Berlin Stories 1 - Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is usually known as the "Holocaust memorial" but with its focus on only the Jewish Holocaust part of me wonders at the silence around non-Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust which seems present as much in Germany as elsewhere.

Located in the city centre, on a site where the Wall once ran and where Joseph Goebbels bunker was housed during the the Second World War, this 19,000 square metre sea of stones fascinates yet ulitimately disappoints. Conceived as a place of seculsion and silence where one loses oneself in the labyrinths, hesitantly navigating the uneven ground beneath ones feet, in reality its a maze for visiting school-children to play hide and seek.





There is no entrance, no centre, no exit. And nothing to tell you what this sculpture/installation is supposed to mark or represent. Apparently there is in the southeast corner of the memorial, underground, a "place of information". Nothing guides you to this though or alerts you to its presence.

American architect Peter Eisenman conceived his work to be a distressing landscape of memories, an abstraction of horrors that defy all description in words. But in a public space the public seem to treat it as an abstract amusement arcade.