Toronto , July 20, 1999
"...they
[Germans] all sound like
concentration camp guards
anyway."- Jewish-American architect and
designer of the Berlin Holocaust
memorial Peter Eisenman, as
quoted by the National Post art critic
John Bentley May
New
History, new Memories, but old Problems
remain by John Bentley Mays FOR anyone fascinated by the
ever-changing look, life and workings of
great cities, Berlin is the most exciting
place on Earth to be right now. You can't
turn a corner without seeing the busy
billions of incoming marks, dollars and
yen hard at work, transfiguring the
desolate, disfigured Cold War outpost of
10 years ago into the gleaming capital of
Europe's heftiest super-power. In due time, I'll be letting you in on
my opinions about the new Berlin. Today's
story is about another Berlin. It's the
one I came to know during the summer of
1991, when I lived here, studying German
at the Goethe-Institut each morning and
spending the hours from noon to nightfall
walking wherever my feet took me. The Wall had been gone almost two years
by that time, but the ghost of it lingered
on. You could feel the vanished barrier,
like a slight thickening of the air, when
crossing from old West Berlin, long smugly
accustomed to its role as a massively
subsidized tropical paradise within a
frigid police state, into the East-side
zone of Communism's triumphs: a few
modern-looking government and apartment
blocks rising improbably from bombed-out
emptiness and shabby streets. But in those days before the current
onslaught of building, there were some
accidentally good things about Berlin. One
was the dead, weedy expanse extending
south from the Reichstag and the
Brandenburg Gate, where I often went to
catch the summer sunsets because nowhere
was the sky wider or brighter. But Berlin never let me forget where I
was. A pattern of broken pavement in the
dirt --only that -- marked the site of
Potsdamer Platz, once the focus of hectic,
vivid urban life. A few steps away was the
unmarked grave of the knocked-down Reich
Chancellery and the concrete bunker in
which Hitler killed himself.
Wherever else one turned, stories of the
city's past seeped out -- from the
amputated facades of railway stations
wrecked by Allied bombardment to the ugly
concrete air-raid shelters still dotting
the city. In the days I studied verbs
here, the city was still an archive of sad
memories about Germany's failed democracy,
the horrible postlude, and the years of
sorrow following 1945. As I write this, eight years later, the
blasted earth is being covered by
glistening towers and great government
pavilions in which a new Berlin history
can be written, new memories created to
succeed the miserable ones. But while this headlong construction
was what drew me to Berlin this summer, I
knew I could not leave the story at that
-- especially now, when some Germans are
recalling complex matters that other
Germans, and many people outside this
country, would just as soon forget. Today at noon, for instance, the
political leadership of the Federal
Republic will assemble at the former Army
General Staff Building to pay tribute to
the German officers shot dead in its
courtyard after their failed attempt to
kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. This event,
and others throughout the day, will climax
almost a week of remembrance ceremonies,
sponsored each year by the German
Resistance Memorial, housed in the
complex. Sitting alone in the courtyard last
week, I wept for these men and their
families. The military men had risked
everything in their attempt to do Hitler
in and end the war. Even if they had
succeeded, there was the further risk that
nobody would rush to their side But if I
was tempted to hallow their memory with
sanctity (as the politicians today will
doubtless do), a nagging doubt kept me
from doing it. The problem has to do with the role
played before 1944 by noblemen such as
Claus Schenk Count von
Stauffenberg, the chief plotter, and
offspring of a titled family of the sort
that had historically supplied German
military leadership. The complaint is that
Count von Stauffenberg and ambitious men
like him cheered for Hitler in 1933, stood
by quietly in 1934 when Hitler destroyed
the S.A. -- a competitor to the Army in
the Third Reich -- decided National
Socialism was a bad thing only during the
war years, and decided to strike down
Hitler only after Germany's fate was
sealed. But it's just not that simple. Count
von Stauffenberg and his comrades may have
been vain, narrow-minded men, with a
conveniently flexible idea of honour and
duty, and collaborators with a vicious
regime. But one does not have to be a good
man to be a hero; and each of these men
did a hero's job -- though those who
revere the conspirators should say a
prayer that they will not be prevented by
ambition and stupidity from doing the
right thing soon enough. If the commemoration of July 20 is
doomed to be forever problematic, the
official remembrance of the Holocaust by
the German people will also be a vexing
matter. On June 25, after years of
wrangling, the Bundestag gave the go-ahead
for New York architect Peter
Eisenman's proposal for a Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe. The work will
consist of some 2,700 tall concrete
plinths, planted on a site that is now a
sump of muddy waste water south of the
Brandenburg Gate. The immediate reaction from Jewish
groups, inside and outside Germany, was
positive. But perhaps just because
Berliners love to quarrel about absolutely
everything, the arguments about the
Eisenman plan are still bubbling. I would like to drop three objections
into the cauldron. - The first, originally urged by
author Gunther Grass, is that no
monument could ever do justice to
victims of the enormity.
- My second objection is one insisted
upon by parliamentary opponents of the
project: that, if a Holocaust memorial
must be built in Berlin, then let it
explicitly commemorate all those
targeted by the Nazi murder machine as
deviants from Aryan perfection:
Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally
handicapped, as well as Jews.
- My third objection has to do with
Peter Eisenman, whose mind is
vulgar. The closing Bundestag debates
on the memorial, published in the
official record Das Parlament, were
notable for their intelligence,
strength of argument and seriousness.
Whatever their position, all the
speakers -- some very green and young,
some senatorial --acknowledged what
Germany had done, and the gravity of
making so public an act of
responsibility for so horrible a crime.
The speeches spoke volumes about the
moral urgency of the Germans voting to
become the clients of Peter
Eisenman.
The architect's views on his clients,
delivered during a speech before a packed
house at the Art Gallery of Ontario in
Toronto not long ago, began with ridicule
for the English accent of a German
interviewer with whom he had spoken
recently. "But," he added in these words,
or words to this effect, "they all sound
like concentration camp guards
anyway." I think those who voted for Eisenman's
concrete slabs have a right to more
respect from their architect, and a lot
less blabbermouthing in public about the
nation footing the bill. Reader's
letter |
write
to David Irving