Empathetic Memorials: The Other

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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

ISBN 978-3-030-50931-6    ISBN 978-3-030-50932-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50932-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 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
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practicándose por largo tiempo, y que no fue sustituido por la votación
secreta hasta el año 615 (139 a. de J. C.). El derecho que los
magistrados tenían en un principio a nombrar a los magistrados hubo
pues, de quedar reducido al derecho de dirigir la elección en los
Comicios, si bien todavía, gracias a la facultad concedida a
funcionario encargado de esta dirección para examinar y comproba
las condiciones de los aspirantes, como se indicará en el próximo
capítulo, y para inspeccionar el curso de la elección misma, no dejó de
conservar aquel una esencial influencia sobre el resultado de esta. La
renuntiatio era obligatoria para el funcionario que dirigía la elección
una vez realizada válidamente esta, aun cuando es verdad que no
existía ningún medio para compelerle a efectuarla y que en algunos
casos los que tenían que hacerla la negaron.
Por lo que al tiempo se refiere, en todos los cargos no sometidos a
principio de la anualidad, la toma de posesión iba unida
inmediatamente (ex templo) al nombramiento. Esta regla era aplicable
al rey, al dictador, a los censores, a los magistrados instituidos para la
fundación de colonias, etc., del propio modo que a los cargos anuales
cuando por excepción se hubiera diferido el nombramiento hasta
después de haber comenzado el año de funciones. Solo en casos
raros y excepcionales tropezamos aquí con la existencia de intervalos
entre el nombramiento y el comienzo del ejercicio de las funciones. Po
el contrario, el nombramiento para los cargos anuales estaba sometido
por derecho a la anticipación; es decir, que, según la manera de habla
romana, la creación o nombramiento tenía lugar en forma de
designación, y entre esta y la toma de posesión mediaba cierto tiempo
Respecto a la duración de este período intermedio, parece que solo
estaba determinado constitucionalmente que tenía que ser más corto
que un año del calendario; pues la designación con intervalo mayor, ta
como tuvo lugar singularmente después de la dictadura de César, era
contraria al orden existente, desde el momento en que perjudicaba e
derecho de nombramiento correspondiente a los magistrados que
ocuparan después la magistratura suprema. Había, por lo menos, la
costumbre de hacer los nombramientos para el año siguiente en la
segunda mitad del corriente año; por lo tanto, la anticipación se
limitaba, lo más, a seis meses. El fijar ulteriormente el término
quedaba al arbitrio del magistrado que hacía el nombramiento, a no
ser que lo impidieran especiales disposiciones sobre el caso. Era usua
en los tiempos antiguos nombrar para los cargos anuales después que
los magistrados volvían de su mando de estío, por consiguiente, a lo
más no mucho tiempo antes de transcurrir el año de las funciones
después, cuando los cónsules empezaron a funcionar regularmente en
la ciudad todo el año, o sea probablemente desde la época de Sila, las
elecciones de los magistrados anuales se hacían, por regla general, lo
más pronto posible, esto es, en julio. De análoga manera se
verificaban también las elecciones plebeyas.
 CAPÍTULO V

condiciones necesarias para el desempeño

de las magistraturas

En la República romana, o por lo menos en los tiempos que nos

son históricamente conocidos, no se obligaba a nadie a aceptar los
cargos públicos (pág. 140); y para poder desempeñarlos bastaba
desde tiempo inmemorial con poseer el derecho de ciudadano, pues
así como este derecho implicaba la facultad de votar, así también
suponía la elegibilidad. Pero en el curso del tiempo fueron apareciendo
y desarrollándose numerosas trabas para ejercer los referidos cargos
por virtud de las cuales, aun existiendo el derecho de ciudadano, o se
anulaba el nombramiento hecho, o se obligaba, o cuando menos se
facultaba a los nombrados para rehusar el cargo. La diversidad de los
impedimentos u obstáculos jurídicos de que acaba de hablarse se
patentiza sobre todo en lo tocante a la dispensa de los mismos
Algunos eran tan absolutos, que en general no se admitía dispensa de
ellos; otros podían ser dispensados por medio de una resolución
especial del pueblo, debiendo advertirse que no se consideraba
bastante para ello con el simple acto de la elección; y otros
finalmente, si bien autorizaban al magistrado que dirigía la elección
para excluir de esta al candidato, no tenían, sin embargo, fuerza
suficiente para anular una elección válidamente hecha. La tradición no
nos da datos que nos permitan señalar detalladamente las diferencias
que hubieron de existir entre estas varias categorías; por tanto
tenemos que contentarnos con establecer sencillamente los varios
motivos de incapacidad.
1.º La carencia total o parcial del derecho de ciudadano impedía
que fueran elegibles los hombres no libres y los extranjeros, las
mujeres, los jóvenes hasta la edad en que adquirían la capacidad para
el servicio de las armas y el derecho de sufragio, o sea hasta los diez y
siete años cumplidos, los ciudadanos sin derecho activo de sufragio
(pág. 95), por cuanto el pasivo depende del activo, y aquellos
individuos a quienes se hubiese privado por sentencia penal de la
elegibilidad, lo que acontecía singularmente en los últimos tiempos de
la República.
