Empathetic Memorials: The Other

Designs for the Berlin Holocaust

Memorial Mark Callaghan
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
MEMORY STUDIES

Empathetic Memorials
The Other Designs
for the Berlin
Holocaust Memorial
Mark Callaghan
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to
an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years.
Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect
what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual,
theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682
 Mark Callaghan

Empathetic Memorials
The Other Designs for the Berlin Holocaust
Memorial
Mark Callaghan
Birkbeck College, University of London
London, UK

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

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 For Nellie Callaghan. Thank you for your love, support and remarkable
patience. You will remember our first experience of Berlin in 2010, the
difficulties we faced that year and how important it was to be away for a
few days. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe formed part of
our visit. It was during that very challenging autumn that I conceived of
the idea that eventually led to this book—a book that would not have been
possible without you.
 Chronology of the Berlin Holocaust
Memorial Competition

In 1988, television journalist Lea Rosh and historian Eberhard Jäckel

began a campaign for a German national memorial to the 6 million Jews
murdered during the Second World War. By the spring of 1989, the cam-
paign had gained the support of prominent Germans such as the Mayor of
Berlin, Walter Momper, and Senator of Culture, Anke Martiny.1 Donations
from prominent figures, such as Willy Brandt, Christa Wolf, and Walter
Jens, were also forthcoming, along with contributions from school coun-
cils, local unions, and also ‘The covenant of forced sterilization and eutha-
nasia victims’. Petitions containing thousands of signatures in support of a
memorial were also collected.2
By 1992, an estimated DM 15 million had been amassed, half of which
was publicly funded and the other half provided by private donors.3 Corporate
sponsorship was also prevalent with notable contributors being Marcus
Bierich of the Robert Bosch GmbH and Daimler CEO Edzard Reuter.4
By 1994, Rosh and Jäckel had also gained enough support in the
Bundestag that a competition was announced in Germany’s national press.
A field of international artists and architects submitted 528 proposals. All
designers were aware of the memorial’s pre-designated site, 19,000 square
metres of land close to the Brandenburg Gate. Competing artists and
architects were also aware of the memorial’s pre-designated title, The
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The jury, which was announced in April 1994, selected two designs: the
model by Christine Jackob-Marks, and the proposal by Simon Ungers. In
June 1995, it was announced that the Jackob-Marks design was the more
feasible of the two finalists, primarily for budgetary reasons. Some aspects

vii
viii CHRONOLOGY OF THE BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL COMPETITION

of the Jackob-Marks design did, however, concern some of the German

Jewish community. Its gargantuan concrete plate, which would have been
inscribed with the names of all known victims, was designed to be raised
at one end, allowing for the mass of victim’s names to be seen by visitors.
This feature of the design was criticised for alluding to a rising tomb, an
unintended Christian iconography that contravened the memorial’s Jewish
associations.5 This led to the unsuccessful end of the competition, leading
to a two-year hiatus that included the 1996 colloquia where representa-
tives of all German political parties met to discuss how the suspended
memorial project could be revived.
In 1997, a more limited competition was initiated, with nineteen artists
and architects invited to submit designs. The revived scheme had a new
structure of decision-makers, the five-member Findungskommission
chaired by James Young, who recommended the design, American archi-
tects Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra, whose experiential model con-
sisted of 4000 concrete stelae.
On 25 June 1999, the government approved of Lea Rosh’s proposal to
assign the final decision for selecting a memorial to the Bundestag. Out of
559 MPs, 439 voted in favour of the motion to build Eisenman’s design,6
though the building of the proposal would be contingent on the inclusion
of an information centre, petitioned by Federal Cultural Representative
(Bundeskulturbeauftragter), Michael Naumann, who argued that the
abstract design was in need of contextualisation.
On 10 May 2005, Eisenman’s modified design, complete with under-
ground information centre and a reduced number of stelae, was unveiled.

Notes
1. Simone Mangos, A Monumental Mockery: The Construction of the National
Holocaust Memorial, (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press,
2007), p. 20.
2. Interview with Günter Schlusche. Conducted by Mark Callaghan.
10.11.2012.
3. The final cost of the memorial, complete with Information Centre, would
total an estimated 25 million euros. www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en.html.
Accessed 17.10.2011.
4. Interview with Günter Schlusche. Conducted by Mark Callaghan.
10.11.2012.
5. Bill Niven, Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary
Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 166.
6. Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory in France and
Germany since 1989, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), p. 145.
 Acknowledgements

There was no epiphany for my interest in the representation of atrocities

and memorialisation. Instead, this attraction emerged through a period of
study where I became more conversant with a range of media concerning
artists’ portrayals of trauma. This interest was enhanced by a developing
appreciation of theoretical concepts that complement an understanding
of said depictions and the ambition of adding to the discourse, which I
hope to have achieved with the publication of this book. Further to these
academic interests, I have often been drawn to memorialisation of events
and people, the stylistic changes within this medium, and the possible
effects that mnemonic forms can have on viewers, including the illusion
of permanence as an instinctive response to mortality, and, in relation to
this monograph, empathetic identification with the person being
commemorated.
The advice and support of Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine and Dr Gabriel
Koureas has been greatly appreciated throughout my work on this book.
I am thankful for their time, patience, and intelligent guidance.
I am also grateful to Dr Günter Schlusche who offered important
details concerning sources of primary information and provided significant
insights into his experiences and knowledge of the Berlin competitions.
My thanks also to all the artists and architects who gave their time for
interviews, this being Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Richard Gruber,
Karol Broniatowski, Jochen Gerz, Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Heufelder,
Peter Eisenman, and, on behalf of Simon Ungers, his sister Sophia Ungers,
who provided information for her late brother’s submission. I hope to
have done justice to these designs and expanded upon the work of these

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

artists through critical analysis. Former Cultural Commissioner, Professor

Michael Naumann, and Findungskommission Chair, Professor James
Young, should also be acknowledged for their co-operation and willingness
to be interviewed.
All interviewees were generous with their time and played an essential
role in developing an understanding of their concepts, the thoughts
behind their respective submissions, and the ways in which the competition
and its surrounding issues developed. Stefanie Endlich deserves a special
thank you for her interview and also for providing images of several designs
for both competitions. Sarah Friedrich of the Memorial Foundation
should be acknowledged for her efforts in obtaining quality images of the
Information Centre and its exhibits.
There are many scholars whose work has been of value to my thinking,
informing this book in authoritative and indirect ways. To name but some,
appreciation is due to Aleida Assmann, Amy Coplan, Dominick LaCapra,
James Young, Bill Niven, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Rothberg, Alison
Landsberg, Jon Bird, Doreen Massey, Ann Kaplan, Dora Apel, and
Theodor Adorno.
My thanks to the reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan, and the sound advice
of Commissioning Editor Mala Sanghera-Warren and Editorial Assistant
Bryony Burns. Their assistance in the process of publication is greatly
appreciated.
And finally, I express much gratitude to Lisa Holland, Ryan Holland,
and Naya Tsatsou for their love and pragmatism, and many thanks also to
Barry Callaghan, Paul Holland, and Amy Holland for their love and for
knowing when not to ask how the book was progressing. My appreciation
includes all other close family and friends for their encouragement and
interest, and John O’Brien for keeping my spirits up.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Who Is the Memorial For? 11

3 Issues of Representation 83

4 Different Ways of Understanding Individual Victims:

Names, Photographs, and the Void153

5 Designs That Attempt to Resist the Completion of Memory195

6 Conclusion247

Index255

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Peter Eisenman’s winning model for the 1997 contest (after
revision at the request of The Bundestag). (Image provided by
Stefanie Endlich) 18
Fig. 2.2 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Design by
Peter Eisenman. (Photograph: Mark Callaghan (2014)) 42
Fig. 2.3 Dani Karavan, Gelbe Blumen, Project for the Holocaust Memorial,
1995, environmental sculpture, Berlin, Germany,
©Studio Karavan 45
Fig. 3.1 Richard Gruber. Ferris Wheel. (Image courtesy
of Richard Gruber) 99
Fig. 3.2 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Design by Peter
Eisenman. Detail. (Photograph © Ryan Holland (2016)) 116
Fig. 3.3 Simon Ungers’ submission for the 1994 competition. (Image
courtesy of Sophia Ungers) 119
Fig. 3.4 The Room of Dimensions. (Image courtesy of The Memorial
Foundation)125
Fig. 3.5 One of the copied letters in the Room of Dimensions.
(Photograph: Mark Callaghan (2014)) 126
Fig. 3.6 The displayed, enlarged copy of Suzanne Burinovici’s postcard
to her daughter Claudine. Room of Dimensions. (Photograph:
Mark Callaghan (2014)) 127
Fig. 4.1 The foyer of the Information Centre. (Image courtesy of the
Memorial Foundation) 164
Fig. 4.2 The Room of Families. (Image courtesy of the Memorial
Foundation)167

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 4.3 Irina and Eugen Berkowitz. (Image courtesy of The Memorial
Foundation)169
Fig. 4.4 Adalbert Berkowitz. (Image courtesy of The Memorial
Foundation)170
Fig. 4.5 Auschwitz-Birkenau, June 1944: deportees arrive after a
journey of several days The Room of Families. (Image courtesy
of the Memorial Foundation) 172
Fig. 4.6 Christine Jackob-Marks’ submission for the 1994 competition.
(Image provided by Stefanie Endlich) 177
Fig. 4.7 The name of Berl Fiegelman. Room of Names. (Image courtesy
of the Memorial Foundation) 180
Fig. 5.1 Renata Stih and Freider Schnock’s submission, Bus Stop!, 1994.
(Image courtesy of ©Renata Stih and Freider Schnock) 200
Fig. 5.2 Bus Stop!’s Fahrplan (Timetable). 1994. (Image courtesy of
Renata Stih and Freider Schnock) 210
Fig. 5.3 Jochen Gerz’s submission, Warum (1997). (Image courtesy of
Jochen Gerz) 225
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Empathetic Memorials – The Other Designs for the Berlin Holocaust

Memorial revisits the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competitions of the
1990s, with a special focus on submissions that engage with issues of
empathy, the role of the secondary witness, viewer interpellation, and cul-
tural memory. Its central drive is the analysis of provocative designs that,
through research and integration of theoretical frameworks, develop new
understandings of Holocaust memorialisation and new understandings of
the frameworks themselves. The work challenges the field of memory
studies by showing a relationship between empathy and cultural memory
that safeguards victims’ suffering, preventing misappropriation in which
viewers could mistake the victim’s situation as their own perceived victim-
hood. This materialises from the question of how memorial designs that
do not include images of suffering can be ‘completed’ by viewers’ memory
of other Holocaust representations and how this could influence their
capacity to relate to victims’ experiences.
One of the key aims is the exploration of questions concerning the
potential elicitation of empathy by analysing Holocaust memorial designs
that have the capacity to kindle empathic responses. This involves analys-
ing a range of designs, none of which proposed to include an image of
suffering. The goal is to frame this within the perspective of would-be visi-
tors’ visual and also somatic experience, as several of the featured designs
offer this kind of empathetic encounter. As a result of this approach,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Callaghan, Empathetic Memorials, Palgrave Macmillan Memory
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50932-3_1
2 M. CALLAGHAN

debates are brought together concerning representation of the Holocaust

and the consequences of memorials evoking empathy.
A recurring problem with the study of empathy is the lack of consensus
in regard to what empathy is.1 In The Age of Empathy: Lessons for a Kinder
Society, Frans de Waal proposes a broad conceptualisation of empathy,
arguing for the inclusion of several psychological phenomena, including
mirroring processes, bodily synchronisation, and emotional contagion (a
process of self-oriented perspective-taking).2 This over-arching conceptu-
alisation is not applied to my analysis of the potential elicitation of empa-
thy. Of more relevance is Amy Coplan’s definition—‘empathy proper’
(‘successful empathy’)—which she distinguishes from emotional conta-
gion, with ‘empathy proper’ being a complex imaginative process whereby
viewers (appropriate to this study, this involves visitors to memorials),
‘simulate the victim’s situated psychological states whilst maintaining clear
self-other differentiation’3—where the secondary witness evokes the vic-
tim’s experience from the other’s perspective.
The ethical stakes of representing the pain of others periodically ema-
nates from Theodor Adorno’s post-Auschwitz aporia, where he deter-
mines that writers and artists have a moral obligation to represent atrocities
whilst also being mindful that depictions of suffering can stimulate aes-
thetic pleasure, that a victim’s experience can somehow be attractive, even
gratifying, causing a suspicious avidity.4 Images of suffering can, though,
be a revelatory experience, prompting questions about the cause of suffer-
ing (Sontag 2004), and can make one cognisant of atrocities, even leading
to vigilance (Kaplan 2005). In an enduring, oscillating debate, counter-
points include the position that explicit images of suffering can be so
repellent that viewers refrain from engagement with the subject being pre-
sented (Apel 2002), and whilst empathising with victims can be effective
in terms of emotional and visceral appeal, there is also the risk that one is
claiming (consciously or not) the victim’s experience (LaCapra 1998). As
Dominick LaCapra raises the concern, the beholder can become a ‘surro-
gate victim’, thus becoming a ‘falsifying voice’, which is the basis for his
argument that empathy should be unsettled and critically interrogated in
order for the viewer to avoid ‘empathic over-arousal’5—an effect that may
result in viewers’ being focused on their own emerging distress rather than
the victims’, an involuntary process so painful that viewers may no longer
be empathetic (Hoffman 2001). This is the primary reason for my selec-
tion of Coplan’s work on empathy, as the self-other differentiation allows
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

