Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany

Last updated April 07, 2019

Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany encompass a large group of commemorative works dealing with the outdoor built environment. Most often these memorials attempt to keep the memory of Holocaust victims alive through dissemination of this memory to the public.

Theory

Since the end of World War II, there has been a question as to how one can adequately commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. For a time, it was often regarded with a sense of amnesia until memorialization efforts emerged. Holocaust memorials in Germany face the difficulty of commemorating the victims of a crime it has itself committed. American feminist historian Claudia Koonz evaluates this difference between memorializing the Holocaust as the perpetrator, rather than the victim.^[1]

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma. Amnesia can also be caused temporarily by the use of various sedatives and hypnotic drugs. The memory can be either wholly or partially lost due to the extent of damage that was caused. There are two main types of amnesia: retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is the inability to retrieve information that was acquired before a particular date, usually the date of an accident or operation. In some cases the memory loss can extend back decades, while in others the person may lose only a few months of memory. Anterograde amnesia is the inability to transfer new information from the short-term store into the long-term store. People with this type of amnesia cannot remember things for long periods of time. These two types are not mutually exclusive; both can occur simultaneously.

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, and the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.

According to scholar James E. Young, Holocaust memorials today have an anti-redemptive nature, reminding visitors of the horror of the Holocaust. These "countermonuments" work to bring events of the past into present awareness rather than relegate them to the past.^[2] These same subjects of cultural amnesia and remembrance of the Holocaust appear in the works of other post-Holocaust artists, such as the German artist Anselm Kiefer, and writers such as Romanian poet Paul Celan.

Anselm Kiefer German painter and sculptor

Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.

Paul Celan was a Romanian-born German language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Cernăuți, in the then Kingdom of Romania, and adopted the pseudonym "Paul Celan". He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.

Case studies

Multiple former concentration and labor camps have undergone redesigns to create memorial landscapes.

Bergen-Belsen

One of the first Holocaust memorial landscapes to come into being was at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, northwestern Germany. Efforts to establish a commemorative landscape here began shortly after the end of World War II. The core of the design comes from German landscape architect Wilhelm Hübotter who worked on the design in 1945 and 1946. He was removed from the project as his design, featuring native-only plants and references to Germanic burial mounds, was seen as being too in-line with national socialist ideals of a pure German landscape. Hübotter's design was, however, successful in its rejection of the beautification of the site, which was seen as inappropriate to the commemoration of acts of atrocity.^[3]

Bergen-Belsen[ˈbɛʁɡn̩.bɛlsn̩], or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to accommodate Jews from other concentration camps.

Lower Saxony is a German state (Land) situated in northwestern Germany. It is the second-largest state by land area, with 47,624 km² (18,388 sq mi), and fourth-largest in population among the 16 Länder federated as the Federal Republic of Germany. In rural areas, Northern Low Saxon and Saterland Frisian are still spoken, but the number of speakers is declining.

A landscape architect is a person who is educated in the field of landscape architecture. The practice of landscape architecture includes: site analysis, site inventory, land planning, planting design, grading, storm water management, sustainable design, construction specification and ensuring that all plans meet the current building codes and local and federal ordinances. The title landscape architect was first used by Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City's Central Park.

The realized landscape features smaller burial mounds where mass graves exist. Each mound features a stone plaque noting how many thousands of people are buried within. A path links these graves with a commemorative obelisk and a freestanding, inscribed wall at one end of the site. Critics, such as Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, claim that the design still engenders a subordination of the commemoration to the landscape itself, therefore playing into the national socialist ideals which caused the Holocaust.^[4]

A mass grave is a grave containing multiple human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. The United Nations has defined a criminal mass grave as a burial site containing three or more victims of execution. Mass graves are usually created after a large number of people die or are killed, and there is a desire to bury the corpses quickly for sanitation concerns. Although mass graves can be used during major conflicts such as war and crime, in modern times they may be used after a famine, epidemic, or natural disaster. In disasters, mass graves are used for infection and disease control. In such cases, there is often a breakdown of the social infrastructure that would enable proper identification and disposal of individual bodies.