2.º A la oposición de clases hay que atribuir el hecho de que, en
los antiguos tiempos, ni los plebeyos pudieran ocupar cargos de la
comunidad, ni los patricios tuvieran condiciones para desempeñar las
quasi-magistraturas plebeyas. En el libro precedente hemos tratado
(pág. 71) de la casi completa abolición de los motivos de incapacidad
nombrados en primer término. También era de esta clase la
incapacidad del rey de los sacrificios para desempeñar un cargo
público de la comunidad, por cuanto el rey patricio no sirve para este
puesto. Y asimismo pueden mencionarse, desde la época de los
emperadores Julio-Claudios, la incapacidad de los transalpinos y
acaso la de los no itálicos en general.
3.º La falta de capacidad para los honores llevaba consigo la
inelegibilidad. Esta incapacidad abarcaba a los que hubieran sido
esclavos, a los descendientes de estos en primer grado y a los nacidos
fuera de matrimonio legítimo (pág. 92); a las personas cuya posición
social parecía incompatible con el desempeño de cargos públicos
sobre todo por tener necesidad de ganarse la vida; a las personas
reprobadas a causa de una mancha moral. Pero estas condiciones
inseguras y vagas, tanto en su extensión como en la manera de se
comprobadas, dependían principalmente de las costumbres y
además, del arbitrio de los magistrados que hubieran de hacer los
nombramientos. Por ley, o por costumbre que podía hacerse vale
como ley, estaban excluidos de la elección aquellos ciudadanos que
no pudieran indicar un padre o un abuelo. También estaban realmente
excluidos los trabajadores asalariados, cifrándose y mostrándose en
ello, no solo el orgullo del régimen de la esclavitud, sino también la
vanidad y la gran soberbia de la aristocracia que gobernaba sin
retribución alguna; pero quizás esa exclusión tuviera lugar, más aún
que por vía de una disposición de ley, no haciendo en realidad caso de
las candidaturas de semejantes individuos. En la época republicana no
existían fundamentos legales para excluir a los individuos infamados
en los tiempos del principado es cuando se reconoció la infamia como
causa de exclusión de los puestos públicos, tal y como se había fijado
este concepto en el derecho civil para lo concerniente a la
representación en los asuntos procesales. La condena por hurto o po
otras análogas acciones deshonrosas, el haber sido marcado con mala
nota por el censor, la degradación militar, y otros actos semejantes a
estos, eran motivos que se tenían en cuenta para excluir de las
candidaturas a los individuos en quienes esos motivos concurrían
ahora bien, los magistrados que tenían derecho a hacer e
nombramiento eran los únicos que a su arbitrio podían decidir en cada
particular caso si las mencionadas causas de exclusión existían o no
existían.
4.º Probablemente en virtud de la ley villicia sobre los cargos
públicos, dada el año 574 (180 a. de J. C.), solo se permitía llegar a
ocupar esos puestos a los ciudadanos obligados al servicio de las
armas, esto es, a los menores de cuarenta y seis años y útiles
corporalmente, luego que hubieran prestado dicho servicio el número
de años determinado por la ley, o también cuando se hubieran ofrecido
a prestarlo. Posteriormente, quizá a partir de la época de Sila, se
prescindió de este requisito, si bien todavía se exigió por la costumbre
como condición para ingresar en la carrera administrativa, el habe
servido un año como soldado y un segundo como oficial. Desde los
tiempos de Augusto se necesitaba para entrar en la cuestura el habe
prestado servicio de oficial.
5.º No era permitido ocupar al mismo tiempo dos cargos públicos
permanentes; el ser una persona elegida para la pretura la
incapacitaba, por lo tanto, para presentarse a las elecciones edilicias
de aquel mismo año. Los cargos públicos ordinarios no permanentes y
todos los extraordinarios podían acumularse, ya entre sí, ya con los
cargos permanentes.
6.º Desde antiguo se desaprobó, por constituir una infracción de
principio de la anualidad, el que una persona ocupara un cargo público
anual durante dos años consecutivos. La reiteración después de
pasado cierto plazo, consentida en un principio, fue más tarde, desde
comienzos del siglo V, limitada para el consulado a un plazo de diez
años; luego fue totalmente prohibida: con respecto a la censura, a
fines del siglo V, y con relación al consulado, en los primeros años de
siglo VII; en tiempo de Sila se volvió a poner en vigor el intervalo de un
decenio para el consulado. — Es probable que con respecto a los
cargos inferiores no hubiera trabas jurídicas que se opusieran a la
reiteración; de hecho, sin embargo, no se hizo uso de ella, supuesto
que en tiempos posteriores, si los dichos cargos inferiores se
adquirían, era la mayor parte de las veces solo para poder ascender a
los cargos superiores. — Tocante al tribunado del pueblo, como los
que lo desempeñaban no podían aspirar a otros cargos públicos, no
solo estuvo permitida la reiteración, sino hasta la continuación. — Y
con respecto a los cargos ejercidos fuera de la ciudad que llevaban
anejo el imperium, fue frecuente en los últimos tiempos de la
República el permitir la reiteración sin previo intervalo, bajo la forma de
la prorrogación (pág. 168).
7.º Parece que a principios del siglo VI hubo de prohibirse e
desempeño de distintos cargos públicos patricios anuales sin
transcurrir un cierto período de tiempo entre uno y otro; la ley villicia
dispuso luego que este período fuese por lo menos de dos años.