for a distance from the victim that negates the ‘empathic over-arousal’ that
LaCapra writes of.6
A memorial design’s capacity to induce empathy therefore involves
debates concerning secondary witnessing—when the observer relates to
the experience of the primary witness conveyed through accounts and
imagery—and empathy, which might cause a form of secondary trauma
shared with the victim.7 As a corollary of this, the key concepts of ‘empathic
unsettlement’ (LaCapra 2001), and different forms of empathy—‘self-­
oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ perspective-taking (Coplan 2011a), are
probed and mapped, identifying the consequences of recalling canonised
representations of the Holocaust in memorial designs that take visitors
closer to the victims’ experience but without representing this mimetically.
This is not an examination of whether one style is more effective at
conveying the Holocaust than another, or to take a righteous standpoint
regarding long-standing debates concerning the morality of using explicit
imagery. Instead, designs are examined that do not depict suffering in
order to see how they might still evoke empathy for victims. This pays
attention to several designs, including the question of whether, in the
realm of the visual, despite lacking any image of human distress, selected
proposals might actually provoke images of anguish.
This exploration contributes to the discourse by introducing a further
understanding of the relationship between cultural memory and empathy.
Whilst the initial response of some visitors might be one of alarm, discon-
certed, even reeling, from the sight of, for instance, a permanent-lit cre-
matoria tower, empathy, by way of its relationship with cultural memory,
becomes inherent in this and other provocative submissions due to asso-
ciations with canonised representations. Taking into account the models
of post-memory (Hirsch 2012) and secondary witnessing (Apel 2002) as
the prevalent forms of memory transmission for those who did not witness
the Holocaust, the discourse is furthered by evaluating memorial designs
where representations of violence and suffering are notably absent, yet,
can still be visualised through cultural memory, defined by Aleida Assmann
as a form of memory that includes artefacts, sites, rituals, and texts,8 and
where popular media has the potential to create and frame images of the
past, which will be drawn upon by entire generations (Erll 2008). By
doing this, the aim is to go beyond the debate concerning the ethical haz-
ards of representation, drawing from key submissions from the Berlin
competitions that help us to understand the intrinsic role of cultural mem-
ory and that several of the featured designs of this monograph are more
4 M. CALLAGHAN

than mere provocations; they represent the possibility of stimulating

empathic responses by evoking associations with Holocaust imagery and
narratives which are in cultural circulation.
This comprises submissions that proposed to employ concentration
camp icons, namely cattle-trucks, and in one design, an imitation crema-
toria tower, made of metal, painted black. The idea of projecting pre-­
Holocaust photographs of victims across the memorial site was also
proposed, meaning portraits of the murdered would have been shown,
each one afforded forty seconds, each one showing a victim before their
suffering began. The relationship between cultural memory and empathy
is also explored through an abstract design featuring the names of mass-­
murder sites, where the names would be projected using natural light
through perforated I-beams, compared to the winning model by Peter
Eisenman, which, by contrast, makes no reference to the genocide at all.
This original approach to Eisenman’s blueprint also pays attention to how
this concept was another, in effect, alternative design, as the original model
was subject to significant changes.9
The idea of an uncanny Holocaust memorial is also realised, discerned
through analysis of a design resembling Vienna’s late nineteenth-century
Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel memorial design for Berlin would, how-
ever, feature cattle-trucks for its gondolas, thereby causing both the leisure
contraption and a Holocaust icon to be estranged, no longer appearing as
expected, thus disturbing previous associations. Whilst an empathetic
effect remains possible, perusal of this design is more concentrated on its
relation to Freud’s concept of The Uncanny and how this memorial comes
to represent a new, fearful way of encountering concentration camp ico-
nography, how its threatening signifiers of the past call into consciousness
that which has been repressed.
This focus on alternative designs is imperative as many of the submis-
sions disclose important factors concerning the fragile and volatile mem-
ory of the Holocaust, new possibilities for remembrance, and, as a result,
significant insights regarding the ways in which designers approached the
memorialisation of this event and the transgressing multiplicity of
approaches to memory and commemoration that their designs offered.
Further to this, attention is paid to the connected interests between the
post-War generation juries and the German counter-monument artists of
the same generation. Known for resisting what they see as the instruc-
tional, demagogic tendencies found in fascist monuments, this sub-genre
is explored through several designs that were submitted for the Berlin
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

competitions. Commonalities emerge through analysis, which includes

issues of co-authorship and viewer interaction, exemplified by the proposal
of having a robot inscribe public answers as to why the Holocaust hap-
pened, programmed to carve the responses onto the memorial site’s sur-
face over eighty years. Other challenging ideas, that qualify as being
counter-monuments, even defied the competitions’ pre-set location;
designs that proposed, in one example, to dedicate a section of autobahn
to Jewish Holocaust remembrance, and a further, more confrontational
idea that, had it been commissioned, would have tested the limits of
Germany’s commitment to commemorate the genocide, this being the
demolition of the Brandenburg Gate. Issues of empathy are pertinent to
this section of the monograph too, as one counter-monument submission
proposed to transport visitors by red tourist buses to several of the former
concentration camps. This prompts discussions regarding empathetic
identification with victims and the notion of a more authentic understand-
ing of the Holocaust via these transportations and their subsequent desti-
nations—a submission that was opposed to what its designers regarded as
the ‘artificial’ pre-designated site in Berlin where none of the murders
took place, seeking instead to expand empathic communication, to edify
as much as possible.10
The discourse concerning empathy, presented in this monograph, is
not exclusive to memorial designs. The Information Centre beneath
today’s memorial (Peter Eisenman’s field of concrete stelae) features sev-
eral letters written by victims to their loved ones; in each case, a final letter
knowing they will never see them again. They too have the capacity to
induce empathetic responses, including the notion of ‘idiopathic empathy’
(Bennett 2003), where empathy is contingent on the viewer sensing that
the victim was sufficiently like them in order for the viewer to imagine
being in their place. In this concept of empathy, an absence of this connec-
tion might result in victims being disregarded. Examination of the victims’
letters is especially germane, as the emotive impact of the letters brings
into prominence questions concerning the ‘wrong’ sort of compassion
and the limits of empathy in terms of ethnic, geographic, and social dis-
tance, which could preclude compassion (Dean 2004). Crucially, it also
brings into focus whether one has to sense a ‘likeness’ with the victim (in
this case a writer of the letter) in order to empathise, and how this form of
empathy corresponds to Coplan’s ‘empathy proper’. An essential compari-
son is made between the victims’ letters exhibited in the Information
Centre and the disingenuous form of empathy that can cause a ‘false
6 M. CALLAGHAN

likeness between them and us’ (Young 1993). Citing the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum’s use of identity cards, issued to visitors and
designed to facilitate spectators’ identification with victims’ suffering,
James Young draws attention to a ‘lazy and false’ empathy in which one
simply takes the other’s place. By comparing the victims’ letters with the
identity cards, this monograph shows the profound differences between
these sources of empathy, that the immediacy of the victim’s handwritten
words engenders a form of empathy that goes beyond the need for a sym-
bolic proximity to the sufferer whilst further highlighting the inadequacies
of the identity cards. Equally, as the letters offer the immediacy of the
victim’s emotions, their desperate pleas and instructions to the recipient, a
perusal of empathy that is independent of historical context is paramount.
Whilst some of the aforementioned memorial designs are indelibly linked
to images of suffering despite them having no depictions of distressed
humans, the letters exhibited in the Information Centre offer emotional
encounters that are not contingent on awareness of canonised representa-
tions of the genocide, or even knowledge of the Holocaust.
The emotive accounts of victims presented in the Information Centre
create a direct contrast with Eisenman’s field of concrete pillars on the
site’s surface. The relationship between these two entities is analysed from
the distinct perspective of how the memorial is understood as being in
partnership with the Information Centre, rather than being separate,
largely unrelated, components. With a concentration on Eisenman’s
abstract field of stelae, the discussion expands on Paul Williams’ survey of
memorial museums (Williams 2007), by appraising the apparent paradigm
of having an abstract memorial with accompanying museum. Eisenman’s
modified design and its Information Centre are not entirely the bilateral
arrangement of memorial and museum that one might believe it to be.
The monograph explores how they complement and contrast with each
other in terms of offering two different experiences—the open, potentially
anxiety-provoking, non-instructive experience of the abstract memorial,
and the instructive experience found in the Information Centre.11 Also
pertinent is the consideration afforded to features of some alternative
designs that can be observed in the Information Centre.
As with the creation of any national memorial, the outcome demands
reflection and assessment. With a new approach to the Berlin competition
that analyses several alternative designs, this monograph considers what
could have been built in the pre-designated location of the former
Ministerial Gardens, close to the Brandenburg Gate.12 By examining a
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

cross-section of submissions, the monograph analyses designs that sought

to challenge the idea of even having a centrally located memorial; along
with other, highly contentious proposals, such as those featuring iconog-
raphy associated with the concentration camps; and further submissions
that represent the gamut of styles and approaches to memorialisation.
These alternative designs prompt the question of how the competition
relates to political memory in terms of Pierre Nora’s assertion that political
memory is ‘anchored in national narratives’ that include memorials,13 and
Aleida Assmann’s definition of political memory as being selections from
the past which ‘strengthen a positive self image’.14 Drawing on archival
research and interviews with a range of protagonists, debates are also
revealed concerning who the memorial should be dedicated to, and how
the idea of a memorial relates to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Coming to
terms with the past), thus highlighting a need for German introspection
and the motivation to cultivate a new German self-image.
In terms of methodology, the material in this monograph is determined
by an analysis of the alternative designs, together with the formal submis-
sions by the artists, and my interviews with them. Interviews with jury
members, James Young and Stefanie Endlich, provide important insights
into the competition and the preferences and anxieties of the selectors,
and my interview with Michael Naumann, who served as Commissioner
for Cultural Affairs (Bundeskulturbeauftragter) from 1998 to 2001, is also
essential in this regard. Official responses to these designs by the jury
(where available), along with examination of German press articles, is also
fundamental to the methodology. The aim is not to act as a retrospective
jury member, promoting alternative designs as a preference to Eisenman’s
selected model, but rather to examine what other Memorials to the
Murdered Jews of Europe15 would have contributed in terms of viewer
interaction, empathy for victims, and new ways of understanding the rep-
resentation of the Holocaust.

Notes
1. Amy Coplan, ‘Will the real empathy please stand up? A case for a narrow
conceptualization’, in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 49
(September 2011) pp. 40–65 (41).
2. Ibid.
8 M. CALLAGHAN

3. Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects’, in

Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. by Amy Coplan
and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3–18 (p. 8).
4. Adorno, Theodor, ‘Commitment’, in Aesthetics and Politics (London:
Verso, 2007), pp. 112–123. The much-citied passage was first introduced
in Adorno’s essay, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1949).
5. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (New York:
Cornell University Press. 1998), p. 182.
6. As Lisa Cartwright also posits, ‘by projecting oneself into the life of the
victim, the importance of that original experience is reduced, and that,
instead, empathy comes from a recognition of the feelings expressed in
representation, rather than by an identification with who the victim was’.
Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in
Post-war Representation of the Child (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008), p. 24.
7. Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary
Witnessing (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University
Press, 2002), p. 20. Apel goes on to argue that by way of secondary trauma,
there can be a sense of ‘unresolved shock and injury shared between sec-
ondary witness and the victim’.
8. Aleida Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective
Constructions of the Past’ in Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness
in the German Speaking World since 1500, ed. by Christian Emden, and
David Midgley (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 18–39 (p. 32).
9. James Young, Peter Carrier, other scholars have paid attention to some of
the competitions’ alternative designs, but their primary focus is the compe-
tition’s outcome, this being the commissioning, building, and reception of
Eisenman’s field of concrete blocks. Analysis of Eisenman’s design includes:
Suzanne Stephens, ‘Peter Eisenman’s Vision for Berlin’s Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe’, Architectural Record, 193.7 (2005)
pp. 120–27. Johan Åhr, ‘Memory and Mourning in Berlin: On Peter
Eisenman’s Holocaust-Hahnmal’, Modern Judaism: A Journal of Jewish
Ideas & Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 28.3 (2008),
pp. 282–305. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘Deconstructivism and the Holocaust:
On the Origins and Legacy of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe’, in History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust
Culture, ed. by Wulf Kansteiner, Todd Presner, and Claudio Fogu
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016),
pp. 283–303. Maike Muegge, ‘Politics, Space and Material: The Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a Sign of Symbolic
Representation’, European Review of History. Vol. 12. (2008), pp. 212–19.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

