Collective Memory and the Holocaust

On May 10 New York architect Peter Eisenman officially unveiled his Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin: 2,711 concrete pillars, ranging in height from three to sixteen feet, rise up at subtly varying angles in a vast field in the city center. A grid of narrow alleys weaves through the pillars, undulating at times gently, at times steeply. Ever since the space was first chosen for a Holocaust memorial in 1992--when it was a vacant expanse between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, part of the no-man's-land once occupied by Hitler's bunker and traversed by the Berlin wall--it has served as a kind of projection screen or free-fire zone for German controversies about the politics of collective memory: Should there be a reminder of Nazi atrocities in the center of the German capital?...more here