Exhibit No. 1: Delayed Holocaust Memorial

As the heavy, metal door of the new Jewish Museum’s Holocaust Tower sweeps shut, sealing visitors into a frigid cylinder of darkness, those within are struck by a heart-stopping notion of what it was like to be locked in a Nazi gas chamber.

“This was done consciously, to encourage reflection,” Judith Meisner of the museum’s educational department says of the 90-foot-tall tower of blackened concrete. “Even the floor underneath is uneven, to give one a sense of being off balance.”

The Jewish Museum, first proposed by Berliners 70 years ago, is empty and will not host even temporary exhibits until October 2000. Since it opened for tours Feb. 12, thousands of Berliners have been through the unique building and free-standing tower designed by Berlin-based American architect and UCLA professor Daniel Libeskind that for now have become, by default, this nation’s monument to the Holocaust.

Germans have been debating for more than a decade how to commemorate the slaughter of 6 million Jews with a national monument in this city that was the capital of Nazi Germany and will become the seat of power again next summer when the government moves here after five decades in Bonn.

The impending return of officialdom to the domain of Adolf Hitler, along with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s assurances to young people that they should feel no responsibility for the Nazi era, has reignited the long-smoldering conflict over how Germans should atone for the murderous sins of an earlier generation.

But as young Germans seek to move out of the war’s shadows and establish a post-postwar society governed from Berlin, a rash of lawsuits demanding compensation for tens of thousands of wartime slave laborers is undermining the argument that Germans have earned the right to move on. The captains of industry have not even paid their financial debts to wartime victims, argue advocates for the claimants, much less reached the end of moral atonement.

At the center of the debate over when Germany will be allowed to become a “normal” country unburdened by its past is the on-again, off-again plan for a national Holocaust memorial designed by architect Peter Eisenman and sculptor Richard Serra, both Americans. The oft-delayed and disputed project--which last year almost got the go-ahead from the federal government--has been revised under the advice of Germany’s new culture czar, Michael Naumann, endorsed by Schroeder and resubmitted for discussion and a vote this spring in Parliament’s lower house, or Bundestag.

“I never doubted the moral and ethical importance of it,” says Naumann, who drew criticism from German media and Jewish community leaders when he labeled an earlier version of Eisenman’s project “too grandiose.”

The controversial Cabinet-level official insisted in an interview that his resistance to the original model proposing a graveyard-like expanse of 2,700 concrete pillars across several acres was grounded in fears that a monument without an educational element, no matter how grand in size, would eventually fade from notice.

Naumann described the Eisenman design as too beautiful to be a fitting reminder of horror. “The danger is that as time goes on,” he said, “the beauty of the memorial will become self-serving and will diminish its purpose.”

While the federal government is now supporting the new plan for a national memorial, which would reduce the monument park to about half the originally proposed size and add a million-volume library and genocide-watch institute, even the revised version has powerful opponents.

Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen of the center-right Christian Democratic Union faces reelection this fall and has seized on the memorial issue. Diepgen has vowed to derail the latest proposal, claiming it “raises more new questions than it answers.”

The persistent disputes over the memorial design have coincided with a bitter controversy stirred up by German writer Martin Walser, who has upset those intent on fostering remembrance with his claim that “self-flagellation” over the Holocaust has become excessive.

“The time for debate over building a Holocaust memorial is long past. It has been so protracted and politicized that we now must just build it,” says Eckart Stratenschulte, head of the European Academy think tank here. “If we continue to put off a decision, this will become evidence in the eyes of the rest of the world that the Germans are trying to run away from their history again.”

He and other social analysts believe that the work-in-progress of the Jewish Museum, the Berlin branch of the Shoah Foundation archives and dozens of small, neighborhood memorial plaques and tributes to victims of the Holocaust are more tangible and effective reminders than symbolic monuments. Nonetheless, most agree there should be a national gesture of remembrance in the new capital.

But Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, who hosted a Berlin fund-raiser this month for the Shoah Foundation project he sponsors, hinted at the sensitivity of the memorial issue when he declined to disclose his opinion.

“That is a decision that the German people have to make,” he said of the memorial, repeating his offer to share the Shoah Foundation’s video archives of 50,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors.

But the complexities stalling the national memorial threaten to prevent its completion for years, turning the attention of those committed to commemoration to other projects.

Those at work establishing the Jewish Museum here have tapped into the well of unsatisfied historical interest by offering tours of the empty structure and the tower, which will remain purposefully devoid of visual diversion.

“So far, it’s just open as a building, not as a museum,” says the educational department’s Meisner, noting that more than 3,000 people toured Libeskind’s structure in the first week it offered a few brief glimpses for visitors. “It’s become a Holocaust memorial of its own--not the memorial, but one that Berliners can already go to.”