10. It is worth noting that in ‘Against Empathy’, Paul Bloom argues that
empathy is a leading motivator of inequality and immorality, a ‘capricious
and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices’. Bloom pos-
its that empathy confuses our judgment and that, instead, we should have
a more distanced compassion. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for
Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco Press, 2016).
11. It is not uncommon to see adults and children leaping from block to block
or hiding from each other behind the pillars.
12. A plot which became available after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and had
been part of the Todesstreifen (the death-strip)—the barren strip of land
separating the walls between East and West—was now the most significant
place in the new Berlin. The memorial’s proximity to the Brandenburg
Gate and also Reichstag signify its importance in the metaphorical heart of
Germany.
13. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire’, trans.
Marc Roudebush, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 5–29 (p. 9).
14. Aleida Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective
Constructions of the Past’, p. 26.
15. It was common for designers and architects to submit proposals with indi-
vidual titles such as Stone-Breath, by Daniel Libeskind, and Yellow Flowers,
by Dani Karavan, knowing they would be changed to the pre-­designated
title is selected.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor, Commitment, in ‘Aesthetics and Politics’ (London: Verso,
2007), pp. 112–123.
Ahr, Johan, ‘Memory and Mourning in Berlin: On Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust-­
Mahnmal’, in Modern Judaism, 2008, 28, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), pp. 283–305.
Apel, Dora, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing
(New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
Assmann, Aleida, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective
Constructions of the Past’, in Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in
the German Speaking World since 1500, ed. by Christian Emden and David
Midgley, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 18–39.
Bennett, Jill, ‘The Limits of Empathy and the Global Politics of Belonging’, in
Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. by Judith Greenberg, The Jewish Publication
Society (Bison, Nebraska: Potomac Books, 2003), pp. 95–134.
Cartwright, Lisa, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Post-war
Representation of the Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
10 M. CALLAGHAN

Coplan, Amy, ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects’, in Empathy:

Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, in ed. by Amy Coplan and Peter
Goldie, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011a), pp. 3–18.
Coplan, Amy, ‘Will the real empathy please stand up? A case for a narrow concep-
tualization’, in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 49 (September 2011b),
(University of Memphis), pp. 40–65 (41).
Dean, Carolyn J.. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 2004).
Erll, Astrid, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, in Cultural
Memory Studies an International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid
Erll, and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008),
pp. 384–398.
Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture
After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Hoffman, Martin, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and
Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
LaCapra, Dominick, History and Memory after Auschwitz (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1998).
LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, and London:
JHU Press, 2001).
Muegge, Maike, ‘Politics, Space and Material: The Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe in Berlin as a Sign of Symbolic Representation’, European
Review of History. Vol. 12. (2008), pp. 212–19.
Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire,’ trans. Marc
Roudebush, Representations, no. 26, Spring 1989, (Berkeley: University of
California Press), pp. 7–21.
Rosenfeld, Gavriel D.. ‘Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: On the Origins and
Legacy of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,’ in
History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. by Wulf
Kansteiner, Todd Presner, and Claudio Fogu, (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 283–303.
Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2004).
Stephens, Suzanne, ‘Peter Eisenman’s Vision for Berlin Memorial to the Murdered
of Europe’, in Architectural Record. 193. 7. 2005. pp. 118–136.
Young, James E.. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials & Meaning.
(Newhaven, London: Yale University Press, 1993).
Williams, Paul, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities.
(London: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2007).
 CHAPTER 2

Who Is the Memorial For?

Who the memorial was for is expressed in the designs of several of this
monograph’s featured artists and architects who saw the memorial as hav-
ing a pan-European and international audience. All of these designers
received considerable attention, as their proposals either reached the final
stage of selection for the 1994 competition or were part of the revived
contest two years later. The 1997 finalist Jochen Gerz declared his design
to be for a ‘community beyond the nation’, which correlates to the
European dimension of his design, with its thirty-nine flagpoles each rep-
resenting a European language spoken by Jews.1 By contrast, Horst
Hoheisel believed the would-be memorial was ‘for Germans and about
Germans’,2 whilst Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock stated that the memo-
rial was for ‘all victims, including Russian prisoners of war, Jews, hostages,
resistance fighters, and homosexuals’.3 One of the few artists who submit-
ted designs for both 1994 and 1997 competitions, Dani Karavan, initially
believed the memorial was for Germans so ‘they could recognise their
crimes’ though his opinion changed as he began to view the competition
as relating more to ‘showing the world that Germans are looking for con-
solation’—which suggests the would-be memorial had, in his view, both a
German and international audience.4 Joint winner of the first competition,
Simon Ungers, held a different opinion altogether, as he believed the
memorial was for the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish Community,
to such an extent that he canvassed the Jewish community on aspects of
his design, including which concentration camp names should be

© The Author(s) 2020 11

M. Callaghan, Empathetic Memorials, Palgrave Macmillan Memory
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50932-3_2
12 M. CALLAGHAN

integrated as part of his concept.5 Ungers’ view correlates with one of the
few jury members to speak in these terms, Lea Rosh, Director of the
‘Association for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, the per-
son most responsible for instigating the task to create a national Holocaust
memorial, who asserted that the ‘memorial is erected by the perpetrators
to their dead victims’.6 Though this is a modest sample, it exemplifies the
different notions of who the memorial was deemed to be for.
Though it took five years for a final decision to be made, The Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe did exist by way of the continued debates
amongst historians, intellectuals, the public, the press, and politicians. The
discursive existence of a memorial was not only present by way of argu-
ments concerning the form and necessity of a memorial but also who the
memorial should be for, what its purpose was, and whether a memorial
was even required. These debates continued throughout both competi-
tions, as the competition that began in 1994 was disbanded because the
chosen design upset representatives of the Jewish community. In 1997, a
new competition was initiated that eventually led to the selection of the
model by Peter Eisenman in 1999.
Looking at both competitions, essential lines of inquiry include the
questions of whether the memorial would be an expression of German
guilt for the past, and whether it was a timely opportunity for reunified
Germany to demonstrate remorse to the rest of the world. If so, why were
former East Germans largely excluded from the project? Were the compe-
tition instigators looking for a memorial that would assuage the country’s
historical burden? Did the competitions’ sponsors, the media, the German
public, and the Bundestag believe the memorial would be a warning to
post-war generations, that it should, in effect, promote the message of
‘never again’? The competition was certainly a project that coincided with
debates concerning German national identity, the question of assigning
guilt, the extent to which Jews felt they were German, and the omnipres-
ent and heady term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the
past), which in many respects is the notion under which these discourses
belong. It was against this background that the Berlin competition was
instigated, with deliberations running parallel to a national dialogue that
continued throughout the 1990s.
Whether the scheme to build a Holocaust memorial is analysed the-
matically or chronologically, it was a quixotic project, an initiative that,
like the majority of memorial competitions and commissions, sought to
convey a multiplicity of complex issues in one mnemonic entity; built close
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 13

to the Brandenburg Gate, with differing notions concerning the form of

commemoration, who should be remembered, and who the memorial’s
beneficiaries would be. As such, amongst the polyphony of views, I observe
and review the differing motivations for building a memorial, including
the extent to which the Holocaust resonates in contemporary Germany
and how a reunited country saw itself and wished for others to see it. As a
corollary of these and other differences, the question of who, if anyone,
has a mandate to interpret the past also emerges.
By examining the competition guidelines and the views of many pro-
tagonists, incisive analysis is presented concerning how the memorial—of
any design—was thought of by some jurors and the media, as a panacea,
loaded with too much expectation about what it could represent and
achieve. This assessment is not offered to chide the views of the jurors and
the competitions’ guidelines, but rather to examine why the memorial
project was being applied with such responsibility and accountability that
began in 1988 when TV journalist Lea Rosh and historian Eberhard Jäckel
proposed a Holocaust memorial be erected in central Berlin.7 What fol-
lowed in January 1989 was a call for a ‘conspicuous monument’ to be
constructed in Berlin with the commemorated event being ‘the genocide
against Jews in Europe during the Second World War’. As Rosh declared:

Germany, the land of the perpetrators, the country of the inventor of this
unique genocide, the murder of the Jews, has not a single monument to the
more than five million dead, murdered by the Germans. France has such a
monument. Italy has, Belgium has also. The Norwegians remember their
dead, Hungary also. Only we do not. And it is long past time to end
this scandal.8

What followed was also a memorial project that excluded other victim
groups—Roma and Sinti, homosexuals (unless Jewish), and by its desig-
nated title, Jews who survived the Holocaust, too. With assiduity, debates
are examined between the competitions’ instigators, German politicians,
the Jewish community, and historians, concerning the exclusivity of the
memorial to murdered Jews. Whilst following parts of this monograph are
more concerned with how some alternative designs relate to concepts of
empathy, in this chapter we see how some of the featured proposals are not
exclusive to the memory of the Jewish murdered, primarily because they
employ references that relate to all victims. There are many lines of enquiry
that cause one to ask who the memorial is actually for. If the memorial is
14 M. CALLAGHAN

ultimately for Germans, how does this relate to their self-image in the
newly reunified state? As part of this, I examine the attitude of Germans
who were born during the 1940s–1950s to the Nazi past and how this
could impact on the memorial project, particularly as the jury comprised
of this demographic. This area of discussion corresponds to the idea of
there being a European and international patronage which correlates to
Michael Rothberg’s ‘multi-directional memory’, a concept which allows
us to think of the presence of widespread Holocaust consciousness as a
basis to articulate a vision of other crimes, such as, for example, slavery.9

2.1   The Two Competitions and Their

Respective Guidelines
In 1995, the jury of the first competition, which was announced in April
1994, selected a design from the 528 entries, submitted by a field of inter-
national artists and architects. The model by Christine Jackob-Marks was
chosen as joint winner, together with the model by Simon Ungers (Fig.
3.3, Sect. 2). On 29 June 1995, it was announced that Jackob-Marks was
considered the more feasible of the two winning designs, as Ungers’ pro-
posal would need modifications in order to comply with the required bud-
get.10 The Jackob-Marks proposal did, however, upset some of the Jewish
community, as the huge concrete plate was derided for being a Grabplatte
(tombstone), which inadvertently referred to the Christian symbolism of
Christ’s rising from the tomb at the resurrection, thus contravening the
memorial’s Jewish associations.11 This led to the unsuccessful end of the
first competition in 1995, leading to a two-year interval until the scheme
was revived with a new hierarchy of decision-makers in 1997, the
Findungskommission chaired by James Young.12
The official tender for the 1994 contest defined the task of the memo-
rial as an artistic expression of the obligation to remember and as a response
to the symbolism of its location. As part of this mandate, the 1994 com-
petition guidelines included a preamble that summarises the historical
background and how the competition’s instigators consider the current
situation of Holocaust memory in post-unification Germany:

In this terror, the Jewish population of the world has been decimated by a
third. Words such as compassion, sympathy, and empathy fail. Given the
unprecedented character of suffering, the dimension of linguistic expression
is blown. This crime is the heaviest burden on Germany, even today, half a
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 15

century later (…) Situated just metres from Hitler’s headquarters is the for-
mer ‘Ministerial Gardens’. This is where the words were formulated which
led to the deeds which made the fate of all the Jewish citizens of Europe
irreversible through suffering, exile, and death. This is where the central
German memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe should be built. The
location symbolises in a special way the commemoration of the millions of
murdered Jews, which is a duty to all Germans to recognise.13

The memorial’s pre-set location is of historic importance, and demon-

strates a determination to transform a place beset with Nazi history14 into
one that commemorates some of those they annihilated.15 Of further note
are the competition’s references to the failure of the words ‘compassion’,
‘sympathy’, and ‘empathy’. The competition’s opening statements there-
fore determined that, according to the instigators, such emotive words—
or any words, for that matter—cannot be adequate responses to the
Holocaust.16
The parameters given in 1994 and again, in the revived competition of
1997, seem to fall directly into both deconstructivist and traumatic dis-
course, with references to Germany’s difficult and disturbing history,
alluding to an absence of harmony and continuity, and how the ‘burden’
remains present. To those who compiled and endorsed the initial guide-
lines, the prospective memorial appears to have been viewed as a paradox
of the curative and the scarred, a ‘healing’ memorial that would also leave
a seemingly permanent physical and metaphorical wound on the nation.
This initial call for an artistic response to historical questions asks for pro-
posals that can represent vicarious trauma, address the complex issue of
German remorse, and provide a peaceful and possibly salutary memorial
design—ideas that will be pursued and examined throughout this mono-
graph. Whilst this is certainly not a parochial expectation for the memorial
site, it lists directives that, when combined, present an onerous challenge
to architects and artists.
In April 1994, what was an open, anonymous, international competi-
tion also included the following aims:

The Federal Republic of Germany, represented by the Federal Ministry of

the Interior, the State of Berlin, represented by the Senate Department for
Construction and Housing, and the Förderkreis (an organisation that cam-
paigned to build a Holocaust memorial in Berlin), are joint instigators of
this art competition. So it is clear: it is the Germany of today, which comes
together in the full commitment to:17
16 M. CALLAGHAN

Not to avoid the truth, or to give in to forgetfulness.