8.º En los tiempos antiguos no se conoció un orden jerárquico que
hubiera de guardarse al ir ocupando los diferentes cargos, si bien lo
regular era, claro está, que antes de llegar a desempeñar los que
llevaban anejo el imperium, se ocuparan los cargos auxiliares y
subalternos. Todavía a fines del siglo VI no era raro que después de
consulado se ejerciera el tribunado militar; y aun cuando no era usua
que después de haber ejercido un alto cargo se desempeñase otro
subordinado, nada, sin embargo, impedía que así sucediera. Por e
contrario, lo probable es que después de publicada la ley villicia el año
574 (180 a. de J. C.), se exigiese en los cargos patricios ordinarios e
desempeño previo de la cuestura como condición para aspirar a la
pretura, y el de la pretura para aspirar al consulado. Augusto
comprendió en un solo grado, entre la cuestura y la pretura, las tres
edilidades y el tribunado del pueblo, si bien esto no era aplicable sino a
los plebeyos, y además instituyó con el nombre de vigintiviros un cierto
número de cargos de entrada, los cuales constituían un grado inferio
a la cuestura, y su desempeño previo era condición necesaria para e
de esta. Como los dos grados ínfimos, de los vigintiviros y de los
cuestores, estaban constituidos ambos por un número igual de veinte
puestos, el tercero, de los ediles y tribunos, por diez y seis, y el cuarto
de los pretores, al menos por doce, para que hubiera posibilidad de
elegir cuestores hubo que añadir una cierta cantidad de auxiliares, y
con respecto a los demás grados apenas fue preciso apelar de un
modo efectivo al derecho electoral. Parece que el fin de estas
disposiciones fue hacer que, sin que se prescindiera de la forma de
elección, en realidad se fuese ascendiendo grado por grado, dentro de
un sistema normal, hasta la pretura. También al consulado se hizo
extensivo esto, aunque en menor grado que a los cargos dichos, pues
después de la división del año introducida en la época del principado
(págs. 219-22), se nombraban cada año, primeramente cuatro
después, muchas veces seis, y no era raro que hasta más cónsules
— Con respecto a los cargos públicos ordinarios no permanentes, o
sea la dictadura y la censura, poco a poco se fue fijando, no por ley
sino por la práctica una regla, según la cual solo podían aspirar a ellos
los que ya hubieran sido cónsules. — Como ya queda dicho (pág
184), los cargos reservados al Senado por la organización que
Augusto estableció, quedaron regularmente sometidos en su
desempeño al requisito derivado de la referida gradación. Y a este
requisito no se faltó, por la agregación ficticia de cargos cuyo
desempeño previo era indispensable (adlectus inter praetorios), sino
en la época del principado, durante el cual se hizo gran uso de
semejante medio, con el propósito sobre todo de quebrantar las
limitaciones impuestas, por las mencionadas condiciones de
capacidad, al derecho del emperador para nombrar magistrados.
9.º Las condiciones concernientes al servicio militar (4.º), al orden
de ascender (8.º) y a los intervalos entre cargo y cargo (7.º), llevaban
consigo, en cuanto se refiere a los dos grados de la magistratura
suprema, pretura y consulado, ciertas limitaciones tocantes a la edad
El primero que probablemente exigió de una manera directa cierta
edad para los cargos públicos fue Sila, a consecuencia de la abolición
que él mismo hizo de las condiciones militares de capacidad
prescribiendo al efecto, como mínimum de edad para el ejercicio de la
cuestura, la de estar entrado en los treinta y siete años, y
sucesivamente, para la pretura, la de estar entrado en cuarenta, y para
el consulado, estarlo en cuarenta y tres. De hecho, sin embargo, solo
se respetaron los dos últimos límites de edad; en efecto, parece que
acaso para hacer un hueco en la serie obligatoria a los dos cargos de
la edilidad y del tribunado del pueblo, los cuales no formaban
legalmente parte de la serie, pero por costumbre se venían
desempeñando después de la cuestura, se permitió que aquellos que
hubieran sido declarados ya para ocupar alguno de estos dos cargos o
ambos, pudieran entrar a desempeñar la cuestura tan pronto como
empezara a correr para ellos el año treinta y uno de edad; esto es lo
que luego se hizo de hecho regla general. Augusto rebajó los límites
dichos, estableciendo probablemente como mínimo de edad: para la
cuestura, el haber entrado en los veinticinco años; para la edilidad y e
tribunado, que, como dejamos dicho, fueron incluidos por él en la serie
obligatoria, el haber entrado en los veintisiete; para la pretura, el habe
entrado en los treinta, y para el consulado, el haber entrado en los
treinta y tres.
