BERLIN - In the 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the nation has struggled - painfully and sometimes defensively - to come to terms with its Nazi past. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Berlin, the restored capital, where a vast rebuilding effort has transformed the once-ravaged city center.
A cobblestone walkway leads between the pillars at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which formally opens on Tuesday.
A view of the information center at the memorial, where the display includes letters from those on their way to concentration camps.
The new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, is the apotheosis of this soul-searching. A vast grid of 2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth, it is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality - showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion.
The memorial's power lies in its willingness to grapple with the moral ambiguities arising in the Holocaust's shadow. Its focus is on the delicate, almost imperceptible line that separates good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence.
The location could not be more apt. During the war, this was the administrative locus of Hitler's killing machine. His chancellery building, designed by Albert Speer and since demolished, was a few hundred yards away just to the south; his bunker lies beneath a nearby parking lot.
Covering five and a half acres in the center of Berlin, the memorial, which opens May 10, will be an unavoidable fixture of the city's life - reassuring those who see the Holocaust as a singular marker of human evil while upsetting those who feel that Germany has already spent too much time wallowing in guilt.
By putting to rest the fantasy that the Holocaust can be conveniently relegated to the past, Mr. Eisenman is clearly exploring these tensions. The memorial's grid, for example, can be read as both an extension of the streets that surround the site and an unnerving evocation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that kept the killing machine grinding along. The pillars, meanwhile, are an obvious reference to tombstones.
But the memorial's central theme is the process that allows human beings to accept such evil as part of the normal world - the incremental decisions that collectively lead to the most murderous acts.
There is no way to glean this from photographs; it can be understood only by experiencing the memorial as a physical space. No clear line, for example, divides the site from the city around it. The pillars along its periphery are roughly the height of park benches. A few scattered linden trees sprout between the pillars along the memorial's western edge; at other points, outlines of pillars are etched onto the sidewalk, so that pedestrians can actually step on them as they walk by.
The sense of ambiguity - the concerns of everyday life, a world of unspeakable evil - will only be amplified once the memorial opens to the public. It is not hard to imagine Berliners sitting on the pillars at the memorial's edges, reading books or sunning themselves on a spring afternoon. The day I visited the site, a 2-year-old boy was playing atop the pillars - trying to climb from one to the next as his mother calmly gripped his hand.
These moments speak to one of the Holocaust's most tragic lessons, the ability of human beings to numb themselves to all sorts of suffering - a feeling that only intensifies as you descend into the site. Paved in uneven cobblestones, the ground between the pillars slopes down as you move deeper in.
At first, you retain glimpses of the city. The rows of pillars frame a distant view of the Reichstag's skeletal glass dome. To the west, you can glimpse the canopy of trees in the Tiergarten. Then as you descend further, the views begin to disappear. The sound of gravel crunching under your feet gets more perceptible; the gray pillars, their towering forms tilting unsteadily, become more menacing and oppressive. The effect is intentionally disorienting. You are left alone with memories of life outside - the cheerful child, for example, balanced on the concrete platform.