To honor the murdered Jews of Europe.
To remember them in sorrow and shame.
To assume the burden of German history.
To give the signal for a new chapter of human cohabitation in which injus-
tice to minorities should no longer be possible.18

From the beginning, the debate was, as Peter Carrier opines, ‘charac-
terised by remarkable incongruity, expressed in petitions and instructions
to participants in the 1994 competition, between the distinct political pur-
pose of the memorial and the entirely open formal solutions expected of
artists and architects’.19 Jan-Holger Kirsch, a scholar at the Centre for
Contemporary History in Potsdam, criticised the goal of the memorial for
being too vaguely defined both in the competition guidelines of 1994 and
in public discussions thereafter. Jury member Stephanie Endlich similarly
stated that:

The memorial’s task description was short and ill-defined and it is not even
stated precisely who erects the memorial and for whom. There is also that
difficult discussion: Is it a memorial for the Jews, or is it for commemoration
by the descendants of the perpetrators? What is the goal of the memorial?
Can we commemorate with large sculptures?20

As Günter Schlusche of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation noted:

‘Mistakes were made during the first competition that were not related to
the creativity of the designer. Mistakes were made in the description of the
task, because before one asks architects to develop ideas, one should
describe the problem’.21 Nevertheless, the guidelines were printed and
made available to the 1078 artists and architects who expressed an inter-
est, 528 of whom submitted proposals by the January 1995 deadline.22
A significant comparison can be made with the 1997 guidelines issued
by James Young23 and the Findungskommission, where the venture was
broadened by suggesting that prospective designers consider the wider
motivations for creating a memorial and what function their proposal
might serve. In the revived competition, artists and architects were issued
with questions to consider rather than given a list of statements. The ques-
tions were German-centric; they were no longer being directed by the
original competition’s guidelines, and now artists and architects were
being asked to think about set questions.
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 17

As Young explains:

Instead of making formal requirements, we developed a concept of remem-

brance or commemoration work, which took into account the following
points: a clear-cut definition of the Holocaust and its significance, the role
of Nazi Germany as the perpetrator, and the role of today’s unified Germany
as a subject of remembering; the relationship of the current generation to
the remembrance of the Holocaust. Instead of giving answers we asked
questions: What are the national reasons for the commemoration? Are the
aims of this commemoration redemption or reconciliation? Is this part of
the mourning process? Do educational motives matter? What national and
social purposes should the memorial fulfill? Will this be a place where Jews
mourn missing Jews? A place where Germans mourn missing Jews? A place
where Jews remember what Germans once did to them? These questions
were, in my opinion, in themselves, even an essential part of the memorial
and memorial process, so I suggested the artists should ask them of them-
selves even if no final answers could be found.24

By posing questions rather than making statements, Young left it for

the designers to decide what they thought the memorial should be. Young
also recognised that conclusions to these questions might not be forth-
coming but that the memorialisation of the Holocaust and the necessary
creative process to achieve this should be founded on questions concern-
ing the purpose of the memorial, including ideas about who the memorial
is for and why—questions that are pursued in this chapter. Furthermore,
Young’s question of whether educational motives matter foreshadows a
key development in the Berlin competition, as the selection of Eisenman’s
design (Fig. 2.1) was only commissioned on the proviso, instigated by
Commissioner for Cultural Affairs (Bundeskulturbeauftragter), Michael
Naumann, that an information centre be included in the memorial site,
adding, as he argued, contextualisation to the abstract design.25
There are similarities between the two sets of guidelines, but with each
similarity comes a significant difference. In 1994, competing artists and
architects were asked to honour the murdered Jews of Europe; in 1997,
they were asked to think about whether the memorial would be a place to
mourn the deceased. This made the competition now open to the idea of
a memorial design that is not a place of sorrow and bereavement, that its
purpose and social function is open to question. In 1994, interested
designers were told the memorial presupposes the weight of German his-
tory, whereas in 1997 they were asked to consider the reasons for a national
18 M. CALLAGHAN

Fig. 2.1 Peter Eisenman’s winning model for the 1997 contest (after revision at
the request of The Bundestag). (Image provided by Stefanie Endlich)

Holocaust memorial and whether it could relate to atonement and possi-

ble resolution with the Jewish community, though this is never specified
and could be more of a reference to reconciliation, more generally, with
Germany’s past. Either way, by posing questions instead of presenting
statements, Young and the Findungskommission encouraged a more open
competition of creativity, in terms of what this memorial—or any contem-
porary memorial—could be.
The question of who the memorial was for was left for designers to
consider, prompted by suggestions that the memorial will in some way be
for ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’, as the 1997 guidelines, discussed by Young,
point to: ‘a place where Germans mourn missing Jews?’.26 Though this is
most probably an outcome of a habitual propensity rather than a refusal to
accept the notion of a German Jew, it is problematic due to the high pro-
file and coverage of statements, which alludes to Germans and Jews as
being separate people, as though German Jews were not being consid-
ered.27 The edict is also notable for not referencing ‘Europe’ or anything
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 19

resembling ‘the international community’, particularly as many of the

finalists for the revived competition were not German. Young’s questions
to competing artists and architects do indeed relate to the ‘nation’, but
who the memorial is specifically for is not clarified. In fact, following some
seven years of debate (1994–2000) and a three-part colloquium, which
resulted in the formation of the 1997 Findungskommission, there was no
consensus on who the memorial was for. Exactly who was building the
memorial for whom was still entirely unclear.28 According to Simone
Mangos, during the colloquia of 1996, when representatives of all German
political parties met to discuss how the suspended memorial project should
continue, ‘this fundamental question had been avoided altogether’.29

2.2   The Concept of ‘Never Again’

The 1994 guidelines were ambitious and open enough to encourage a
range of ideas.30 This included the notion of the memorial pointing to a
message of ‘never again’, which is how the final listed aim can be inter-
preted: ‘To give the signal for a new chapter of human cohabitation in
which injustice to minorities should no longer be possible’. Furthermore,
some aspects of the guidelines were intrinsic to any design for this compe-
tition, such as the guidelines’ first statement regarding amnesia—‘Not to
avoid the truth, or to give in to forgetfulness’—and the further point con-
cerning the ‘burden’ of German history. By proposing a design for this
competition, with its pre-set important location, its considerable size of
19,000 square metres, and its pre-determined title of The Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, all proposals were inevitably connected to the
idea of remembering the Holocaust and the burden of German history by
way of these encoded outcomes.
Shortly after the publication of the guidelines, Senator Wolfgang Nagel
(Senate Administration for Construction and Housing, Berlin) provided
further commentary on the incentive to create a national Holocaust
memorial, emphasising its importance for contemporary German racism,
which made the function of the memorial exclusive to the reunified state
and, in this case, its on-going issues with the far right: ‘This is the most
important cultural enterprise in Germany since 1945 due to the new racist
violence’.31
Speaking on the day that The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
was unveiled, 8 May 2005, sociologist Michal Bodemann reiterates Nagel’s
concern of the previous decade by telling Die Tageszeitung that there
20 M. CALLAGHAN

seemed to be a continued ‘lack of awareness of the connection between

anti-Semitism and racism’. In Germany today, Bodemann argued, ‘there
are actual racist tendencies—perhaps in the talk of the parallel society in
which the Turkish minority has supposedly secluded itself’.32 While
Bodemann did not believe the memorial would heighten consciousness of
existing racism given that the Holocaust is regarded in isolation and is
deemed so singular that it seems obscene to relate it to today, others such
as Nagel, speaking during the first competition, did have faith in the
memorial playing a role in combating the far right. This shows how
responsibility was already being loaded onto the as yet to be selected
memorial.
According to Kirsten Ann Hass, ‘the work of any memorial is to con-
struct the meaning of an event from fragments of experience and memory.
A memorial gives shape to and consolidates public memory: it makes his-
tory’.33 The Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competition had to face similar
concerns and interpretations of what the memorial’s purpose should be,
particularly as the memorial was commemorating such a difficult, painful
subject. From conception to completion, the memorial had been assigned
numerous responsibilities, from being a representation of Jewish murder
without causing offence to the Jewish community, to conveying notions
of ‘duty’ and the ‘burden’ of the Holocaust on the German nation, to be
some way aesthetically ‘German’, and now a mnemonic form that could
also be responsible for addressing contemporary racism and thus have a
direct impact on the prospect of ‘never again’. A similar view was expressed
by an SDP (Social Democratic Party) politician, Peter Conradi, during the
all-party debates of 1996, when he remarked upon the type of memorial,
not in terms of style but rather of what he hoped the completed memorial
could achieve, a function that appears to have a ‘never again’ aspect:

Monuments reflect the intellectual, cultural and political time in which they
arise. The Holocaust Memorial could show an inner transformation of our
people, even when dealing with our history. It will oblige our descendants,
if genocide happens here or elsewhere, not to look away again, but to get
involved.34

To place such aspirations on culture is to assume it can have a greater

influence than politics, that ‘soft power’ (where culture can mobilise polit-
ical change) can always be effective and potent, overriding the intricacies
and failings of politics, always mobilising the public into pressuring
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 21

governments. Though the memorial project should not be criticised for its
ambitions that are broadly positive, it should be recognised that too much
weight was being applied to a memorial that, if anything, came to amelio-
rate these demands rather than solve them.
Though few competing designers addressed the concept of ‘never
again’, the German commitment to building a Holocaust memorial could
serve as a basis for promoting acts of unity across cultures, time-frames,
and countries. Such a large-scale, national project, that also invites designs
from international artists, has the potential to raise awareness of other
genocides and in doing so become the catalyst for remembrance of other
crimes against humanity. I would, however, question whether ‘never
again’ could ever be measured in terms of a memorial’s effect on a nation’s
vigilance against genocide. How could one ascertain whether a memorial
played a role in preventing or reducing the activities of the far right, should
the wider population be able to counter such actions? Though memorials
do, as Conradi states, reflect politics when commissioned and unveiled,
gauging the impact of a memorial on political action to combat far-right
actions and public support of such movements would always be difficult to
substantiate. On this subject, one should also be mindful of Bill Niven’s
example of ‘active memory’ in regard to the significant anti-racist demon-
strations that took place in the late summer of 2000, notably in
Neumünster, Düsseldorf, Kassel, Berlin, and Cologne. Active memory, as
opposed to lip-service, was also in evidence prior to the Berlin Holocaust
Memorial Competition, when, two years before the initiative, 300,000
protested against racism across Germany, showing solidarity with foreign-
ers, demonstrating a determination to prevent a repetition of the past.35
For all the comity and sanguine expectations propounded by Nagel and
Conradi, a national memorial was not required in order for these positive,
active memory expressions to have occurred.
Conradi’s hopes for a Germany that refuses to tolerate genocides might
have been satisfied by reunified Germany’s 1998 intervention in Kosovo,
when it lacked a UN mandate and went against the country’s previous
policy of not engaging in military action beyond its own borders.36 As
Claus Leggewie writes: ‘In what might echo Theodor Adorno’s famous
plea that the Holocaust be remembered so that Auschwitz is not repeated,
this political and military intervention could never be attributed with any
certainty to the, then, on-going Holocaust memorial debate’.37 But it
does demonstrate that the new Germany was exercising a significant moral
responsibility, and one that correlates with the reunified state’s
22 M. CALLAGHAN

commitment to protecting, through military action, oppressed communi-

ties.38 Conradi’s statement and the idea of ‘never again’ express an interest
in the prevention of genocide that is in some way inspired by the Holocaust,
making connections to atrocities outside of Germany and the Nazi era.
The concept of ‘never again’ cannot be measured in terms of how a memo-
rial can have a positive impact on this, but the way the narrative around
the memorial project was framed signals how the nation perceives its own
role in regard to its military interventions and resistance against contem-
porary fascism.
This aspect of the memorial initiative provides a testing ground for
Michael Rothberg’s ‘multi-directional memory’, where remembrance of
the Holocaust promotes a widespread consciousness of other genocides
and crimes against humanity.39 The emergence of Holocaust memory on
a global scale, caused by, for instance, feature films, novels, formal educa-
tion, and the annual UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day,40
would have the potential to remind visitors of other histories, including
the Rwandan genocide, or slavery, as the memorial is dedicated to the
mass suffering and eradication of people. For this process, Rothberg pro-
poses the concept of multi-directional memory, exemplified by the Berlin
Holocaust Memorial project, which also connects to other countries and
their respective atrocities, thereby ‘articulating other histories, through
their dialogical interactions with others’.41 The proposed memorial, dedi-
cated only to Jews, would also highlight the crimes committed against
other victim groups who would not be represented by this memorial. In
other words, this would provoke memory and discussion of these further
examples of atrocities.42
Thinking about memory in ways that allow for multi-directional com-
munications can promote ‘complex acts of solidarity in which historical
memory is a medium for the formulation of new political and communal
identities’.43 Multi-directional memory is, then, a potentially fertile way of
cross-cultural thought and communiqué.44 As Dora Apel clarifies: ‘The
idea that there were two Holocausts—the Jewish Holocaust and the
African or Black Holocaust—has, for instance, gained wide currency
among African Americans, who retroactively apply the term of the mid-­
twentieth-­century disaster to events that, in their origins, preceded it by
several hundred years and terminated in the previous century’.45
It is important to note that the question is not whether such multi-­
directionality between slavery, Nazism, and colonialism are historically fas-
tidious, but instead whether they cause productive lines of political
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 23

thought, new solidarity between historically oppressed groups, and even

political resistance. Rothberg illustrates how multi-directional memory can
expose gaps in the collective remembrance of genocides and mass killings
through a dialectical affinity of sites of violence.46 This is a dialectical inter-
relation that reveals the historical specificity of the respective site through a
continuing dialectic between the universal and specific aspects of the historic
event concerning the site and its associated events.47 With Rothberg’s work
in mind, interaction of memories would occur by visiting the memorial site
in Berlin, which would remind some visitors of other atrocities, and, in
many cases, ones specific to their heritage.48 Whilst the ‘never again’ effect
of the memorial would be difficult to establish, the potential affinities
between historically oppressed groups broadened the meaning of Germany’s
determination to build a national Holocaust memorial.

