- BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany
erected on Saturday the first of a planned 2,700 concrete pillars for a
long-delayed memorial to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis after
years of agonizing over how to express its remorse for the Holocaust.
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- Designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial
will consist of a maze of pillars standing on a site the size of several
soccer pitches, a stone's throw from the landmark Brandenburg Gate and
the Reichstag parliament building at Berlin's heart.
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- Due for completion in 2005 at a cost of more than 26
million euros ($29.3 million), the monument will be a grid of gray slabs
of varying heights designed to leave visitors unsettled and disorientated.
From a distance it will look like a sea of waves.
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- As Eisenman examined the first 10 pillars erected on
the site to check the quality of the slate gray concrete before contractors
begin mass production of the slabs, the architect said the memorial should
help Germans face up to their past.
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- "You'll feel like what it is to be alone,"
he told reporters beneath the pillars. "You will feel what it is like
to be lost in space. I talked to people who walked alone at Auschwitz,
who saw their parents taken away, who felt lost to the world."
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- Lobbying for the memorial started in 1988, but the project
was repeatedly held up by disputes over its location, design, cost, building
materials and a demand by the German parliament for an information center
to be incorporated at the site.
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- RENEWAL
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- Lea Rosh, head of the Foundation for the Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe which campaigned for the monument, said it
was not surprising Germany had taken so long.
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- "It is the first and only time in the history of
the world as far as I know that a nation has stood to its own greatest
crime and wanted to erect a memorial," she said.
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- Both Rosh and Eisenman said the site of the memorial,
at the heart of reunited Berlin, not far from the bunker where Adolf Hitler
committed suicide in 1945 and incorporating the bunker of his chief of
propaganda Joseph Goebbels, was perfect.
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- "This isn't about guilt. It is about renewal. It's
not about repression. It's about opening up," Eisenman said.
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- Germans looking at the site from a viewing platform said
they supported the project. "It is good and right that they are doing
this. It is a part of German history," said Frank Kasparek, 33, a
visitor from the southwestern city of Stuttgart.
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- After deliberations over what material to use, Eisenman
said he had chosen concrete because using marble or granite would have
made the memorial look like a cemetery. Concrete's imperfections and how
it aged were part of its charm, he said.
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- "It is not about a thousand years," he said,
referring to Hitler's dream for a Thousand Year Reich.
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- Eisenman said he hoped that as in the case of other great
monuments such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris
the architect of this project would be forgotten:
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- "This project is not about the people who are here.
It's about the people who are not here and we shouldn't forget that."
($1=.8876 Euro)
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