A estas reglas se atendía, pues, para saber si un ciudadano podía
o no ser propuesto para ser nombrado magistrado por medio de
interrogación hecha a los Comicios. La resolución de las cuestiones
dudosas — en la mayor parte de los casos, los datos que hubiere que
apreciar serían notorios, o fácilmente se podían adquirir los
justificantes precisos — no correspondía al cuerpo electoral, sino que
se defería al conocimiento del magistrado que dirigía la elección, quien
empleaba al efecto un procedimiento administrativo. Por esto
evidentemente, es por lo que tenía que verificarse antes de la elección
el anuncio o presentación de los candidatos y la admisión de los
mismos (nomen accipere), debiendo advertirse que como a menudo se
había tenido que resolver inmediatamente antes la cuestión relativa a
magistrado a quien correspondía la ejecución de la elección, es claro
que debía ser admitida alguna clase de comunidad en e
procedimiento probatorio. Aquel candidato que hubiere omitido e
presentarse como tal candidato al pueblo y no se hubiera cerciorado
previamente de haber sido admitido, es claro que podía se
considerado como no capaz para ser elegido por el magistrado que
dirigía la elección; pero este no era menos libre de admitirlo cuando no
se le ofreciera duda alguna en cuanto a las condiciones de capacidad
del aspirante; de esta manera se hizo no pocas veces la elección de
los ausentes, aun sin que ellos lo supieran. Hacia fines de la
República, la presentación hasta entonces usual de los candidatos
empezó a ser prescrita por la ley, disponiéndose que hubiera de
ponerse en conocimiento del magistrado veinticuatro días, por lo
menos, antes de la elección; y todavía más tarde, quizá el año 692 (62
a. de J. C.), se mandó que esa notificación tuvieran que hacerla en
Roma personalmente los candidatos. — La exclusión del candidato la
verificaba el magistrado que dirigía la elección, considerando como no
emitidos los votos que se hubiesen depositado a favor de aquel.
En la época del principado, las condiciones de capacidad para e
desempeño de cargos públicos fueron radicalmente alteradas po
haberse establecido una pairía a la que exclusivamente se concedió la
opción a los mismos. Ya durante el gobierno del Senado, los cargos
públicos, no obstante la formalidad de la elección en los Comicios, se
habían hecho realmente hereditarios en las grandes familias; hasta
cierto punto, la misma disposición de las cosas hizo que los miembros
de dichas familias fueran los que ingresaran en la carrera política y
ascendieran por los varios grados que la constituían, y que se naciera
más bien que se fuera elegido cuestor, y en cierto modo también preto
y cónsul, a pesar de que todo ciudadano no infamado siguiera
gozando en principio de la elegibilidad legal para los puestos públicos
y de que en virtud de esto se estuvieran siempre añadiendo algunos
elementos nuevos al plantel hereditario. Pero Augusto abolió aque
principio republicano, y el derecho de sufragio pasivo, que por largo
tiempo les estuvo vedado, con relación a los cargos públicos
superiores, a los individuos no senadores, gracias al orden jerárquico
que había establecido la ley entre tales cargos, hubo de limitarse
también ahora, con relación a los cargos públicos inferiores, a los
descendientes agnaticios de los Senadores, con lo que se creó un
orden o clase senatorial que tenía el privilegio, pero a la vez también la
obligación legal de desempeñar aquellos cargos. En la pairía dicha
podían ingresar, además de los descendientes de senadores, aquellos
individuos a quienes el emperador concediese el derecho de
pertenecer al orden senatorial (latus clavus); sobre todo a los jóvenes
que por su nacimiento y sus riquezas eran idóneos para ingresar en la
dicha pairía, se les abrió de esta suerte, por modo de excepción, sí
pero con mucha frecuencia, la carrera política. — También para e
ingreso en la segunda clase de funcionarios, ahora nuevamente
creada, se exigió como condición el pertenecer a la caballería; pero la
concesión de esta dependía del beneplácito imperial, y po
consiguiente, el emperador puede decirse que no reconocía
limitaciones para elegir y nombrar magistrados.
 CAPÍTULO VI

colegialidad y colisión entre los magistrados

Bajo el nombre de colegialidad de los magistrados y de los

sacerdotes, se designaba en el Derecho romano un concepto
absolutamente distinto del que hoy se significa con la misma palabra, o
sea el hecho de que a varias personas se hubiese encomendado po
igual el desempeño de una función política única. Así como legatus es
el depositario o portador de la lex, el que recibe una misión política, as
también aquellos individuos que reciben conjuntamente un mandato
del Estado son conlegae. Son requisitos esenciales para que exista la
colegialidad, además de los indicados, esto es, que la comisión se
reciba del Estado y que los que la reciban sean formalmente iguales
el que la misma no sea ejecutada por medio de un acto común de los
comisionados, como acontece con relación a las tropas militares, sino
por acto de uno solo de ellos, sin cooperación de los demás. E
derecho privado no conoció el nombre, pero sí conoció un mandato
común de la especie de la colegialidad en aquella tutela, correlativa en
general con la magistratura, que tenía lugar cuando existían varios
tutores, todos ellos con iguales facultades que los otros. La institución
se nos presenta en toda su pureza en la más antigua forma de la
misma, o sea en el gran colegio sacerdotal: cada particular augu
verifica en nombre del Estado y para el Estado la inspección del vuelo
de las aves, y cada acto de estos puede ser ejecutado igualmente po
cada uno de los miembros del colegio. El concepto de que se trata
comenzó bien pronto a aplicarse, singularmente a lo religioso
atribuyéndose la colegialidad a aquellas colectividades que, como po
ejemplo, la de los Salios, no funcionaban sino en común; pero según e
estricto sentido que originariamente tuvo la palabra, solo eran colegios
tanto de magistrados como de sacerdotes, aquellas colectividades
cada uno de cuyos miembros tenía derecho a practicar por sí mismo
individualmente, todo acto de la colectividad, lo que no impedía
naturalmente el que los mismos deliberaran y obraran colectivamente
en determinadas circunstancias.