2.3   A West German Initiative

The idea of creating a national memorial also concerns questions of
national identity and national memory. Though numerous designs
amongst the total of 547 (528 for the first competition, 19 for the second)
would be received from international architects and artists, the decision-­
making was almost exclusive to Germans in the first competition of 1994
(albeit former West Germans) and included just one non-German, James
Young, on the 1997 Findungskommission panel that selected Eisenman’s
design.49 The second competition is also more notable for its additional
layer of assessors, the five-member Findungskommission who were given
the task of recommending a national memorial from the nineteen archi-
tects and artists now invited to submit proposals, two of which, Jackob-­
Marks and Dani Karavan, had submitted ideas for the 1994 competition.
The jury, founded in 1994, was designed to represent all of the three
main sponsors equally: the Federal Republic of Germany, the Förderkreis
(the organisation that campaigned to build a Holocaust memorial in
Berlin), and the State of Berlin. The jury represented the fields of art,
architecture/urban planning, history, public policy, and administration. It
also included members from all of Germany’s main political parties. The
jury included two Jewish members (Arie Rahamimoff, and Salomon Korn,
who is half Jewish), but no representation from anyone with connections
to former East Germany. This second point becomes of particular impor-
tance when one considers co-project instigator Eberhard Jäckel’s ‘Now is
the moment’ article where he positioned the memorial as being a joint
24 M. CALLAGHAN

enterprise between the former GDR and FRG of which the reformed
GDR parliament had already formally expressed its shared responsibility
for the Holocaust. As Jäckel stated:

By bringing the two German states together, they also assume responsibility
for their common history. The first freely elected GDR parliament has in its
first meeting on 12th April 1990 and made a remarkable joint statement
reminding all seven fractions of its priority to let it be known that it shares
responsibility for humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish men, women
and children.50

This contradiction, or possible oversight, remains evident when one

considers the selectors for the revised competition three years later. The
new jury consisted of ten participating jury members of the first competi-
tion, now joined by two further jurors to complete a panel of twelve.51
Former West German bias had still not been recognised, or if it had, then
it had not been addressed, as the jury remained devoid of members with
connections to former East Germany. The memorial’s relation to the
suturing of a divided nation was still not, then, despite Jäckel’s notion of a
joint enterprise, one that bears out.

2.4   Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Coming to Terms

with the Past)

The competition was a scheme orchestrated and selected almost entirely

by former West Germans, therefore coming to represent West German col-
lective memory52 by way of selection, whilst also being a project that rep-
resents an international take on the memory of the Holocaust with its
global call for submissions and the guarantee that many non-Germans
would experience the completed memorial, primarily by way of tourism.
German aegis is most prominent though, not only in terms of jury repre-
sentation but also in terms of who several influential Germans believed the
memorial was for. Though opinions were wide-ranging, some non-jury
members argued that the memorial was primarily, if not exclusively, for
Germans. This included former East German, Wolfgang Thierse, Speaker
of Parliament, who, in June 1999, declared that the memorial was being
built ‘for ourselves, as it will help us to confront a chapter in our history’,53
and Jochen Schulz-Rohr, Co-Chair of The Memorial Association, who
was equally forthright in announcing that: ‘It doesn’t really matter what
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 25

people from other countries say; what is more important is that we

Germans need this’.54 Such a self-issued challenge to address issues of
responsibility and the complexities of such difficult history was also prof-
fered by sociologist and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, who stated that:
‘The monument will be a sign that memory of the Holocaust is a funda-
mental element of the ethical-political self-understanding of the Federal
Republic’.55 What emerges, then, is the concept of an introspective memo-
rial that, when completed, becomes a representation of a country’s self-­
examination. Then chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, elaborated
this point:

This is about the core of our self-understanding as a nation. In Parliament,

the government and the public, there is a high degree of consensus that
Germany bears responsibility to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust. It
is therefore necessary that besides the locations of the Nazi crimes and their
documentation centres, a central place in public memory is created.56

The accompanying press release for the first competition, issued by

Senator Wolfgang Nagel of the Senate Department for Building and
Housing, also made reference to the ‘burden’ Germans have to face, whilst
expanding upon this idea, again causing one to argue that who the memo-
rial is for and its purpose is exclusive to Germans, the issue of
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and to maintain, in physical form, a represen-
tation of the country’s most distressing history. Senator Nagel released
this statement with approval from the jury:

It is not too late for a monument because the obligation to deliberate and
to have a confrontation with historical responsibility for the crimes of the
National Socialist Germany is imposed upon us Germans and will not pass
away. So it is vital for us to carry the burden of knowledge, to express regret
and sorrow as well as benefit from the realization of the past lessons for the
present and future […] The object of this competition is of course difficult
because it is not about getting rid of duty and we are not trying to draw a
line under the past.57

How selected designs correspond to resistance against creating a cathar-

tic memorial, together with the idea of the would-be memorial represent-
ing a line ‘being drawn under the past’, will be pursued when
counter-monument proposals are examined in Chap. 4. What appear to be
shared concerns between the jury and some designers will come into
26 M. CALLAGHAN

focus, as the interests of the jury and artists of the same generation (born
in the 1940s, or early 1950s) and the same nationality are evaluated. The
apprehension regarding the drawing of a line under the past is intrinsic to
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which generally translates as a ‘reckoning or
coming to terms with the past’, though some interpret the phrase as ‘over-
coming or mastering the past’. The first meaning suggests an on-going
process, while the second understanding refers to the expectation of a suc-
cessful endpoint.58 As Christine Richert-Nugent asserts:

Those who adhere to the latter notion imply that a conclusion is indeed pos-
sible. Once it has been reached, one can draw a final line, or Schlussstrich,
under the past and Germany can once again be a ‘normal nation,’ however
one might want to define such a concept. In any case, central to the effort is
the need to construct a ‘usable’ past out of the Third Reich and its
aftermath.59

In their book Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (1967), Alexander and

Margarete Mitscherlich describe Vergangenheitsbewältigung as ‘the psy-
chic process of remembering, and working through, a process which has
to begin in the individual, but which can only be successfully completed if
it is supported by the collective, by society at large’.60 The creation of a
national memorial implies that such practices were underway and could
therefore be finalised by a memory work receiving input by a wide section
of society. The problem, however, is that support by the collective, whether
it be for the memorial design or discussions concerning any aspect of the
Nazi era, is rarely, if ever, consensual.
The 1994 guidelines certainly provide further evidence of the on-going
concern regarding Germany’s ‘burden’ and ‘duty’ to address its difficult
past. This included a preamble that summarised the historical background
and how the competition’s instigators considered the current situation of
Holocaust memory in post-unification Germany. The guidelines made it
clear that Germans are obliged to ‘recognise the crimes of their forebears’
and that this is a ‘burden’ for them, therefore making the memorial spe-
cifically and exclusively for Germans. What the guidelines ask for is also
obfuscated by the first two post-War generations’ propensity for acknowl-
edging a German crime, whilst, at the same time, showing that there are
many unacknowledged family histories; that they tend to ignore the con-
tent of their forebear’s involvement, which leads to what Harald Welzer
describes as being ‘cumulative heroization’, a phenomenon of history
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 27

becoming ameliorated from generation to generation.61 This involves the

children of the ‘eyewitness generation’ (Germans who were old enough to
see and/or be aware of the Holocaust, or even be complicit in the persecu-
tions) who do not, unlike their offspring, heroicise their antecedents. They
do, nonetheless, ‘manoeuver them out of the perpetrator group into the
much less suspect group of accidental witnesses’, which happens when
either questioning their parents’ complicity in person, or when reading let-
ters written by their parents, which detail their involvement in Nazi crimes.62
Welzer’s, ‘Grandpa Wasn’t A Nazi’, reports that only 1% of responders
to a 2002 survey believed their relatives were ‘directly involved in crimes’,63
a survey that comprised 182 interviews and family discussions with the
‘eyewitness generation’, their offspring, and the following generation
too.64 The survey shows how, in many cases, the following generations
readily embrace interpretative options suggested by their forebears, and in
other examples, where there is no response to a grandparent’s story when
that story evidences clear participation in Nazi crimes.65 A common out-
come is the way that war-time stories of participation and complicity alter
as they are re-told by the next generation, undergoing a complete change
of meaning. As Welzer summarises:

Often questionable, and sometimes even scandalous acts recounted by the

eyewitnesses are mediated more abstractly through the second generation,
with details changed and opened to interpretation; these accounts are then
clarified in the grandchildren’s generation into a finding that the grandpar-
ents ‘helped’, ‘hid’, or ‘saved’, even if it was dangerous for them.66

This is not to suggest that descendants of the eyewitness generation do

not believe in the Holocaust as a historical fact, but rather that their rela-
tionship with the past can, at times, be subject to alteration. In fact,
Welzer’s findings also include a key point concerning the paradoxical
result of successful education about the Nazi past, with Welzer discover-
ing, through interviews with the children and grandchildren of the eyewit-
ness generation, that the more comprehensive their knowledge about war
crimes and extermination, the stronger the need to develop stories to rec-
oncile the crimes of ‘the Nazis’, or ‘the Germans’ with the ‘moral integ-
rity’ of parents or grandparents.67
As previously argued, the jury, and many of the designers who also
belong to the generation born in the 1940s and 1950s, were following
competition guidelines that included statements which firmly align the
28 M. CALLAGHAN

memorial to being a German-specific challenge relating to the country’s

difficult history.68 Yet this generation, the children of the ‘eyewitness gen-
eration’, are, according to Welzer’s study, prone to not acknowledging
their forebears’ complicity and instead tend to distance their relatives from
the atrocities. This is in contrast to the competition’s guidelines that define
the task of the memorial as being where, ‘sadness, shock, and respect
should be symbolically connected to a consciousness of shame and guilt’.69
Furthermore, what I would question, particularly in light of the evidence
concerning the grandchildren of the generation who committed the crimes
and their tendency to heroicise their ancestors, is how they might perceive
the idea of a national memorial to crimes that, to them, were committed by
Germans, but not their families. Would they feel the ‘historical responsibility
being imposed on Germans’? Would they feel the ‘burden’, and how would
they respond to the idea of ‘recognising the crimes of their forebears’? If
Welzer’s study is characteristic, then familial memory is detached from his-
torical fact,70 and in some cases reinterpreted, meaning that whilst the ‘bur-
den’ of national history would be felt by younger Germans who are mindful
of the Nazi era, the competition instigator’s hopes that forebears’ crimes
will be recognised applies to other Germans’ forebears rather than to theirs.
These factors could result in a reinterpretation of the Nazi past by some
Germans who might, as Silke Arnold-de Simine posits, ‘view the fascist era
in the same way that, say, a British person might: something that is discon-
nected from their own heritage’.71
As Young declared in relation to what kind of memorial could emerge
from these complexities:

In a subtler, more reserved, more précised design, perhaps something like a

balance between the burden of memory and the inspiration which the mem-
ory sparks could be expressed; a relation of tension between an existence,
perpetually marked by the memories and an existence perpetually disabled
by them. Just as other nations remembered the Holocaust before the back-
drops of their founding myths and their ideals, their experiences as libera-
tors, victims, or fighters, so too will Germany remember the Holocaust
before the backdrop of its own complex motives, which are prone to self-­
denial whether we like the motives or not.72

With optimism, Young hoped for a memorial design that would repre-
sent the weight of German mid-twentieth-century history and, at the
same time, relate to the complexities of what might be viewed as an
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 29

indelible memory for Germans (and of Germans) and how this seemingly
ineradicable history has impeded on German life. The aspiration to com-
mission a design that shows these tensions points to the need for a memo-
rial design that expresses Germany’s post-Holocaust history, thereby
causing the memorial to relate to the wider context of post-War German
history rather than a design that would seek to focus exclusively on the
Holocaust itself. Such a design would convey the problem of Germany’s
enduring association with the genocide, pointing to how the memory of
the Holocaust has impacted on the country and its citizens. It would have
to strike a delicate balance between communicating Germany’s lasting
burden and how this has affected the country, whilst also being careful to
avoid a design that expresses German-specific issues without paying due
attention to the murdered Jews.

