The day’s last, wry sun-rays, bouncing from the shelf of the Memorial, fade in its deep cool breath, exhaled from the grid of the meticulously implemented furrows, and form the feeling, or better, the unconscious expectation that walking among the concrete blocks you imperceptibly leave the city’s mundane comfort and enter the belly of a slumbered, long-time sleeping, rotting creature whose surgically reorganized intestines’ stench and labyrinths bring you to unsettling disorientation and whose inner, somewhat metabolic, warmth sets you, calm and dizzy, wondering through the stones of your own memory, disturbed and ashamed by the straight, salvaging fast-tracks between them, trying to sort the blocks you can overlook out of the ones that, doubting the relevance of your grasp of the atrocities of the past, soar over you and automatically fuse with the pinkish glare of the mnemonic banality.
I started this writing as a reading of Peter Eisenman’s project inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s attitude to telling a story. By yarning continuously about how he is going to write a biography the Russian author presents us with “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”. A novel full of absence. And the absence induces enigma, the enigma engenders reality or illusion of reality… And the most absent character, that of Sebastian Knight, is the most vibrant one.
Similarly, “there is nothing to read in Peter Eisenman’s stone book of memory,” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes.
“Absence” would, therefore, be one keyword for me. Faked lack of evidence, in Nabokov’s case, and the scattered remnants of sinisterly designed, severely executed and then rigorously shattered system, in the case of the Memorial, are the creative “input”. But the wholeness of the story is, as if, of no importance, since both devisers focus on the diversity, power and abundance of sensations provoked in the audience, avoiding showing it the ugly, unpleasant and sad picture.
The body of work, subject to the creative undertaking, houses distinct, empirical or notional moments but not literal historic facts or chronological processes of the topic. Thus the result enters a meta-level of existence - a “place without information” as Eisenman calls it. Being there is a stimulating experience in which the mind, the imagination and the aesthetics all take part. The monument becomes a context where “there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past” and where “only the living memory of the individual experience” is present.
“Collective” is another keyword I would like to include here. While Eisenman’s reading of modernism in his essay “ The Representations of Doubt: At the Sign of the Sign” was, roughly put, to talk “of” instead of “why” and “how”, the project for the memorial brings it further and actually stops talking but starts listening. “It stands there, silent,” the architect says: “the one who has to talk is you.”
The memorial will, therefore, be complete when everyone visits it and expresses their reading of it, when the collective appreciation and denial has been inlayed in its oscillating space, thus fixating into resonance the phase of the two waves - the upper membrane of the slanted stelae tops and the lower membrane of the ascending and descending paths. “All kinds of unexpected things are going to happen”, the architect says, referring to the memorial’s openness to whatever the visitor brings to it. In Eisenman’s opinion the possibility for graffiti, picnics, film shootings, fashion shows and games is not a threat for the sanctity of the monument’s space. And it is not the multitude of events themselves but the variety of attitudes they would radiate that was Eisenman’s creative intention. “I didn’t want it to seem designed. I wanted the ordinary, the banal. If you want to show a picture, just show it - don’t spend too much time arranging it.”
It is almost like the project is not a design for a memorial but a design for all the possible ways to design the given memorial whose harmonic confluence hopefully expresses the significance of the memorial’s subject.
Having in mind Agamben’s concept about the “Unforgettable” and the “Memorable”, it is clearer how the absence of references activates the collective memory. “In the memorial, both heterogeneous dimensions of memory are topographically differentiated; above ground - the absolutely unreadable stelae, below - an Information Center reserved for reading. The immaterial edge, that separates these two kinds of memories is the real space of the memorial.”
In other words the architect sets the table, turns on the microphone and starts the camera but lets the visitors to talk. Even lets them choose the mnemonic space to shift the given setting. Creating a memorial that creates the memorial one wants to create. The collective freedom, support, opposition or controversy, found in this elusive design, help us begin to appreciate the significance of full discharge of any literal associations when dealing with such, complicated and loaded with bad conscious and painful reflections, matters.
For “life and society are healthy only when the tension between the “memorable” and the “unforgettable” is maintained.”
“Abstraction” would be the last keyword I would like to point out. Giorgio Agamben never mentions the project’s purpose at all in his article “Two Kinds of Memory” as if corroborating Eisenman’s intent to release the memorial of its default explanatory self.
References:
- “Die zwei Gedächntisse”(“Two Kinds of Memory”), Giorgio Agamben, Die Zeit, 04.05.2005 Nr.19
- “Collective Memory and the Holocaust”, Ross Benjamin, The Nation, 31.05.2005
- “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, Peter Eisenman
- “The Representations of Doubt: At the Sign of the Sign”, Peter Eisenman
- “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-Ino and the Self-Referential Sign”, Peter Eisenman, 1979
- “How Long Does One Feel Guilty ?” - SPIEGEL interview with holocaust monument architect Peter Eisenman, Charles Hawley & Natalie Tenberg, SPIEGEL ONLINE, 9.05.2005
- “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”, Vladimir Nabokov, 1941
- “A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable”, Nicolai Ourousoff, The New York Times, 9.05.2005
- “Holocaust Memorial: Architect Peter Eisenman, Berlin 2005”, Sarah Quigley, The Polynational War Memorial, 21.09.2005
- “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” entry, wikipedia.org