Berlin Memorial Mired in Politics

Politics is being blamed for this week’s potentially fatal delay in a decade-old quest to build a Holocaust memorial in the heart of this once and future capital.

But the latest postponement of the project’s go-ahead vote, until after Germany’s federal election Sept. 27, also has raised a previously unspeakable question: How much national soul-searching over Nazi-era atrocities is enough?

“Too much remembering?” the respected weekly Der Spiegel asked on this week’s cover, arguing that the protracted squabbling over the memorial’s particulars masks a more deeply rooted reluctance to bring the wartime horrors so vividly to public attention.

Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen sparked the current controversy over the planned memorial to 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust when he disparaged the model designed by American architect Peter Eisenman as “too monumental.” He also suggested that the memorial would be more appropriately located at one of the concentration camps that were the scenes of systematic slaughter.

As this city that was the seat of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich rebuilds after the wartime devastation and 45 years of division, Diepgen has complained that Berlin risks becoming “a city of memorials and repentance.”

Gerhard Schroeder, Helmut Kohl’s challenger in the ever-narrowing race to become Germany’s next chancellor, entered the fray on Diepgen’s side, apparently sighting a ripe subject for exploiting broader German dissatisfaction with his opponent. Kohl has been an outspoken champion of the Holocaust memorial, and the defection of Diepgen, a fellow Christian Democrat, has served to portray the 68-year-old chancellor as out of step with the vast majority of Germans too young to have any memories of the Nazi era.

Schroeder’s advisor on cultural affairs, publisher Michael Naumann, earlier this month likened the memorial’s grandiose scale to the gigantism practiced by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Eisenman’s design calls for thousands of tombstone-like pillars erected across five acres near the Brandenburg Gate, evoking the image of an oversized graveyard.

“I fear that a nation that tries to portray the greatest crime in its history as an elegant and chic monument will be crossing the threshold of shamelessness,” Naumann observed.

He and Diepgen pushed for, and won, postponement of a meeting of the Berlin and federal governments Tuesday, when final approval of the Eisenman model had been expected.

Some Jewish community leaders and public figures criticized Diepgen and Schroeder for deliberately making the memorial an election issue to force postponement--and a rethinking of the entire project if Schroeder wins.

“I fear the monument is now as good as dead,” said Ignatz Bubis, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Advocates of the memorial said that if Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party wins next month’s election, Naumann’s criticism of the Eisenman design will be seen as also having won endorsement and the project will be either forgotten or delayed to death.

“I’m not God, so I can’t say that it will never be built, but certainly its prospects for the foreseeable future are in doubt,” said Michel Friedman of the Central Council.

While he accused Diepgen and Schroeder of trying to muffle public consciousness of the Holocaust, Friedman said most younger Germans want to confront their country’s dark past “to learn, to understand, to be aware of the consequences.”

Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union sought to save face over a delay that highlighted his eroding political clout. A party spokesman described the memorial issue as “a highly sensitive one” that will be resumed in earnest after the election.