2.5   The European Dimension and How Some

Alternative Designs Referenced This Perspective
Issues of German responsibility were raised throughout the deliberations,
including the hiatus between the two competitions. Conradi began pro-
ceedings with a direct reminder of who was responsible for the Holocaust,
who was affected by it, and that, contrary to the post-War generation’s
propensity to modify the often self-confessed actions of their parents, the
memorial debates, if not the memorial itself, should be a reminder of this:

We want to build a monument that commemorates the victims of a crime

and the crime, which was committed not by strangers, but by Germans: the
systematic, brutal murder of the Jews of Europe. This was not a foreign
power, this was our countrymen, our neighbours, our fathers and
grandfathers.73

Though Conradi considered the memorial to be for the victims and the
new Germany, his focus on Germany as being the sole perpetrator ignored
a European dimension of the memorial that relates not exclusively to the
murdered of the continent but also to their perpetrators. The Holocaust
was a pan-European catastrophe as the memorial’s title states, and as Dan
Diner argues, the murder of 6 million European Jews is ‘the paradigmatic
European memory, providing the different member states of the EU with
the bond of a shared history and an ethical commitment to remember and
confront this dark episode in their history’.74 This is supported by Antonia
30 M. CALLAGHAN

Grunenberg who posits that the Second World War will remain the ‘fore-
most factor of European remembrance and that the Holocaust will con-
tinue to gain recognition as a European event’,75 whilst the planned
presence of European embassies near to the site also enhances what Niven
believes to be a memorial that should be understood in terms of ‘Europe’s
loss, not only Germany’s, thus helping to define Germany’s national iden-
tity along European lines’.76 Therefore, the building of a Holocaust
memorial is always an initiative relating to a pan-European audience due
to the twenty-two European countries (based on existing European states
in 1939) having their citizens transported to the concentration camps.
There is also a global audience, due to the descendants of the murdered
surviving in other continents,77 particularly in North America.78 Schulze-­
Rohr highlights this point during his commentary on who he believes the
memorial is being created for:

No memorial commemorates the murdered Jews in Europe. In Germany

there are only memorials for Germans, but not for the murdered European
Jews. And Germans are only 2 percent of the victims, 98 percent came from
other European countries.79

However, Conradi and Schulze-Rohr do not mention the breadth of

European involvement in the orchestration and implementation of the
Nazi pogroms. It is a fact that anti-Semitism and fascism were pan-­
European phenomena as the murder of Jews would have been impossible
without the broad collaboration of some European governments and citi-
zens.80 Addressing the German parliament on 27 January 2009, Feliks
Tych, Director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw from 1995 to
2007, spoke of the fact that many of the defendants sentenced in the ‘last
Nazi trials’ were ‘collaborators from the East and the West of Europe who
voluntarily participated in the work of annihilation carried out in the con-
centration camps’.81 Ukrainian John Demjanjuk, who was finally convicted
in 2011 for being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor,
is a most famous example. According to a list published by the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, some of the most sought-after Nazi war criminals were
Hungarian, Croat, Dutch, Danish, Lithuanian, and Estonian.82 This
means that pronouncements focusing responsibility for the Holocaust as
though it were exclusive to Germany were either misinformed or sugges-
tive of a determination to take full and sole liability for the past, suggesting
what one might call a ‘Germanisation’ of the Holocaust.83 In this respect
 2 WHO IS THE MEMORIAL FOR? 31

German introspection was understandable and an inevitable part of the

memorial enterprise, but in terms of ‘self understanding’ the memorial is
also one for all Europeans due to the multiple citizenship of those who
were murdered (the memorial’s pre-determined title provides a guaran-
teed reference to this) and the nationalities of those who were complicit in
the genocide. It is significant that several artists and architects were deter-
mined to include references to Europe in their designs, such as 1997 semi-­
finalist, Gesine Weinmiller, whose design consisted of eighteen abstract
blocks, which were all to be selected from different regions of Europe.84
Jochen Gerz, whose design featured thirty-nine flagpoles, each represent-
ing a European language, was also determined to incorporate signs of
pan-European patronage,85 whilst Dani Karavan’s 1994 proposal included
the engraving of each European country’s name.86 This is not to suggest
that any of these designs signalled European participation in the murders,
but rather that they were determined to include references to the pan-­
European victims.

2.6   The Idea of an Aesthetically German

Memorial and How Designers Responded
Issues concerning the memorial being for all Europeans, and a global
audience too, were not exclusive to the proposed Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe. The memorial project was not the first of its kind in the
new Germany. After reunification, the memory of National Socialism and
the Holocaust did not suddenly fade or disappear as some feared; on the
contrary, the 1990s saw a virtual ‘memory boom’.87 The Wannsee Villa in
Berlin, the location for the meeting that determined the ‘Final Solution’
for the ‘Jewish problem’, now became a memorial and museum—the
House of the Wannsee Conference—adding to the eighteen specific memo-
rial sites (and approximately 200 initiatives to create them) counted in
1990.88 The Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competition continued this ded-
ication to creating places relating to the memory of the Holocaust.
Though reunification triggered numerous memorial projects, commemo-
rating the Nazi era became increasingly prominent before the Wende.89
The much-celebrated Jewish Museum in Berlin, of which a competition to
design an extension began in 1988, and the nearby Topography of Terror
(operating since 1987, with a competition for a permanent museum
announced in 1992 and opened in 2010), were both powerful reminders
32 M. CALLAGHAN

of National Socialism. Such memorial places anchored the memory of fas-

cist Germany more firmly in the collective consciousness, though there
were voices arguing that the new Germany could not build its national
identity on the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust. Objections to cre-
ating a memorial, regardless of its function and design, included the mor-
dant, somewhat cynical views of high-profile journalist Henryk Broder
and publisher Peter Moses-Krause. In Der Tagesspiegel, Broder declared:
‘The time is ripe for a Holocaust memorial that doesn’t hurt anyone and
gives everyone the comfortable feeling of having done something good’.90
Whilst, in Berliner Zeitung, Moses-Krause argued that the chosen monu-
ment would only be ‘a cheap demonstration of historical consciousness on
defenceless objects’.91
Wolf-Jobst Siedler, conservative publisher and publicist, accused his fel-
low countrymen of ‘megalomania’ when it came to memorialising German
shame and guilt.92 In response, project founder Lea Rosh countered by
apparently speaking on behalf of many Germans with a suggestion of frus-
tration when it comes to everlasting debates concerning
Vergangenheitsbewältigung that might even slow the memorial’s progress:

There are many citizens in this country who will support it, all those with
imagination and compassion and decency. We have an abundance of war
memorials, from the First and Second World War. We still do not have a
Holocaust memorial. Let’s see how many anniversaries, speeches and pro-
testations of ‘dealing with the past’ we have to still go through until we
finally have such a memorial.93

