Wow.
Just saw this photo in the NYT article about the new Memorial for Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Wow.
"Beautiful" is obviously not the right word here. It looks amazing, powerful, pervasive, upsetting, unforgettable.
I love it.
Some people don't, though those who don't seem to criticize it more on political and cultural grounds rather than aesthetic. It is a memorial more for the Germans than the Jews, they say. What about the other victims in World War II, they ask.
But I love it. The silent, leaden blocks. The shadows they cast. The weight. The oppressiveness. The lack of color.
It reminds us that there is nothing glorious or poetic or uplifting about the Holocaust. Yes, we won the war. Yes, evil was vanquished. Yes, there are individual stories of triumph and humanity and hope. But that made no difference to the people who died in the concentration camps. They died without hope and without dignifity. For them, there was just the crushing weight of death, the finality of it, the futility, the terrible nothingness.
Their days were the leaden concrete pillars. There was no happy ending to THEIR story.
That was what they knew, and that is what we should remember now with this memorial.
(In case you are interested, here are some other photos as well as a more critical article about the Memorial.)
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