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New York, Tuesday, March 9,
2004

In
Berlin, Jew tells Holocaust joke, rankling builders of Shoah memorial

By Toby Axelrod

BERLIN,
March 9 (JTA) —
Sometimes, a bad joke can elicit worse things than a painful groan from listeners.

Especially when the joke is about the poison gas the Nazis used to kill
Jews during the Holocaust.

Peter Eisenman, the architect of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial (below right), caused a stir recently when he told a meeting of the memorial’s board of trustees that his
New York dentist, after putting a gold filling in his teeth, “said he had just put a Degussa product in my tooth, and asked if he should take it out again.”

[Peter Eisenman, model]The
Degussa company produced the Zyklon B gas used to kill Jews at Auschwitz
and other Nazi death camps. Degussa also is the firm charged with graffiti-proofing Berlin’s new
Holocaust memorial.

The firm was nearly dropped from the project after sponsors learned of its history.

Eisenman, who is Jewish, said he told the story to lighten up the meeting, and didn’t mention Holocaust victims.

But his listeners were incensed.

Alexander Brenner, former president of Berlin’s Jewish community and one of the few members of his family to survive the Holocaust, stormed out of the meeting and later accused Eisenman of disparaging the memory of Jews who were murdered in the
Holocaust. He asked the memorial board’s chairman, Wolfgang
Thierse, president of the
Bundestag, to take a position on the issue.

Meanwhile, Albert Meyer, the new head of Berlin’s Jewish community, used the occasion to criticize the memorial itself, saying it would have been better to spend the money to reopen Berlin’s pre-war Academy for the
Science of Judaism — where Rabbi
Leo Baeck, among others, was a teacher.

Thierse said it was too late to criticize the project, which was approved by the Bundestag in 1999 after more than a decade of debate.[click to enlarge]

The memorial is still under construction, expected to be completed in 2005.

Lea Rosh, [right, caricatured with memorial]
deputy chairwoman of the memorial’s board, called Eisenman’s joke an example of “pure tastelessness,” and an embarrassment.

Eisenman offered a verbal apology this week. He also told the Berliner
Morgenpost newspaper, “If necessary, I will ask personally for forgiveness again. I did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings or snub them. I am sorry. I did not intend that.”

Paul Spiegel, head of the
Central Council of Jews in Germany, is demanding an apology in writing.

Wolfgang Benz, spokesman for the memorial’s advisory board and head of the Center for Research on
Anti-Semitism at the Technical
University of Berlin, said Eisenman used American-style humor and had not taken into consideration the effect it might have.

In America, Benz said, “people are much looser with themselves and with history, including Jewish history”.

Our
website dossier on the origins of
anti-Semitism
The good, the
bad, the ugly Lea
Rosh objects to Degussa firm working on
her $27m Holocaust memorial in
Berlin
Jul 2001: Lea Rosh’s Holocaust
Memorial Campaign Aims to Shock
Germany | Der
Spiegel:

“Welches Plakat?” |
Holocaust
Memorial Donations Sought |
‘Holocaust
Never Happened’ ad prompts survivor’s
lawsuit | Provocative
German Holocaust Denial Poster
Removed
The
1947 Bruno Tesch trial (whose
Degesch firm distributed the Zyklon B
pesticide product East of

the
Elbe)
Data
on Lea Rosh
New
History, new Memories, but old Problems
remain
Art
versus memory
Outrage in Berlin
Conservative
German politician claims Jews are “a
Race of Perpetrators”