Such protests and their subsequent rebuttals show that the memory of
National Socialism is intrinsic to German national identity, including a
paradoxical need to commemorate a disturbing past whilst also wishing to
emerge from it, reducing its resonance in Germany’s self-image and out-
look. There was, however, another reason for some jury members’ percep-
tion that the memorial was for Germany. This concerns self-image and the
way in which the unified state might be perceived globally. As historian,
co-instigator of the project and member of the 1995 jury, Eberhard Jäckel,
asked: ‘Where is our memorial? We Germans must place a symbol that will
be visible from afar to show to the world that we have accepted the burden
of our history’.94 Jury colleague and art historian, Stefanie Endlich,
expressed a similar view that substantiates the point that high-level
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 III
KING COAL (1810-1910)
THE “Industrial Revolution” that changed the face of a large part of
England is generally stated to have commenced about 1770, when
machinery began to displace hand-labour and so drove the workers
out of their homes into factories. About the same time came the
construction of canals connecting the chief waterways and centres of
population, and the slow improvement of the roads. But none of
these important changes greatly affected the outward appearance of
our villages until about forty years later, when, as the title of this
chapter indicates, the steam-engine replaced the water-wheel in the
factories, and when coal began to make its influence felt all over the
country. Simultaneously there grew up a system of macadamised
roads and stage-coaches, which gave place in thirty or forty years to
railways. For a century coal was the dominant factor in English life,
but since 1910 petrol has played the main part in altering the aspect
of the countryside.
Meanwhile, of course, minor causes have always been in operation.
The progressive enclosure of common land and the gradual
grouping of the old one-acre holdings into large hedged fields
continued all through the early part of the nineteenth century, in spite
of violent agitation by Cobbett. Whatever may have been the
arguments in favour of enclosure, the inevitable effect on village life
was to squeeze the small man out of existence and to perpetuate the
big farm employing workers at starvation wages. Poverty stalked
through the little cottages, many of which were unfit for human
habitation. The cruel game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of
poaching, and the woods were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-
guns, which sometimes claimed a gamekeeper for victim instead of a
poacher.
And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old self-
supporting village community, changes in the means of transport
brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one
blow the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic
character of village architecture. Too scattered, too cowed, and too
poor to organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their
consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive
Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the
century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these
buildings represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and
parson with its iron grip on village life. The dignified brick meeting-
houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were of another
type, the flamboyant Gothic chapel of Victorian days had not been
conceived, but the village Bethel of 1810 or so is a standing witness
to the cottager’s grievance against the ruling class of his day. Very
little cottage-building was done, for though the population was
increasing very fast, it was migrating from country to town in order to
be near the new factories.
The network of canals that spread over England between 1760 and
1830 or so did not greatly influence the appearance of the
countryside, though their numerous lockhouses and bridges have
the merit of severe simplicity. But the system of new roads
introduced by Telford and Macadam early in the nineteenth century
had an immediate and far-reaching effect. With them we enter on the
brief but glorious coaching-period, which holds such a grip on the
English imagination that it still dictates the design of our Christmas
cards. The “old-fashioned Christmas” that has been such a godsend
to artists implies unlimited snow, holly, mistletoe, and plum-pudding,
with the steaming horses standing in the inn yard and the red-nosed
driver ogling the barmaid. Dickens made the most of it in literature,
Hugh Thomson and Cecil Aldin in art. For the stage-coach
immediately enlivened every village and town lying on the great
highways. The roadside inn came into its own, but after some forty
crowded years of glorious life declined again until the motor-car
provided it with a new lease of prosperity, or at any rate until the cult
of the bicycle gave it a fillip.
The influence of railways on the appearance of the countryside has
been mainly indirect, in the sense of having destroyed the isolation
of villages and hamlets and with it the local characteristics that they
possessed. For example, the use of purple Welsh slates was almost
unknown outside Wales up to the beginning of the nineteenth
century, when they came into common use, for though their colour
and texture is unpleasing, they are relatively cheap and can be fixed
on lightly constructed roofs. So first canals and then railways
combined with factories to spread machine-made goods all over the
country. Otherwise the railway has not greatly defaced the landscape
as a whole, for there are still large tracts of country where one can
be out of sight and sound of it, and it is not so ubiquitous as the
modern motor-car. Many village railway-stations and cottages are
inoffensively designed, and in the “stone” districts of England are
usually built of local materials, but their appearance suffers as a rule
from the dead hand of central and standardised control. The habit of
erecting enormous hoardings in the fields bordering a railway must
go far back into the nineteenth century. Presumably these eyesores
have some object in view beyond merely annoying the traveller and
defacing the landscape, but certainly they must come up for
consideration in the last chapter of this essay.
Two hundred years ago, even more recently than that, the populous
and prosperous parts of England were East Anglia, Kent, Sussex,
Surrey, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and some neighbouring
counties. Agriculture, sheep-farming, and the wool trade formed the
main source of wealth: and the only notable exception was the iron
industry of the Weald, where a sufficiency of wood fuel was available
for smelting. Between 1750 and 1850 the great northward trek took
place, and King Coal became supreme. He ruined an appreciable
part of Yorkshire and Lancashire, smeared his ugly fingers over
mountain valleys in South Wales and elsewhere, created the “Black
Country” in his own image, and last of all produced the terrible blot
that we call the “Potteries,” where the whole landscape looks like a
bad dream.
The most hideous nightmare-panorama that comes to my mind is a
scene of utter desolation not far from Etruria (a singularly
inappropriate name), in Staffordshire, where slagheaps, collieries,
blast-furnaces, potbanks and smoke dispute the foreground. Yet an
old print that I saw in Messrs. Wedgwood’s adjoining works proves
that less than two hundred years ago this was unspoiled country.
From that time onwards, the northern half of England became the
national workshop, and a large part of southern England became a
private garden. At the present moment half the total population of
England is concentrated in five comparatively small districts:
“Greater” London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the “Black
Country” and Tyneside.
Examples of the early factories built towards the end of the
eighteenth century are to be found in the beautiful valley above
Stroud, and in many wild and lonely dales among the Pennine hills.
They stand beside fast-running streams which at first provided the
necessary power, but before long the steam-engine replaced the
earlier method, and a tall chimney was one immediate result.
Smoke, of course, was another. Yet so many of these old “mills” still
survive that we can study their architecture. There are mills in the
Stroud Valley admirably designed in the Georgian manner, with well-
proportioned windows divided into small panes, stone-slated roofs,
and stone walls, innocent of soot and now golden with time. Built of
local materials, they harmonise well with their surroundings. The
same may be said of a few Yorkshire mills, though for the most part
they have been blackened with smoke and are more austere.
Standing by some deserted building of this type, its great wheel
disused and its windows broken, in a lonely valley with only the noise
of the stream audible, one always thinks of the machine-breakers in
Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, a grim incident of the countryman’s fight
against progress.
But even if an occasional example of these old factories has some
vestige of architectural merit, nearly all of them were unsuited to their
purpose. It does not seem to have occurred to their builders that a
“mill” existed for any object beyond the grinding of the last penny out
of the sweated men and women and children whom it housed. Light,
warmth, decent sanitary conditions—all were utterly ignored. It is
hardly to be expected that the slave-drivers of early Victorian days
would produce buildings of any interest, and in fact the great gaunt
prison-like boxes that desecrate so many Yorkshire and Lancashire
hillsides are a very fair expression of that greedy scramble for money
that has caused such a backwash in our own day. For it must not be
forgotten that some of the most beautiful places in England were
violated in this way. Many people have never visited our northern
counties, which they regard as a foreign land, yet which contain
scenery at least comparable with anything south of the Trent.
But if one takes, for purposes of comparison, the two valleys in
which the ruined abbeys of Fountains and Kirkstall now stand, one
obtains a very fair illustration of the effects of industrialism. They are
only some twenty miles apart, they were founded by monks of the
same Order at about the same time, and in their original state they
must both have been attractively situated. The modern visitor to
Fountains, as he rounds the bend that has hitherto concealed the
Abbey, invariably gasps at the beauty that bursts upon him, for here
a nobleman’s park protects the site and no coal or iron lies near. But
Kirkstall is blackened and overcast by the huge ironworks that sprawl
over the adjoining hillside, a sooty mass of tumbledown sheet-iron
sheds, bristling with tall chimneys belching out smoke; and the river
that formerly fed the monks with trout is now covered with an evil-
smelling and iridescent film of factory waste.
Yet, many and various as were the insults heaped upon rural
England by “captains of industry” in the good old days when England
was making money hand-over-fist, they sink into insignificance
compared with the early Victorian achievement in housing. The
golden age of self-help, philanthropy, missionary enterprise,
evangelical zeal, individualism, and all the rest of it, produced the
“back-to-back” house. The meanest streets of the East End, the
worst slums of our Northern and Midland cities, were built while the
Romantic Revival was in full swing and while Ruskin was lecturing
on the Seven Lamps that he had discovered hanging in Venice. The
wind sown in those prosperous days is quite clearly producing a
whirlwind for us to reap in more difficult times, and one recalls
another text about the sins of the fathers. This is not a faddist or an
extreme view. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, in his new History of England (p.
683), writes of “the ever-advancing bounds of the realm of ugliness
and uniformity, in its constant destruction of the beauty and variety of
the old pre-industrial world. Indeed the more prosperous and
progressive the country was, the more rapidly did that increasing
work go forward.” And he quotes the grave words of another critic:
“The Nineteenth Century did not attack beauty. It simply trampled it
under foot.”
Proceeding with our examination of the various symptoms for which
we shall eventually have to prescribe, let us now consider what are
the shortcomings of the houses built for the people in the early and
mid-nineteenth century, and more particularly how they have
affected the appearance of our countryside. In themselves they
were, as a rule, either entirely sordid, or both sordid and pretentious.
The former were erected by manufacturers and colliery-owners in
long rows to provide shelter for their “hands” at the minimum price,
the latter were more often the work of that public benefactor known
as the “jerry-builder,” and were erected as a speculation. In the
former case the tenants had no option but to accept what was
offered, so paid the rent required and occupied the house without
demur. The jerry-builder’s houses, on the other hand, had to attract
tenants, hence the pretentious element was introduced in order to
ensnare the tenant’s wife. In those days, nearly all small property
was held on weekly rentals and architects were hardly ever
employed to design cottages or small houses.
But the houses had to be designed somehow, so the builder had
recourse to sundry manuals or copybooks of designs for “Villas and
Terrace Houses” in the worst style of the day. The idea of using such
books originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, when
numerous little calf-bound volumes appeared, but they contained
little more than details of the Roman “Orders,” and such features as
chimneypieces, doorways, etc. The result was that the speculative
builder, who made his first appearance about that time, continued to
build in the traditional manner, but added a classical porch and
interior panelling and similar trimmings, which, even if they were
often rather pedantic and un-English, were always in excellent taste.
The nineteenth century copybooks sprang from a very different
source. “Gothick” architecture, for two centuries a byword and a
reproach among all cultivated people, had been rediscovered. From
Queen Victoria’s coronation to her jubilee, architects romped over
Europe and brought home sketches of Gothic detail from France and
Flanders and Venice. Ruskin, who was not greatly enamoured of
English Gothic, but loved it in its French and Venetian forms, spread
the glad tidings among the middle-class; and the famous architect,
Street, ransacked Italy and Spain in his quest. All this mass of
drawings was broadcast over the country at its period of greatest
industrial prosperity. Once I worked in a provincial office facing a
replica of a Venetian palace, and witnessed the erection of a factory-
chimney copied from Giotto’s campanile at Florence.
Naturally the smaller fry in the building world aped their betters.
Second-rate architects and hack draughtsmen set to work to adapt
and caricature these fashionable forms for use by the builder on
shops and villas. Terra-cotta manufacturers gladly joined in the
game, so that soon scraps of Venetian carving and ornament came
to be turned out by the mile and capitals copied from French
churches were moulded in artificial stone in tens of thousands. To
this movement may be ascribed a very large share in the
deterioration of English towns and even villages, for the “Gothic”
craze naturally spread from the centres of fashion to the smaller
places. A travelled and studious architect, set down in a street of
suburban villas to-day, should be capable of tracing the ultimate
source of the pretentious porches, the tile cresting on the roofs, all
the mechanical ornament reproduced down the row; and in nearly
every case he could derive it from a Gothic church in France or Italy.
The sad thing is that these revived ornamental forms were only a
travesty of the old. Gothic architecture was, perhaps, the highest
form of natural and legitimate building that the world has ever seen:
as adapted by the speculative builder, it had no structural meaning
whatsoever, and consisted in mere chunks of crudely caricatured
ornament, generally misapplied. Ruskin preached truth and honesty
in architecture; but his pigmy disciples missed the whole spirit of
Gothic. The barns and cottages of old England represent that spirit
as well as the French cathedrals and Venetian palaces on which he
concentrated with such disastrous effect, yet the English village has
suffered terribly from the Gothic revival.
For the movement spread to village shops and banks, and, of
course, all new churches erected after 1830, or even earlier, followed
the new fashion. Because every old village already possessed a
parish church, now becoming too large for its needs, there was little
for the Church of England to do outside the towns, though there are
many cases such as that at M—— in Middlesex, where an amateur
effort in church-design by the saintly William Wilberforce, just a
century ago, has ruined a beautiful old village highway. But the
Nonconformist bodies, now flourishing and sometimes even wealthy,
were not to be outdone in the race: so they abandoned the stark
galleried chapels, that had hitherto followed the Protestant type
invented by Wren for his City churches, for an ambitious and often
flamboyant variety of “Gothic” that has created a discord in many a
village street. There seems to have been a prevalent idea that every
place of worship must be decorated with a spire, with tracery, and
with a quantity of ornamental features, quite regardless as to
whether funds permitted of a single one of those features being
worthily executed, whether any of them symbolised the entirely
English and healthy movement that produced Nonconformity, or
whether they harmonised with surrounding buildings. Our final
conclusion must be that the Gothic Revival, which, in the hands of a
man like William Morris, who loved England passionately, might have
done so much to save her countryside, was in fact largely
responsible for its defacement.
Another characteristic of this singular movement was its utter
disregard of what we now call “town-planning.” When Ruskin advised
his audience to treat railway-stations as “the miserable things that
they are,”[2] because he disliked railways, he seems to have been
voicing the spirit of his day, which was quite content to speculate on
the symbolism of a piece of carving in a remote foreign city while
men continued to build the most appalling slums. No town was
“planned” in those days: it “just growed.” Occasionally a
manufacturer like Sir Titus Salt coquetted with the idea of a rational
lay-out for a town, but no scheme got very far until the idealist
founders of Bournville and Port Sunlight inaugurated a new school of
thought, proving effectually that good housing was not necessarily
bad business.
At the present time, when authorities on town-planning have long
made it clear that orderly development is both desirable and
practicable, the haphazard growth of suburbs into the country is a
deplorable and even a painful sight to every intelligent person.
English individualism, sometimes an asset, becomes almost a curse
when it interferes, as it still does, with nearly everything that can be
done to save the English countryside from complete uglification.
Consideration of the possibilities of town-planning in this direction
must be deferred to our last chapter; for the moment let us consider
one or two characteristics of nineteenth-century town growth.
Almost without exception, any man could buy a plot of land
anywhere, and build on it anything he wanted. Tripe-dressing,
sausage-skin making, and one or two other “noxious” trades might
be prohibited in a few favoured localities; the obscure and often
absurd law of “Ancient Lights” occasionally restrained his ardour.
Otherwise, so long as his building was strong enough to remain
standing, and provided with adequate means of drainage, he was as
free as air. Building was essentially a commercial business; the
rights or needs of the community did not enter into the question.
Each man built for his day and generation: the future was left to take
care of itself. Yet even from a financial point of view this was a short-
sighted policy. When Wren’s plan for rebuilding London was upset by
vested interests, a chance was lost of making wide streets that are
now urgently necessary but cannot be formed except by payments of
incredible sums for compensation. A more modern instance is to be
seen in the Euston Road, which was a residential thoroughfare
looking over fields when my grandfather knew it a century ago. Then
shops came to be built over the front gardens as the old residents
fled from the invading streets: and now these shops have to be
swept away with heavy payments for compensation to allow the road
to be converted into the great artery that any intelligent person could
have foreseen when it was first built. This phenomenon is not
peculiar to towns: it applies with equal force to the country districts
that are continually being absorbed by towns. Half the squalor of
modern suburbs is due to indiscriminate development. Trees are cut
down and houses are run up along a main road. Traffic increases,
and the tenants move away. The houses are clumsily converted into
inefficient shops, extending over the front garden, or into seedy
inefficient tenements. Empty plots are covered with hideous
hoardings. Without undue interference with the liberty of the subject,
much of this feckless muddling could be avoided by the exercise of a
little rational foresight.
For this is a question deeply affecting the whole community, not a
petty professional grievance. The mad race from towns to the fringe
of the country is destroying the country for miles round: and the
pathology of destruction is now clearly understood. A brilliantly
realistic description of the growth of “Bromstead,” a typical London
suburb, is to be found in Mr. H. G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli. All
who have witnessed the slow spread of this malignant disease will
agree that he does not overstate the case.
 IV
