Technology Recalls Jewish Past Shattered During Kristallnacht

Murmured prayers and mournful music follow time-travelers into Germany’s past as they enter cyberspace reconstructions of synagogues destroyed 60 years ago by rampaging Nazis during Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass,” which signaled the start of the Holocaust.

Technology has allowed young architects at the Technical University here to create something German society in general has been unable to manage: a meaningful memorial to the 6 million Jews killed during the Third Reich.

The “virtual synagogues” were crafted under the guidance of architecture professor Manfred Koob for Monday’s 60th anniversary remembrances of Kristallnacht.

The project brings to life three Frankfurt synagogues that were smashed and burned, along with hundreds of other Jewish places of worship, on the night Adolf Hitler and his followers elevated their persecution of Jews to a campaign of terror.

“This is a living thing. It’s not something that was just built and left in a finished state,” Koob says of the evolving computer-assisted renditions of the ruined synagogues. “It’s not just a memorial but something that can be made more accurate and more meaningful with each revision.”

A Web site displaying images from the project has attracted countless contributions from Holocaust survivors and descendants, says Marc Grellert, who began work on the CD-ROM project four years ago as his graduate thesis and released some images last summer on the Internet. (Some problems in connecting to the site have been reported. Its address is https://www.cad.architektur.tu-darmstadt.de)

Those viewing the synagogues on CD-ROM pore over the computer-generated exteriors of the three synagogues as the images emerge from original photographs and then twirl on screen to offer a bird’s-eye view. The virtual visitor is then swept through the entrance, slowly scanning pews and arches and the elevated choral recesses.

While the digital renditions are said to be true to the original architectural nuances and interior colors, Grellert acknowledges that those who remember the real synagogues commonly complain that the reproductions are too bright and flawless, like architectural mock-ups.

He adds that “a respectful distance” was deliberately maintained from the true versions, even though technology exists to create images that would be hard to tell from a photograph.

For Monday’s memorial services, Grellert has produced a short film showing CD-ROM images of the three finished synagogue reconstructions interspersed with academic observations on the project’s value in documenting the destroyed monuments, along with recollections of one man caught up in the Kristallnacht terror.

“They had problems setting the fire,” Franz Horenczyk, who lives in Israel, recalls of the brown-shirted Nazi henchmen at his synagogue in Frankfurt’s Friedberger neighborhood. “They had to come back later and blow it up.”

While the Darmstadt project has been praised for restoring memories of the three Frankfurt synagogues and cataloging materials for future renditions of 15 others throughout Germany, the independent, low-budget effort has also focused a discomfiting spotlight on the protracted conflict over how the country as a whole should remember the Holocaust.

Jewish community leaders see the decade-long debate over what kind of national memorial to build and where to build it as an allegory for this society’s inability to come to grips with its history, even three generations after the fall of the Third Reich.

“There’s still a strong inclination toward denial in this country,” says Hanno Loewy, director of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, which is dedicated to the study and documentation of the Holocaust. “It’s not so much denial of the facts of what happened but a great amount of denial that people you know were part of it.”

To build the German national monument to the victims means coming to a common understanding of responsibility for the atrocities and coinciding views on how to prevent social differences from again becoming dangerous divisions--emotional and intellectual goals the nation is still far from reaching, Loewy says.

He disputes conventional wisdom that Europeans have learned the lessons of the Holocaust, pointing to the ethnic conflicts that have ravaged the former Yugoslav federation in recent years.

“The lesson people say they learned is they will never be in a position for this to happen to them again. That means they will make sure they are in a position to do it to others first,” he says of sentiments seething below the surface.

He describes the discord over how and where to memorialize the Holocaust in Germany as “a placebo debate” that draws attention from the potential trigger for recurring ethnic conflict: this country’s blood-based definition of who can be a German.

“It wouldn’t count as much for this society to create a Holocaust memorial as it would to change the definition of citizenship,” says Loewy, blaming much of the anti-foreigner agitation brewing in Germany on the social divisions imposed by a citizenship policy that practices cultural exclusion.

The government of recently elected Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has announced plans to change the citizenship laws.

Resurgent right-wing radicalism, most visible in the poorer regions of eastern German states, is attributed to the economic imbalance that persists in the reunited nation and to suppressed discussion of the Holocaust.

“Every fifth youth in Germany doesn’t know what happened at Auschwitz,” says Michel Friedman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “For the others, they learned about it first from television, second at school and only in the last case from their parents. There is something wrong with that.”