La colegialidad fue ajena a las primitivas organizaciones romanas
en las cuales dominaba el concepto de la unicidad de las entidades
colectivas. En el interregno es donde se nos presenta con mayo
relieve la unicidad del régimen originario, sobre todo, porque en estos
momentos el Senado patricio se consideraba casi como un rey
colectivo. Esa unicidad existió también en el régimen sacral de la
República, sobre todo en el pontificado supremo, cargo este distinto
así por su origen como por su contenido, de la composición múltiple
del collegium, cargo que continuó ocupando en el régimen republicano
el poder monárquico religioso, el rey sacral. También en el derecho
privado el poder propio del jefe de familia sobre las personas libres es
unitario, y en la tutela, que es una de las formas de ese poder, no se
admite una verdadera pluralidad de puestos, sino que lo único que
sucede es que a los que concurren a ella se les considera tene
iguales atribuciones. Aun cuando encontramos la colegialidad en las
instituciones patricias, en las corporaciones de los pontífices y de los
augures, en la primitiva jefatura corporativa de los caballeros, y aun
cuando se trata de una colegialidad antiquísima, no puede
considerarse como originaria; es una colegialidad hija del más antiguo
synakismo, o sea de la transformación de la única comunidad de diez
curias en la comunidad trina de treinta curias (pág. 25): un resto, o
más bien un recuerdo de esta transformación consiste precisamente
en haber continuado existiendo como comunidades separadas e
independientes las que compusieron la comunidad única, no en verdad
con derecho a regirse y gobernarse como lo creyera conveniente cada
una de ellas, pero sí con derecho a tener todas participación en e
desempeño de los más importantes puestos, así religiosos como
militares. En todo caso aquí tenemos la prueba de por qué los
maestros del Derecho romano no exigen absolutamente que la
unicidad de la representación, así en el campo del derecho político
como en el del privado, implique unicidad de persona representante
sino que, por el contrario, admiten la existencia de múltiples
representantes con iguales atribuciones para una sola representación
no obstante que esto contradice la idea rigurosamente primitiva de
poder y de que es quizá menos una simple consecuencia de los
principios del derecho que una concesión hecha a las exigencias de la
realidad.
La aplicación del régimen de la pluralidad de puestos a la
magistratura suprema, y luego a los cargos y funciones públicas, es lo
que generalmente se llama abolición de la Monarquía e introducción
de la organización republicana. Las dos leyendas relativas a Rómulo
tanto la de los gemelos como la de la doble monarquía romano-sabina
han sido inventadas para demostrar el principio jurídico sobre que
descansa la nueva organización, es decir, el principio de que la
multiplicidad de puestos es también compatible con la magistratura
suprema; pero una vez admitido este principio, no era posible segui
sosteniendo que el mismo no era aplicable teóricamente a los puestos
inferiores y auxiliares; lo más que podía permitirse es que por motivos
puramente prácticos dejara de realizarse. Las luchas que para la
introducción de la organización nueva pudieron tener lugar, tanto con
la espada como con las armas espirituales, terminaron; hasta donde
nuestras noticias alcanzan, el principio de la colegialidad constituye un
fundamento reconocidamente inatacable del derecho político
republicano, aquel principio que por lo menos durante quinientos años
influyó en la suerte del poderoso Estado, sin eficacia aparente, pero
sin embargo innegable, y cuya total violación con el restablecimiento
del régimen unitario es lo que se llama dictadura de César y principado
de Augusto, y cuya señal exterior es la caída de la República. De la
colegialidad en las organizaciones sacerdotales hemos tratado ya
(pág. 152); réstanos ahora exponer cuáles fueron las aplicaciones que
de ella se hicieron a la magistratura.
En la esfera de esta última no se introdujo el principio de la
colegialidad en aquellas instituciones que traían su origen de la
organización antigua y que en la práctica no admitían oposición n
injerencia, o sea en el interregnado y en la prefectura de la ciudad. Po
el contrario, dicho principio aplicose por lo regular a todos los cargos
públicos que nacieron con la República o dentro de ella, tanto a la
magistratura suprema ordinaria, cuya denominación usual derivaba
cabalmente de la colegialidad, como a todas las demás magistraturas
mayores y menores, ordinarias y extraordinarias; es más: aun en e
nombramiento de aquellos funcionarios establecidos para realiza
actos individuales, que solo podían ser ejecutados por un solo hombre
como el fallo en los procesos de alta traición y la dedicación, se
adoptaba la forma de la colegialidad. De esta rígida sujeción a las
fórmulas consagradas, solo pudieron escapar, entre todas las
magistraturas republicanas, la dictadura y el cargo de jefe de la
caballería, y aun estas estuvieron quizás sometidas a la colegialidad
desigual, cuyo concepto examinaremos luego. El principio de que se
trata se aplicó aun a los cargos subordinados y auxiliares, cuyos
depositarios no se consideraban como magistrados. En la
administración de justicia, donde por lo menos se consentía el dicho
principio, se conservó siempre el antiguo jurado único, individual, y aun
el tribunal de los recuperatores, que funcionaba, sin duda, haciendo
uso del sistema de la mayoría de votos, no estaba sometido tampoco a
la colegialidad. Por el contrario, el número de seis, que eran los jefes
destinados a mandar las legiones, y el establecimiento de un doble
centurionato, no eran otra cosa más que aplicaciones del dicho
principio.