THE AGE OF PETROL (1910
ONWARDS)
IT may well be objected that this is a mere journalese title, for the
influence of motoring on the appearance of the countryside is not
always apparent, and many other factors have been at work, among
them the Great War and its considerable legacy of troubles.
Moreover, some readers may point out that motor-cars were to be
seen in England long before 1910. That is true; but they did not
appreciably alter our countryside before that date, and the number of
them was relatively small.
The most obvious influence that motoring has exerted on England
has been in the direction of road “improvements,” especially since
the War. Few of us foresaw that the clumsy and not very speedy
vehicles which made their first appearance on our highways some
thirty years ago, preceded by a man bearing a red flag, would
eventually cause so radical a change in our ideas of the nature of a
road. For a long time nothing happened. As motors increased in
number and speed and bulk, they continued to become more and
more of a nuisance to the cyclists and pedestrians and horse-drawn
vehicles still forming the majority of road-users. Clouds of dust
whitened the hedges, and choked the inhabitants of all houses
anywhere near a main highway. Accidents became frequent. All this
was unavoidable, because even the best roads made by Telford and
Macadam were unequal to the new conditions, and the far larger
number of narrow winding country lanes were altogether inadequate
for the strain that was now put upon them. An excellent instance of
the resulting state of affairs may still be seen in the Isle of Wight,
where several of the “main” roads are tortuous narrow lanes sunk
between high banks topped with thick hedges. In the summer
months a stream of huge charabancs tears over the whole island
every day. At many places there is no possibility of these
Juggernauts passing each other. Even a hay-cart presents such a
complete obstacle that one or other vehicle has to back till the road
widens, and in places the blockage caused by the charabanc forces
a cyclist or a pedestrian to climb up on to the steep grassy bank
while the monster with its cargo of yelling hooligans pushes past
him. Either roads must be widened almost everywhere or motor
vehicles of all types must be abolished, and, as the latter alternative
is out of the question, we must accept the former as inevitable. How
it may be effected with the minimum of damage to the beauty of our
countryside will be discussed in the next chapter. England has not
yet sunk to the level of the Western States, where it is a simple
matter to shift a barbed-wire fence a few yards back on each side of
the furrows that do duty for a road, and where the iron or wooden
shacks that constitute a “home” may readily be wheeled to a new
site on the prairie. England is a crowded little country full of sacred
associations that go back to the beginnings of our race, and that is
why we hate to see crazy new bungalows lining the Pilgrim’s Way.
Their very appearance is an insult to our English sense of
orderliness and decency, such as we should feel if a negro
cheapjack started selling mouth-organs in Canterbury Cathedral.
In some parts of the country there are stretches of road that can be
widened without material defacement of the landscape, but they are
few. Ancient landmarks hamper progress in most places. Old
bridges, for example, are altogether unsuited to heavy and fast
motor-traffic. Often built askew with the line of a main road, they are
nearly always very steep, very narrow, and, though often sturdy in
appearance, are incapable of bearing the weight of a heavy lorry and
trailer moving with the speed of a railway train. Here again is a
problem requiring solution. Some people would attempt to adapt the
old bridge to modern needs, others prefer an entirely new structure
placed parallel with the old one, and, of course, the third alternative
is complete demolition. The first method is generally impossible, and
there is much to be said for a frankly modern design in reinforced
concrete, provided that it does not stand in too close proximity to the
ancient monument that it supersedes.
Another familiar rural feature that must perforce give way to the
insistent needs of the motorist is the ford or “watersplash.” Much as
we may regret its disappearance, it has to go.
But most difficult of all is the question of dealing with the narrow High
Street of a town or village through which a main artery passes.
Occasionally the jerry-builder has anticipated us here, and has
erected some terrible Victorian nightmare of a shop right up to the
old building-line of the historical cottages that he has demolished. In
such a case the children of the Petrol Age may be able to expiate the
sins of their fathers by pulling down that shop. But more often there
is a building of real merit standing at the very bottleneck through
which the procession of traffic has to squeeze its way, such as the
old church at Barnet or the Whitgift Hospital at Croydon; and then we
are in a quandary, impressed on the one hand by the legitimate
needs of our time, deterred on the other hand by an almost religious
sense of the sanctity of the past. Sometimes the obstacle is a mere
cottage, a barn, a pump, a stone cross, or a quaint structure such as
blocks Hampstead Lane near the Spaniard’s Tavern, yet even these
must be treated with respect. The “by-pass” road, as suggested in
the next chapter, is sometimes the best solution, but is not
practicable everywhere. And lastly, there are the trees. As I write
these lines I can hear the crashes of falling elms and yews that I
have known since childhood. A snorting tractor is pulling them down
bodily with a steel hawser, so that the grass-lined lane that runs near
my home may be widened for the growing needs of what was once a
pretty village.
But a wide straight road does not exhaust the motorist’s
requirements. He becomes thirsty at times, and the village inn has
already risen to the occasion, usually, it must be admitted, without
detriment to the village street. The architecture of licensed premises
is looking up. His car also becomes thirsty, (hence the petrol-station),
and its occasional liability to gastric trouble involves the provision at
frequent intervals of telephone-cabins and repair-shops or garages.
We may profitably consider the design of these accessories and their
relation to country surroundings in the next chapter. The phenomenal
development in the use of motor charabancs has involved the
provision of extensive “parking-places” in all pleasure resorts, e.g., at
Brighton, where a large part of the sea-view from the Esplanade is
blocked. The provision of a “park” at Glastonbury has led to an
outcry recently, and everywhere the problem is pressing.
Finally comes the very vexed question of housing, municipal and
private, that has grown so acute since the War. In this movement the
motorist has played a prominent part, for he has helped to extend
the “Housing Problem,” from its obvious location on the fringes of our
towns, away to the remoter parts of the country. From Kent to
Hampshire the bungalows line our southern cliffs. Housing needs
may be divided into three groups: those of the townsman, the rustic,
and the week-ender. The first concerns us here only to the extent
that new housing in urban districts must of necessity be provided in
the adjoining rural areas: thus London is now so congested that its
County Council has had to acquire large estates in Essex, Kent, and
Middlesex to provide houses for city workers, who are quite properly
dissatisfied with the tenement-dwellings that are their only
alternative. Then, although in many country districts the population is
decreasing, new standards of decency impel the newly-wed to
demand something better than the leaking and verminous hovels
where their parents dwell. All these new houses, whether in country
or town, have been provided in increasing proportion by municipal
enterprise since the War, and hence their design is subject to a
measure of control. Whether that control is sufficient to ensure a
tolerable standard of architectural expression is a matter for further
consideration: at this point it is important to realise that practically all
the post-War “Housing Schemes” have been scientifically laid out on
rational lines, with due regard for the future. It is that central control,
whether exercised by a public body or by a properly constituted
private organisation, which makes all the difference between the
“lay-out” of Becontree or Port Sunlight on the one hand and an
average bungalow settlement on the other. One is a design, the
other an accident,—and the Italian word for “accident” is disgrazia!
Some sixteen years ago I endeavoured to interest the inhabitants of
the district where I live in the possibilities of the then newly-passed
Town-Planning Act. The more enlightened among them readily
responded, but there were some who said that this was a rural area
and that they had no wish to see it turned into a town. Since then it
has turned itself into something resembling a town, but its growth
has been spasmodic and irregular. A few years later came a
proposal to acquire two fields in the centre of the district for a public
park. Again the objectors appeared; what does a semi-village need
with a public park, at a high price too? Fortunately the fields were
acquired, and already they are nearly encircled by building plots.
Meanwhile a great Arterial Road has been driven right across the
new park, cutting it in half and reducing its attractions. Under a
proper town-planning scheme such things would be impossible.
Roads and parks would be laid out on paper years before they were
required; and, though modifications of the first plan would become
necessary from time to time, the ultimate gain would be enormous.
Groups of adjoining authorities are already preparing regional town-
planning schemes in concert, so that trunk roads may be provided in
such a way as to pass through each area to its benefit and not to its
detriment. If “Rusticus” stands too long while the river flows by, as
the quotation on my title-page suggests, he will find the countryside
engulfed.
In my last chapter something was said of the possibilities that the
new science of Town-planning has to offer us, as a result of many
years’ experience and experiment. We have seen the appearance of
innumerable municipal housing-schemes, of “Satellite Towns” like
Letchworth and the new Welwyn, of model industrial communities
like Bournville and Port Sunlight, of communal efforts like the
Hampstead Garden Suburb, of many admirable achievements in the
developments of private enterprise. Originating at the time (1876 et
seq.) when Bedford Park was laid out, the idea developed slowly
before the War and has made great strides since. It is one of the
brightest spots in the history of English progress, but it has not been
sufficient to stem the rush of ersatz building that followed the War.
For it is the bungalow craze, with all that it now implies, which has
most seriously damaged the appearance of rural England during the
last eight years. There is nothing inherently unpleasant in the
bungalow type of house. Properly designed and constructed, it may
be made a thing of beauty harmonising perfectly with its
surroundings. But, to my mind, its advantages have been grossly
exaggerated. On the count of cost, the primary consideration
nowadays, it shows no superiority over the two-floor house;
reasonable privacy for its bedrooms is secured with difficulty; and it
is apt to sprawl over the ground. One cannot quite realise why it has
been so much favoured in recent years; possibly it is merely a
transient fashion, like face-powder or crinolines. There was a great
and a genuine demand for houses after the War, which had to be
satisfied. Nine people out of ten took what they could get, and they
got bungalows. For the most part their ménage consisted of
husband, wife, and a two-seater. Neither servants nor children
entered into the picture. There was a prejudice against everything
connected with the pre-War period, especially with its social
distinctions, and perhaps the ex-service man sought for the
antithesis of the suburban villa. Accustomed for four years to scenes
of ruin and to leaky Army huts, his mind readily accepted the slap-
dash bungalow with its familiar barbed-wire fence and no-man’s-land
of a garden. The effect of flimsiness and impermanence that
characterises so many of these little buildings may be ascribed to
three causes: the difficulty of paying for a house and a car out of an
income that only provided a house before the War, the prevalent
restlessness which almost rejects the idea of settling down in one
place and letting oneself “take root,” and the insidious hold that the
architecture of dumps and sheds had gained on the average man’s
mind in 1914-18. His two-seater carried him out into what was (at
first) the peace of the country, where land was cheap. Run up at
express speed to satisfy an enormous demand, these bungalows
spread out for miles along the roads adjoining the towns, thus
avoiding the road-making charges that have to be met on an
ordinary estate. And next this “ribbon” development continued far out
into the country, so that people who had a slight surplus after
meeting their hire-purchase payments for car and furniture could
enjoy a sight of the sea on Saturday and Sunday from a bungalow
perched on the Sussex cliffs. Thus this singular movement has had
its main effect in rural districts, whose little Councils, with their often
rudimentary by-laws, find the problem almost beyond their power to
solve.
For these bungalows are for the most part designed without
knowledge or taste, without regard to the tradition of English
architecture or the claims of the English landscape. They are
generally built of flimsy machine-made materials, largely imported
from abroad. Yet they have satisfied a perfectly legitimate demand
for accommodation, they have been erected honestly by builders
and paid for by their owners, and they have so far complied with the
laws of the land that they have earned a Government “subsidy”
towards their cost. Hence the bungalow, which many of us regard as
the motorist’s least acceptable gift to the countryside, constitutes a
topic which must be criticised with extreme tact and caution.
There must be many beauty-spots in England that have been spoilt
by motorists and charabancs since the War, but as a fair case one
may cite X—— in Romney Marsh. A few years ago this was an
artists’ paradise and a haven of peace. It has now become a glorified
bus-park, where one is surrounded by petrol-pumps, garages,
blatant exorbitant cafés run by loud-voiced aliens, “souvenir” shops
full of Brummagem and German products, ice-carts, and
innumerable direction-posts to “ladies’ cloak rooms.” All the charm of
the place has gone in bribes to the tripper, and when he tires of it the
ugliness will remain. When one sees a beautiful village or landscape
prostituted to such ends, one wishes that the petrol-engine had
never been invented.
But is ugliness an inevitable concomitant of motoring? Last April it
was my good fortune to travel some 200 miles over the main roads
of Tuscany. In that considerable distance I saw not a single petrol-
station, and hardly a poster or a hoarding. The petrol-pumps must
have been there, but at any rate they were not obtrusive enough to
attract notice. Some people may say that the apparent absence of
these accessories of civilisation furnishes an additional proof of
Italian backwardness, others that the iron hand of Mussolini prevents
progress; but to me, as a lover of Italy, it is a satisfaction that she
has contrived to reconcile the legitimate needs of to-day with the
beauty of her countryside.
 V
THE FUTURE
THE first part of this little book described rural England as it existed
in its unsullied perfection, the second part the regrettable changes
due mainly to the use of coal and petrol, and now we have to
consider what prospect there is of saving the best of the old and
making the best of the new. If “Rusticus” desires to preserve the
remainder of his heritage, he must adopt some bolder policy than
that of gazing at the flowing stream. Nor will the tactics of Canute
serve his purpose: the tide of “civilisation” will not stop for him. There
is every indication that it will flow with undiminished velocity in the
coming years.
Our efforts must therefore be directed to two objects: the
preservation of such relics of the past as are of recognised worth,
and the regulation of all tendencies that are harmful to the beauty of
the countryside. It is heartening to see, in the recent formation of the
Council for the Preservation of Rural England, some public
expression of interest in this vital matter. Without presuming to offer
suggestions to so august a body, it is my purpose to set down in
order the chief factors in the situation, present and future.
In a previous passage it has been remarked that ruin as such is a
matter for regret, not for admiration. One might go a step further and
say that old buildings are not necessarily good buildings. Strictly
speaking, that is true, but is also dangerous doctrine. Nearly all old
buildings are good buildings, and when we find one that we are
disposed to reckon as bad, we must not forget that the canons of
architectural taste have always been fickle. In the eighteenth century
Gothic buildings were ridiculed, and were treated accordingly. In the
nineteenth, taste was completely reversed. On the other hand,
certain architects of the Gothic Revival were so enamoured of a
special variety of Gothic that they endeavoured to remould all old
churches of any differing period nearer to their hearts’ desire. Hence
the formation in 1877 of that body which is familiarly and even
affectionately known as the “Anti-Scrape,” more precisely as the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. It was founded by
architects and others to protest against excessive zeal in
“restoration” by architects and others, and has done a noble work. It
is still maintained partly by architects, whose disinterested efforts in
preserving old buildings are worthy of note because architects
naturally depend for their living mainly on new buildings. As its
headquarters are in London, its work in other centres is most
effectively done through the medium of a local committee. The
essential qualifications for such a committee are taste and
disinterestedness. Suppose that an old cottage or barn on a village
street in Blankshire is threatened with demolition. If the matter is
brought to the notice of the Blankshire local committee by any self-
appointed (even anonymous) “informer,” that committee will offer an
opinion, backed by the expert advice of the S.P.A.B., who may be
able to suggest some alternative to demolition. Their knowledge of
the technical details of restoration is unrivalled, especially as regards
building materials suitable for use in an old structure. If the cottage is
older than a.d. 1714 and of sufficient merit, the aid of the Ancient
Monuments Commission may be invoked. Once such a building is
scheduled as an “ancient monument,” the owner is deprived of his
right to demolish or alter it, and its existence is safeguarded by the
Government. Another means of frustrating base designs on an old
building is to appeal to the National Trust for Places of Historic
Interest or Natural Beauty, who may be induced to launch an appeal
through the Press for funds to purchase it. At present they maintain
over twenty buildings, including some which are of literary interest
(e.g., Coleridge’s cottage) rather than of great antiquity. A third
alternative is to enlist the sympathies of a local authority or a local
philanthropist. In any case the delay in demolition caused by creating
an outcry will serve a useful purpose, for a thoughtless owner may
be led to reconsider his original intentions, and by so doing may find
that the building may be preserved after all. The restoration of old
buildings is much more practicable than any yet discovered use of
monkey-gland is to old people. But of course there are cases,—and
sentimentalists are apt to overlook this fact,—where an old building
has no architectural merit, and simply must give way before the
march of progress. It is difficult, too, to see how a man can be
compelled to maintain a disused windmill. It may be added that
bridges are among the “buildings” scheduled as “Ancient
Monuments.”
As regards natural features, it must be generally known that the
National Trust, already mentioned, has been very active during
recent years in acquiring and preserving all manner of beauty-spots
in England, including such various sites as the mountains of the
Lake District, strategical points on the North and South Downs, river
banks, hill-tops and cliff-tops all over the country. Unfortunately the
era of enclosing commons is not yet over, and another organisation
—the Commons and Footpaths Preservation Society—was founded
in 1865 to further the excellent objects indicated by its title. It saved
Epping Forest, Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common and many
other familiar places for us, and continues to watch over the interests
of all lovers of the country. But, like the other societies mentioned
here, its activities are limited by its funds. However, we must
remember that any district which has adopted a town-planning
scheme can now invoke the majesty of the law to save its open
spaces and natural features, for the first Schedule of the Town-
Planning Act of 1925 includes a reference to “the preservation of
objects of historical interest or natural beauty.”
There have been many recent agitations—notably in regard to Ken
Wood, the Seven Sisters, the Devil’s Dyke, and the Darenth Valley—
which have shown that, in the last extremity, the public will
sometimes rise to the occasion when a beauty-spot is threatened.
Considering the narrowness of the average village High Street, and
the concentration of its historical relics in its centre, there is much to
be said for the construction of a “by-pass” road to carry through
traffic round the village. Otherwise the village green, the pond, the
stocks, the inns, and nearly all the old landmarks would have to go.
Traders object in the case of the larger towns, but vested interests
always turn up somewhere, and it seems fairly certain that the “by-
pass” road meets the needs of the greater number besides