Museum Transformations

How do visitors see this? A new study by Marion Klein (2012) investigates how secondary school students perceive the memorial and the information center. This study has shown that at least the majority of German students has already learned quite a bit about the Holocaust in school and is well aware of the “normative expectations regarding appropriate remembrance.” However, this generation in particular tends to regard the expectation to feel grief and empathy as “imposed from the outside” and “put on” (Klein 2012, 35). Eisenman’s abstract memorial leaves more leeway as to how one should react and remember. This is surprising for many. On the one hand, it is liberating and opens up the possibility of finding one’s own individual approach to a difficult subject. On the other, the memorial’s openness bears the risk of being perceived merely as an attractive perhaps even adventurous space in the city center, hence forfeiting its “function as a cultural representation of the Holocaust.” In this sense, the Holocaust Memorial, or rather its being used in this way, represents the forgetting of the Holocaust in today’s society (Klein 2012, 138, 141). However, the interviews Klein conducted among her sample group show that this forgetting is frequently disrupted, for instance by stumbling on the uneven ground in the deepness of the sculpture, which often triggers contemplation quite unexpectedly (151). The students also perceive the center in various ways: Klein’s study indicates that the individual and family histories presented in the exhibition do elicit emotions and sympathy. At the same time, they provide an opportunity for some of the students to find a connection with their own world. Others regard the exhibition merely as a presentation of facts that prescribe how they should think and feel (144). Female students in particular, however, tend to react positively to the personalized portrayal in the center; they regard the focus on individual fates as more “moving” than the abstract memorial (for gender-specific perceptions, see Klein 2012, 354). According to a survey of 824 secondary school students conducted by Christian Saehrendt in 2007, two-thirds of respondents are much more impressed by the information center than by the actual memorial (Saehrendt 2007).

Not only German adolescents visit the memorial and the information center. A visit to the Holocaust Memorial has become an integral part of tours of Berlin, and it appears that many tour groups from Germany and abroad plan a quick stop at the memorial from Potsdamer Platz, and then depart for the government district and the Brandenburg Gate. Here, the memorial appears as just another tourist attraction, at which people do not spend much time, nor are they very well prepared. The center’s guest book, however, shows that many visitors come especially for the memorial and the center. The exhibition has audio guides in various languages, and leaflets are available in 20 languages. The texts of the exhibition are only in German and English because of spatial limitations, but the foundation offers regular guided tours in several languages. These tours contain information on the history of the memorial’s inception and realization, the history of the site, the architecture of the field of stelae, and an introduction to the main themes of the exhibition. One visitor wrote: “At the beginning, I thought the memorial was strange, even devoid of meaning, but after the tour of the underground part, I was overwhelmed” (Guest book, June 24, 2008, Archives of the Foundation).

This is what happens to many people who have passed through the memorial and then visited the center. After returning from the subterranean exhibition to daylight and into the memorial visitors often feel changed. Many are moved to tears. It might be a common experience that people, after they have visited the center, are able to really feel the essence of the site, which Agamben (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) described in a poetic way. As architect Peter Eisenman (2005a), who was originally opposed to the center, put it in an interview with the the Nation : “It’s not just the columns and it’s not just the archive it’s the fact that they stand together, and you have to see them apart and together and understand the edge between the two.” The interaction of both, the memorial and the underground center, makes this a unique and very special place of Holocaust commemoration in the German capital. Would the memorial have the same effect without the center and vice versa? Both would not be the same. The memorial would probably be perceived by many who have no knowledge of the Holocaust as an adventure playground; the information center discreetly hidden underground “needs the attraction of the field of stelae to draw visitors and to be properly valued,” Brigitte Sion observes (2008, 216). In the center, the presence of the great memorial above can be felt. When we leave the exhibition and go up to the memorial, we have more knowledge, and above all take images and traces of the victims with us while we experience the memorial anew. Together, these two parts of the ensemble “offer an original and moving experience of Holocaust memory, but not separately” (Sion 2008, 216).

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. “Die zwei Gedächtnisse” [The two memories]. Die Zeit 19, May 4. Accessed April 7, 2014. http://www.zeit.de/2005/19/Mahnmal_2f_Agamben/komplettansicht.

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Dekel, Irit. 2011. “Mediated Space, Mediated Memory: New Archives at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.” In On Media Memory , edited by Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg, 265–277. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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