Aun cuando es condición esencial de la colegialidad la pluralidad
de puestos, el número de los que habían de ser estos era cosa libre
no existiendo, por tanto, acerca del asunto, ninguna regla genera
valedera. La colegialidad de tres puestos de las organizaciones
patricias dependía de que la Roma patricia era trina. En la comunidad
patricio-plebeya, la colegialidad adoptó en un principio su forma más
sencilla, o sea la de dualidad; por lo que al consulado se refiere, esta
forma persistió por todo el tiempo de duración del cargo, y en cuanto a
los demás cargos públicos patricios ordinarios afecta, como también a
los cargos plebeyos, hay que decir que todos comenzaron por se
duales, si bien es verdad que, posteriormente, en la mayor parte de
ellos se aumentó el número de los puestos. Singularmente en lo que
se refiere al colegio de los tribunos del pueblo, el cual no podía invoca
en apoyo de su eterna duración ningún fundamento orgánico (pág
175), hubo de asegurarse la persistencia del cargo contra la
contingencia de quedar vacante, aumentando bastante, y desde bien
pronto, el número de los puestos. En los tiempos posteriores de la
República, a consecuencia de la creencia en la virtud benéfica de los
números impares, predominó en los cargos nuevamente instituidos
entonces, y en los extraordinarios, la cifra de tres y la de cinco
puestos.
 Como quiera que, tratándose de cargos públicos que tuvieran
varios puestos, cada una de las personas que los desempeñasen
podía por sí sola, sin asistencia de las demás, practicar todos los actos
necesarios para el desempeño del cargo, es claro que, desde el punto
de vista jurídico, el hecho de que faltase uno o más colegas no tenía
trascendencia. Si desde un principio no fuese cubierto más que uno de
los puestos, o por muerte, o renuncia, o cese de algún colega mientras
se hallara en funciones quedase alguna vacante, el único colega que
permaneciese en el cargo podía, sí, cubrirla si le parecía oportuno
(pág. 178), pero también podía quedarse él solo en plena posesión de
todo el poder correspondiente a la función de que se tratara.
En principio, la colegialidad exige la igualdad de derechos entre los
funcionarios que desempeñan un mismo cargo, por lo tanto igual título
e iguales atribuciones (par potestas); y en efecto, así se aplicaba a los
cónsules, ediles, cuestores, tribunos populares, y en general a la
mayoría de los funcionarios ordinarios y extraordinarios. Una
colegialidad con poderes desiguales o con desigual competencia era
en rigor, una contradicción en los términos. Después que el tribunal de
los ciudadanos y el de los extranjeros fueron encomendados a dos
pretores distintos, solo se pudo hablar de un mandato común para
ambos en tanto en cuanto los dos puestos llevaban consigo otras
atribuciones comunes de hecho a ambos, no en cuanto se refiere a la
jurisdicción.
Hase admitido también la colegialidad entre depositarios de
imperium con diferente poder (maior y minor potestas), por lo menos
entre el cónsul y el pretor, y acaso también entre el dictador y e
cónsul; pero los doctores del derecho político romano lo han hecho as
con el objeto principalmente de poder atribuir también al pretor y a
dictador, cuando menos de nombre, las condiciones generales de la
colegialidad, que real y verdaderamente no les cuadraban. La
diversidad de títulos que desde antiguo sirvió para diferenciar a
dictador del cónsul, y la variedad de competencia de los pretores, y de
estos con relación a los cónsules, establecida desde bien pronto, no
pueden tampoco caber dentro del círculo de la colegialidad. Después
mostraremos que el concepto de esta última no se mantuvo en toda su
pureza y rigor originarios.
Como la colegialidad tendía a la vez a conservar y a impedir e
pleno poder de los magistrados, claramente se comprende por solo
esto que la misma no pudiera conseguir su fin, y que el ideal que con
ella se perseguía en la época republicana solo aproximadamente
pudiera realizarse. Así lo demuestra la manera de tratar y despacha
los asuntos que con ella vino a introducirse. Este despacho podía
tener lugar de tres modos: por cooperación, por turno acompañado de
sorteo y del derecho de intercesión y, finalmente, por distribución de
los negocios según las varias esferas de competencia. Lo que acerca
del asunto conocemos se refiere principalmente a la magistratura
suprema; los preceptos, sin duda esencialmente análogos a estos, que
rigieron con respecto a las funciones inferiores son tan poco
conocidos, que no tenemos más remedio que prescindir de ellos.
