Community, also advocated the construction of the center underground. However, this was not intended as a spatial demonstration of the center’s “subordination” but rather to secure its status as an integral part of the memorial that should not be isolated from the memorial nor artistically and formally regarded as an alien element. Korn anticipated that a building above ground would have competed with the memorial, which means that it could only have lost. The specific nature of Eisenman’s great design, its “lack of direction, missing axiality, regularity, and ubiquity” [“Richtungslosigkeit, fehlende Axialität, Gleichmäßigkeit und Ubiquität”] would have been disturbed by a building on its premises, irrespective of its location; visitors would hardly have noticed an intentionally small and neutral edifice “due to its lack of significance and selfevidence” (Salomon Korn, submission to the meeting of the Kuratorium on February 24, 2000, Archives of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin). Korn’s plea for subterranean construction could thus be understood as a plea in favor of the center. It was also Salomon Korn who, through his active participation in the working group Design, which had been established