Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

on the floor, hanging down from the ceiling, extending from the walls that they are beneath the memorial” (Quack and Von Wilcken 2005, 44).

      In contrast, the proposals of the other competitors tended to create a counterpoint to Eisenman’s memorial with the design of the information center: their aesthetic language deliberately pursued an independent concept. These designs wanted to avoid any sort of artistic quotation, repetition, or submission to the memorial. Without exception, the proposals were of high quality and very original. But Dagmar von Wilcken’s design quickly convinced me and, soon after, the board of the foundation and the majority of Kuratorium members. In the period that followed, individual issues were intensely and at times even fiercely disputed, and Von Wilcken had to defend her conception patiently on several occasions. She revised details where it was unavoidable, but otherwise calmly and persuasively stuck to her position, even when her patience was repeatedly put to the test.

A public symposium held in Berlin in November 2001 (Quack 2002) made great ideas and demands regarding the site came to light. Some of the contested issues could not be resolved, but they were in any case debated in a very dedicated manner. The biggest cause of dispute was the administrative office’s draft for the exhibition script. My colleagues and I had developed a version that was based on the original concept but deliberately surpassed it. It contained aesthetic as well as educational elements, and the concept was enriched by the ideas of the art historians, historians, and museum curators present at the symposium. One of the changes that we introduced was the renaming of the first room to Room of Events instead of Room of Silence. In our view, it was important to add more content to the basic concept. In the end, however, we were unable to reconcile the contradictory views and expectations, and we could not reach a consensus. Ultimately the issues were politically resolved within the Kuratorium (Baumann 2011).

      Interestingly, most of the participants of the symposium vehemently rejected Von Wilcken’s concept, advocating a more independent design for the information center. For the most part, they were worried about whether or not the design, which took up the artistic form of the stelae, would be able to act as the center’s cognitive and educational counterpart to the abstract memorial. A central concern was that the exhibition might become another “emotional staging,” perhaps even a “sacralization” that would neglect the information one wished to convey. Here, too, the old contentious points flared up again: Should the ensemble host a great memorial with as little explanation as possible or should we rather invest in learning centers, preferably at the original historical sites? In addition, new contradictions soon arose. This became apparent in the design of the first room. Von Wilcken’s original concept envisioned a dark space with illuminated glass showcases, an idea that had arisen from the historians’ original concept of it as a room of silence. The idea of these showcases embedded in the floor and containing a minimum of information was fiercely disputed on several occasions.

Contemplation versus information

      The debates often revolved around purported opposites: emotion versus elucidation, contemplation versus information, remembrance versus the provision of information. While these discussions were certainly justified, they often became strangely abstract, even ideological. From the outset, they appeared to focus on various ascriptions guided by diverging expectations that did not do justice to the complex process of conveying historical knowledge in an exhibition. The fates of individual victims of the Holocaust were supposed to be the focus of attention. Only in the course of deciding on the texts and images, and as a result of serious attempts to find a compromise between the diverging ideas, did the antagonistic parties arrive at reasonable solutions.

The debate surrounding the glass showcases on the floor and their planned inscription with the original testimonies of victims of the Holocaust is symptomatic of this. Resistance toward this concept in the first room was considerable among historians (Baumann 2011, 172–177). Some feared that it would lead to a strong emotionalization, and preferred to list the victims’ names instead of displaying subjective quotes. Others feared that the victims’ testimonies would literally be trampled underfoot. Some even thought that the idea that visitors could only read the inscriptions with their heads bowed was contradictory to the aim of providing rational elucidation and information. They feared that visitors would be forced into a pose of religious devotion. However, Monika Richarz, Christoph Stölzl, and others maintained that the arrangement of the texts on the floor was a successful means of conveying information in the exhibition. After Dagmar von Wilcken succeeded in convincing the members of the Kuratorium by means of a model in a room of the German Bundestag, this point of contention was resolved, especially since Alexander Brenner, then head of the Berlin Jewish Community, was very much in favor of the design and did not seem to worry that it might cause problems for Jewish visitors or hurt anybody’s feelings. To this day, the first room, containing the shocking testimonies of persecuted individuals most of them taken from secret diary entries, final letters, or messages and pleas for help thrown from trains on illuminated floor showcases, is one of the most important and touching parts of the exhibition (see Figure 1.2).

      FIGURE 1.2 Room of Dimensions, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Eyewitness accounts are exhibited in showcases on the floor that resemble the stelae above. The showcases contain a fragment of the original source in its original language and translations into English and German. The individual level of these eyewitness accounts is supplemented by a tape on the wall providing information on the number of victims in each of the occupied countries in Europe.

      © Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Marko Priske, 2008.

Of the four rooms, the room today called Room of Dimensions impresses the majority of the center’s visitors most strongly, according to evaluations conducted by the foundation (SKOPOS visitor evaluation 2011, 8, Archives of the Foundation). It is precisely the interplay and tension between the quotes of individuals and the enormous number of victims from the various European countries occupied by Nazi Germany inscribed in a continuous frieze that runs on the wall that enables this first room of the center to offer the possibility of both acknowledging the fates of individuals and of grasping the scope of the genocide. Contemplation and information, mourning and enlightenment, are no longer contradictory but are rather complementary elements in a deeper, more thorough understanding of the Holocaust. Visitors also appreciate this presentation because the historical context has already been conveyed to them in a concise, comprehensive portrayal in the center’s foyer before they enter the first room.

Religious reading or historical remembrance? The Room of Names

      The questions that arose in the planning and realization of the exhibition’s third room, the Room of Names, were similarly difficult (see Figure 1.3). The controversies surrounding this room, however, tended to remain in the background. The entire Kuratorium, as well as political decision-makers, greatly appreciated the willingness of the Memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to make available for use in the information center their database containing over three million names of Shoah victims, based on the “Pages of Testimony” compiled since the early 1950s (Shalev and Avraham 2005, 128–137). This was recognized by all sides as an extraordinary gesture of reconciliation. Nevertheless, for critics of the memorial, as well as museum experts, it also entailed some risks. As in the case of the Room of Names, they saw a tendency to emotionally stage and symbolically reduce the historical context of the Holocaust, which is inimical to the conveyance of historical knowledge. The mere reading of the names of those who were murdered would be reminiscent of liturgical elements and would amplify the “sacralization of remembrance” all the more so as the subterranean location of the center under Eisenman’s memorial can be regarded as a sort of crypt beneath a vast cemetery. I strongly promoted the idea of reading the names and at the same time providing biographical information on each person who carried the name. Consultations with museum experts ultimately yielded the result that the names of murdered Jews from Yad Vashem’s extensive database would be projected onto all four walls of the exhibition room. In parallel with this, basic biographical