La cooperación hubiera representado la expresión perfecta de la
colegialidad, en el caso de que hubiera sido posible. Varios
magistrados podían mandar la misma cosa, pero solo uno era quien
podía llevar a ejecución el mandato; la cooperación, pues, cesaba
desde el momento en que se hacía uso del derecho de coacción que
al magistrado compete. Así hubo de reconocerse en la práctica, como
lo demuestra la circunstancia de que la cooperación no se admitía en
el régimen de la guerra nunca, y en el régimen de la ciudad, en las
funciones más importantes, a saber: en las jurisdiccionales y en e
nombramiento de los magistrados. Para el edicto, para la proposición
de ley, para la convocación del Senado, para la leva militar, se
congregaban todos o varios colegas; pero es porque los límites de
obrar colectivo se habían extendido a estos actos de un modo
impropio e inconveniente. Ahora, dejando a un lado que por este
medio se buscaba el dar en espectáculo a las gentes semejante
palladium de la República, cosa, en general, muy propia del derecho
político romano, hemos de advertir que el resultado práctico que con
ello se consiguió fue el de hacer enteramente imposible la intercesión
de los colegas (que pronto estudiaremos), por cuanto, obrando estos
unidos, aquella no tenía razón de ser. Por otra parte, las cuestiones de
etiqueta, por ejemplo, las relativas al turno en la presidencia de
Senado, encontraron un terreno favorabilísimo para su desarrollo con
este procedimiento.
La expresión verdaderamente práctica de la colegialidad se
encuentra en la regla, según la que los asuntos divisibles eran
despachados por turno, esto es, por el colega a quien le tocara
funcionar en cada plazo de tiempo, y los no divisibles eran
despachados por aquel colega a quien le tocaran en suerte; debiendo
añadirse que los colegas podían también entenderse y obrar de
acuerdo (comparare), igualmente que hacer uso de la intercesión, de
que luego se hablará.
El turno lo encontramos en el más antiguo régimen militar y en la
más antigua jurisdicción. Cuando el mando de la guerra se hallaba
encomendado a dos jefes que funcionaban juntos y tenían las mismas
facultades, turnaban diariamente en el ejercicio del mismo. De esta
regla, a cuya acción entorpecedora y perjudicial debió Roma la derrota
de Canas, se haría seguramente poco uso en la práctica. Se permitía
la variación de este turno, acordándolo así los colegas, y entre los dos
cónsules aconteció probablemente con frecuencia que el uno estuviera
al frente de la caballería, el otro al frente de la infantería, siendo por lo
tanto este quien daba las órdenes supremas. Además, el instituto de la
dictadura era perfectísimamente adecuado para impedir la inoportuna
dualidad del mando en el orden militar, y en los antiguos tiempos se
hizo uso del mismo regularmente, con este objeto, siempre que la
necesidad lo imponía. Finalmente, la división de las tropas y del campo
de la guerra, división que ya estudiaremos, produjo probablemente
desde bien pronto el efecto de impedir que fuera fácil que los jefes
militares con iguales atribuciones ejercieran el mando juntos. — Mayo
importancia práctica tuvo el turno en el régimen de la ciudad. La
jurisdicción iba correspondiendo sucesivamente por plazos o períodos
de tiempo proporcionados al número de los funcionarios que
participaban en ella, y como los lictores iban también turnando con
aquella, este turno debe referirse al ejercicio de todas las funciones
públicas dentro de la ciudad. La jurisdicción civil fue organizada de otro
modo por la ley licinia del año 387 (367 a. de J. C.); en todo lo demás
continuó el turno, cuando menos como regla general. El convenio y e
sorteo de los colegas solo se aplicaron a las funciones públicas de la
ciudad para establecer el orden de sucesión con que correspondía
actuar a los magistrados. No hay que olvidar los distintos efectos de
turno sobre el ejercicio del imperium militar y del imperium en la
ciudad; en el primer caso hay que obedecer al magistrado que no
ejerza temporalmente el mando; en el segundo caso no hay que
atenerse más que a la función. — Tocante al ejercicio de aquellos
actos correspondientes a un cargo público, los cuales no consienten n
cooperación ni turno, v. gr., el nombramiento de sucesor, la suerte es
la única que decide, a no ser que los concurrentes se pongan de
acuerdo sobre el particular.
La tercera forma de despachar los asuntos, o sea el reparto de los
mismos por esferas de competencia, excluye realmente la
colegialidad, o la limita por lo menos al acuerdo mutuo indispensable
para determinar el círculo de asuntos propios de cada colega. E
acuerdo mutuo no era cosa que a estos se permitiese de una manera
incondicional; no por ley, pero sí por costumbre con fuerza legal, se
prohibía probablemente a los cónsules el ponerse de acuerdo para
regir uno la ciudad y el otro los negocios de la guerra. En virtud de lo
dicho más arriba (pág. 171) acerca del íntimo enlace que por la
Constitución existía entre ambas formas del imperium, el de la ciudad
y el de la guerra, si bien es verdad que los dos cónsules no ejercían
indistintamente el uno y el otro al mismo tiempo, también lo es que po
regla general ambos cónsules participaban a la vez, uno al lado de
otro, así en el imperium de la primera clase como en el de la segunda
Parece que con esta limitación se permitía que los colegas se pusieran
de acuerdo para repartirse los asuntos y despacharlos
contemporáneamente, cada uno los que le hubieran correspondido en
el reparto hecho, lo mismo que se permitía ese acuerdo para variar e
turno y no hacer uso del sorteo: una vez acordado el reparto de los
negocios, se hacía primero la distribución de estos en grupos, y luego
se podían sortear los grupos entre los colegas. Sobre todo en e
régimen de la guerra, y por tanto, con relación a las tropas y a los
distritos sometidos al mando (provinciae), hubo de ser frecuente e
ejercicio simultáneo de varios mandos militares supremos, si bien
parciales. En estas separaciones, relacionadas estrechísimamente con
las medidas militares y políticas que anualmente habían de tomarse
por acuerdo entre los magistrados y el Consejo de la comunidad, este
último ejerció un influjo decisivo desde al instante sobre la distribución
de los negocios, mientras que, por el contrario, una costumbre
inveterada y fija no le consentía mezclarse en la adjudicación de los
grupos o divisiones de asuntos a tal o cual persona, dejando en esto
libertad a los cónsules para convenirse sobre el particular o hacer uso
del sorteo.
