2,500 Pillars Don’t Tell Holocaust Story

Now that the German parliament has voted to build a major Holocaust memorial in Berlin, authorities must make sure that attached to that memorial will be a real museum--one that helps future generation visitors really understand why so massive a memorial was built in the heart of Germany’s capital.

When, after a decade of often acrimonious national debate, the parliament approved the memorial in June, it mandated not only a vast field of about 2,500 stone pillars resembling a graveyard but also an element that previous designs had not included: a so-called documentation center, which, through exhibits, would teach about the nature and history of the Holocaust. It made sure, moreover, that the memorial would be dedicated specifically to the Holocaust’s horrific heart: the Shoah, the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

The field of pillars will be powerful. But, as envisioned now, the attached “documentation center” will be only a mini-museum, too small and inadequate to carry out the crucial and massive educational task of explaining what the Shoah was, why it was carried out and the civilization that was destroyed when the people who comprised it were destroyed.

Such a task can be filled only by a real museum, similar in scale to the ones now standing in Jerusalem and Washington, that presents in honest and detailed ways the full history and scope of the tragedy.

It’s laudable that the parliament mandated an educational center. Without such a center, future visitors would encounter merely a place of memory--the purpose of which would eventually be, in the main, forgotten.

Nor would this be unprecedented. Many countries have established memorials that were meaningful once but that are now ignored or can only be understood by consulting a guidebook. Men on horseback lead troops to victories in historic battles. Grand arches, towering columns and vast spaces commemorate great events, often solemn ones, that close inspection may identify but not explain. What those monuments once signified with such immediacy is no longer evoked generations later.

What the Berlin Holocaust memorial signifies is too important to succumb to such generational amnesia. The Shoah was more than a battle. It was a state-sponsored, ferocious war against an entire and defenseless people, based on racial theories, carried out by the most cultured nation on Earth, using industrialized methods of murder; and it was horrendously successful. It was the greatest crime in human history. And it deserves not only a memorial and not only a documentation or interpretive center but a living museum that explains to all visitors, for all time, who was killed, why they were killed, what the circumstances were in Germany that made it possible for Germans and their collaborators to kill them, and the civilization that was destroyed when its people were destroyed.

A board of experts will oversee the content of the documentation center that will be part of the Berlin Holocaust memorial. That board will have to contend with powerful and conflicting voices in Germany. Some will argue that the center mustn’t say too much, others that it mustn’t say too little. Still others will complain that other museums elsewhere in Berlin already tell parts of the story of the Shoah, or that they soon will.

But this center must say it all, precisely because it’s on the site of the memorial itself. The memorial will be immense and will draw visitors from Germany and the world--far more than the other museums in Berlin that touch on one or another aspect of Nazi depredations. Few of the visitors to the memorial will go to other museums to understand what the memorial commemorates. If it repeats some of the themes covered in the other museums, the redundancy will be well worth it.

Germany will have one chance, on the grounds of this memorial, to tell the whole story in an effective way--and only by building a full-fledged museum will it be able to do so.

The board members with the responsibility to design this educational center must resist pressures to avoid a complete account of the destruction of Europe’s Jews, including the extent to which German society participated in that destructi on.

Only a real and honest museum will be able to do this. Only such a museum will be able to provide what future Germans, and all visitors to the memorial, will need. The debate on its content should now begin, and in its power and agony that debate will be good.