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emembrance
Approval of a memorial in Berlin does not
end debate on Shoah responsibility.
TOBY AXELROD
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Berlin
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26 Detroit Jewish News
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gray-haired man and woman
stood at the wooden fence,
reading the posters pasted
onto its planks: "This is the
site of Germany's future memorial to
the murdered Jews of Europe."
Behind the high wall is a sandy, lot,
big as several football fields, sprinkled
with wild flowers and pools of
rainwater. -
Soon this lot will look much dif-
ferent.
Late last month, more than half
a century after the end of World
War II, Germany's parliament
finally decided to build an $8 mil-
lion Holocaust memorial — a vast
field of 2,700 cement slabs resem-
bling aiant
giant gravestones, designed
by American architect Peter
Eisenman. Work is to start next year.
Not all questions have been
resolved — such as how to honor the
memory of other victims of the Nazis,
including homosexuals, slave laborers
and the Roma and Sinti, as Gypsies
prefer to be known.
But in general, politicians and reli-
gious leaders expressed relief at the
parliament's decision. And many
- noted that there may be no other
place in the world with a monument
dedicated to its own victims.
The decision capped 11 years of
public debate, an often painful con-
frontation with questions of guilt and
responsibility that penetrated all levels
of German society.
Opting to include an information
center at the site, legislators made it
clear that the memorial should not
end this discussion but rather ensure
that it continues after the last sur-
vivors and perpetrators are gone.
Indeed, the discussion — which
many have called more revealing and
more important than a concrete
memorial — is far from over.
Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen,
who opposed the Eisenman design as
too huge and unrelated to history,
now has turned his criticism to the
suggestion that separate memorials be
built for the other Nazi victims.
Not in Berlin, he has said, gearing
up for the next showdown.
For his part, Andreas Nachama,
president of Berlin's Jewish community,
hopes the planned memorial will speak
for other persecuted groups as well.
"The general public speaks about a
Holocaust memorial," he said.
That means it is primarily for the
"With this memorial,
there can be no more
denial or indifference."
— Wolfgang Thierse
Jews, but it also includes other vic-
tims. So maybe this is a first step
toward seeing that others are included,
even if their names are not on it."
Other groups should have their
own memorials, said Lea Rosh, who
first proposed the memorial.
"But they don't have to be in
Berlin. We have already said that there
should be one for Roma andSinti, but
in Stuttgart, where they were impris-
oned," Rosh said.
The 11-year debate about the
memorial has reflected advances made
in the decades of discussion on ques-
tions of guilt and responsibility, par-
ticularly, in the former West Germany.
Since the days of the Nuremberg
and Eichmann trials, where the finger
was pointed at major players, there has
been a giant leap in public awareness
of the role played by ordinary
Germans in Nazi crimes.
This awareness has grown just as
the perpetrator generation passes on.
So the postwar generations are the
ones with the task of remembering.
At the site, located near the
Brandenburg Gate, pedestrians
stopped to read the posters and arti-
cles pasted on the fence.