While in Berlin last week I toured sights in the old East and around
the Brandenburg Gate that I had seen twenty years ago, before the wall
came down. The changers are, in a word, staggering. It was impossible
even to walk through the gate back then, now its as easy as standing
under the Washington Square Arch in NYC. But that's just one
small part of the new Berlin, a much more significant one, for me at
least, is Peter Eisenman's Holocaust memorial, just 300 meters from the
Gate.
Photographs fail to do it justice. On a large city block hundreds of
rows of separate black granite monolithic rectangles are laid out in a
grid, cut by intersecting alleys that suggest at once a huge modern cemetery, rows
of concentration camp barracks, narrow ghetto streets, and coffins
waiting for burial. The layout is deceivingly simple. In fact, it is
built on a waving sea of ground that swoops up and down giving greater
height to the structures as one traverses the maze of narrow
alleys. The clostrophobia is profound, and yet the hope curiously
springs from the mass of quiet bold forms.
It must be experienced to be appreciated.
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