Jewish Holocaust Memorial

The second most visited tourist destination is the memorial built to commemorate the nearly 9 million Jews that were systematically murdered by the Nazis’s conceived and manipulated by Hitler and Goebbels to create a common enemy to the fatherland.

The structure is very big and is designed to inspire and educate fellow tourists to the pure evil of the National Socialist Agenda circa 1939 onwards as it began to implement what has come be known as the “final solution”.
The sculpture park is designed for ordinary tourists and Berliners alike to remind them of what happened during the holocaust and as a stark reminder that this must never happen again.
It is a fascinating memorial and is open to interpretation around its meaning and how it represents the lessons learned from this horrible chapter in history. There are arranged in rows solid blocks of stone that are in varying shapes and sizes and that cover a vast area all arranged in rows and on an uneven surface.

It consists of a 19,000-square-metre (200,000 sq ft) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 metres (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 metres (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres (7.9 in to 15 ft 5.0 in). They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew.

The artist wanted people to read into the sculpture what they would and now that I reflect on it some more when you are walking in the middle of it, it becomes quite oppressive as well as being disorienting for the person in the maze. Many visitors and Berliners have also interpreted the contrast between the grey flat stones and the blue sky as a recognition of the "dismal times" of the Holocaust. As one slopes downwards into the memorial entrance, the grey pillars begin to grow taller until they completely consume the visitor. Eventually the grey pillars become smaller again as visitors ascend towards the exit. Some have interpreted this as the rise and fall of the Third Reich or the Regime's gradual momentum of power that allowed them to perpetrate such atrocities on the Jewish community.

The space in between the concrete pillars offers a brief encounter with the sunlight. As visitors wander through the slabs the sun disappears and reappears. One is constantly tormented with the possibility of a warmer, brighter life. Some have interpreted this use of space as a symbolic remembrance of the volatile history of European Jews whose political and social rights constantly shifted. Many visitors have claimed walking through the memorial makes one feel trapped without any option other than to move forward. Some claim the downward slope that directs you away from the outside symbolically depicts the gradual escalation of the Third Reich's persecution of the European Jewish community. First, they were forced into ghettos and removed from society and eventually they were removed from existence. The more a visitor descends into the memorial, he or she is without any visible contact of the outside world. He or she is completely ostracized and hidden from the world. It is common for groups of visitors to lose each other as they wander deeper into the memorial. This often reminds one of the separation and loss of family among the Jewish community during the Holocaust.
Some have interpreted the shape and color of the grey slabs to represent the loss of identity during the Nazi regime.Read more