The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a sculpture that can be entered and walked through, a sculpture that – in my experience – radiates great emotional power; it is an architectural symbol of the incomprehensibility of the crime it commemorates.
It is – in the true sense of the word – an open work of art. Open to the city, to surrounding area into which it flows. Open to its manifold individual uses: this memorial cannot be accessed “collectively,” it individualizes. It generates a sensory/emotional sense of isolation, distress, threat. It forces nothing.
It is my hope that people, also and especially young people of normal sensitivity, will sense this, will feel the memorial’s indefinable expressive power, will be touched by it, and will seek out the information center, moved and questioning. Here, the victims are given names and faces and fates – who can remain unmoved by this! And then people will walk through the field of stelae again and remember the victims.
This is what can be, this is what is intended: not a kind of negative nostalgia, but a commemoration of the victims that obligates us now and in the future: to a culture of humanity, of recognition, of tolerance in a society, in a country, in which we as people can be different without fear.
Source: Wolfgang Thierse, “Rede zur Eröffnung des 'Denkmals für die ermordeten Juden Europas, 10. Mai 2005’” [“Speech at the Dedication of the ‘Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, May 10, 2005”] www.bundestag.de/aktuell/presse/2005/pz_0505101.html
Translation: Thomas Dunlap
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