A commemorative plaque, or simply plaque, or in other places referred to as a historical marker or historic plaque, is a plate of metal, ceramic, stone, wood, or other material, typically attached to a wall, stone, or other vertical surface, and bearing text or an image in relief, or both, to commemorate one or more persons, an event, a former use of the place, or some other thing. Many modern plaques and markers are used to associate the location where the plaque or marker is installed with the person, event, or item commemorated as a place worthy of visit. A monumental plaque or tablet commemorating a deceased person or persons, can be a simple form of church monument. Most modern plaques affixed in this way are commemorative of something, but this is not always the case, and there are purely religious plaques, or those signifying ownership or affiliation of some sort. A plaquette is a small plaque, but in English, unlike many European languages, the term is not typically used for outdoor plaques fixed to walls.

A critic is a professional who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or government policy. Critical judgments, whether derived from critical thinking or not, weigh up a range of factors, including an assessment of the extent to which the item under review achieves its purpose and its creator's intention and a knowledge of its context. They may also include a positive or negative personal response.

Ravensbrück surface relief

More recent attempts at memorializing concentration camp landscapes have taken different approaches. In the 1990s an international design competition was held for the redesign of the landscape at the former women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, also in Germany; the competition was won by the German practice of Burger + Tischer. On this site, where many of the original structures were demolished and which was later occupied by the Soviet army, little of the original layout remained intact. The winning scheme proposed an excavation of the site by volunteers, gradually creating a surface relief. This process would expose old foundations and the layout of the camp, whose borders would then be reforested to accentuate the boundaries. At the section of the site where youth were detained, a field of flowers acts as a memorial where no other visual traces remain.^[5]

Black Garden of Nordhorn

Memorial landscapes and gardens which commemorate the losses of the Holocaust also exist on sites which were not directly related to the crimes of the Nazi regime. These designs tend to approach the memory of the Holocaust in a different way, often intending to provoke rather than console the visitor. Rather than sealing off this disturbing aspect of German history, these commemorative landscapes attempt to bring their memory into the present public consciousness.

In Nordhorn, artist Jenny Holzer was commissioned to redesign a memorial to the fallen of Germany's three previous wars, including World War II. Next to the existing monolith, she designed a circular garden consisting of concentric rings of plantings and pathways. She employed a high level of symbolism, including benches with etchings such as "The ocean washes the dead" that render them undesirable to sit upon, creating discomfort for the visitor. Called "The Black Garden", Holzer's design also features plants with dark foliage and blossoms, including an Arkansas Black apple tree, black Mondo grass, dark-leafed geranium and common bugle with dark purple leaves, adding to the melancholy nature of the garden. The apple tree itself adds to the symbolism of the garden, Holzer states it is meant to evoke Biblical notions of man's curiosity about doing wrong.^[6] In the spring, a single spot of white tulips, planted in front of the plaque for victims of National Socialism, contrast with hundreds of black tulips.

Berlin Steles

Berlin showcases another Holocaust memorial landscape: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Designed by Peter Eisenman, the memorial consists of 2,711 concrete steles, of different heights through which visitors can walk. While Eisenman does not explicitly explain the meaning behind these forms, Constanze Petrow ^{[ who? ]} speculates that their collective form provides both a recollection of traditional Jewish cemeteries as well as a sense of loss of the Jewish community through the contrast of the quiet space of the memorial with the noise of the surrounding city.^[7]

Notes

↑ Koonz 1994
↑ Young 2000
↑ Wolschke-Bulmahn 2001, p. 284
↑ Wolschke-Bulmahn 2001, p. 298
↑ Mead 1998, p. 40
↑ Weilacher 2005, p.56
↑ Petrow 2005, pp. 88, 90

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References

Koonz, Claudia. "Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory." Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Ed. John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 258-280.
Mead, Andrew. "Winning Scheme Uncovers Sombre Traces of the Past." The Architects' Journal 207.22 (1998): 40.
Petrow, Constanze A. "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin." Topos 50 (2005): 86-92.
Weilacher, Udo. In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape Architecture. Boston: Birkhäuser, 2005.
Wolschke-Bulmahn, Joachim. "The Landscape Design of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial." Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001: 269-300.
Young, James E. At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.