La partición de los asuntos por mutuo acuerdo no era la expresión
más perfecta de la colegialidad, pero sin embargo esta era la que le
servía de base; por el contrario, cuando la ley determinaba la
competencia de cada magistrado, la colegialidad se hacía ilusoria
Esto es lo que ocurrió con la magistratura suprema, cuando la
legislación licinia creó un tercer puesto en ella, destinado en especial a
la administración de justicia, y esto continuó ocurriendo en adelante
cuando se fueron sucesivamente instituyendo otros puestos para e
mismo fin en la capital y en Ultramar, siendo substancialmente
indiferente para el caso que esta especial competencia se hubiera
otorgado a los funcionarios en el acto mismo de su elección hecha en
los Comicios, cual aconteció al instituir el tercer puesto referido, o que
la elección se hiciera para las jurisdicciones en general y luego cada
una de estas se adjudicara a aquel de los funcionarios previamente
elegido a quien le correspondiera por suerte, que es lo que tuvo luga
en muchos casos. El fundamento de la colegialidad de los magistrados
supremos, esto es, el pleno imperium que cada uno de ellos gozaba
se conservó todavía nominalmente en estas instituciones, dado caso
que a los dos primeros puestos de dicha magistratura no les fue
negada la jurisdicción misma, sino tan solo su ejercicio, y a
magistrado supremo añadido posteriormente a los otros dos tampoco
dejó de pertenecerle el mando militar; lo que hubo fue que el ejercicio
de este mando quedó neutralizado o localizado, ya porque a
magistrado de que se trata se le prohibía salir de la ciudad mientras
durase el tiempo del desempeño de sus funciones, ya también porque
del mando militar solo podía hacerse uso en los territorios
ultramarinos. Con estas disposiciones quedó, sin embargo, abolida de
hecho la colegialidad de la magistratura suprema, originándose, po
consiguiente, la llamada colegialidad desigual, antes (pág. 203
mencionada, y que con más exactitud debería llamarse nominal.
Para introducir la pluralidad de puestos en los cargos públicos, no
dejaría de tenerse en cuenta la consideración práctica de que la
dualidad servía para hacer improbable la paralización de los asuntos
paralización que no podía menos de acontecer en el caso de que e
magistrado estuviese impedido de funcionar, y que debía sentirse
grandemente, sobre todo cuando se careciera casi del todo de
representación. Pero el motivo capital de semejante introducción fue
sin duda alguna, la negativa consecuencia que la misma produjo, a
saber: la debilitación de la extrapotente Monarquía y la consiguiente
posibilidad de quebrantar el imperium, y en general, el poder de los
funcionarios públicos. De hecho, el régimen antiguo de la unicidad de
persona en la magistratura suprema envolvía tal peligro de que fueran
desconocidos los derechos de la comunidad y la seguridad persona
de los individuos, a causa del absoluto poder que correspondía a los
reyes, que se veía con evidencia la necesidad de una reforma de
principios encaminada en sentido contrario. La pluralidad de puestos
dejó intacta la plenitud del poder, pero hizo posible el quebrantarlo. La
materia del mandato mancomunado en el derecho privado no estaba
organizada de la misma manera para todos los casos; así, en la tutela
testamentaria bastaba con la declaración de un solo tutor, mientras
que en la agnaticia se requería la de todos los tutores. En la
colegialidad de los magistrados se siguió la línea media: bastaba con
que uno solo de ellos diera el mandato o la orden, pero esa orden
quedaba ineficaz con que uno solo de los colegas se opusiese a ella
De esta manera, sin debilitar cualitativamente el poder monárquico
pleno, se le colocó en disposición de negarse a sí mismo, en
disposición de que la injusticia que él mismo podía preparar fuese
evitada por la intervención del colega.
La colisión entre los mandatos de dos magistrados, o sea el acto
de contrarrestar y hacer inútil el mandato de uno de ellos por medio de
mandato contrario de otro, que es lo que los romanos llamaron
intercesión, podía tener lugar, bien entre dos funcionarios que se
encontraran entre sí en la posición de superior a inferior (maior y minor
potestas), bien entre los que se hallaran bajo un pie de igualdad
Ambas formas pertenecen a la época republicana.
La superioridad e inferioridad entre las magistraturas era
incompatible con la originaria unicidad del cargo público; era tan
imposible que un magistrado dejara sin efecto un mandato dado por un
auxiliar o subordinado suyo, como que el mismo magistrado retirase su
propio mandato, porque el derecho de mandar que el auxiliar tenía
derivaba de su mandante. La subordinación de un magistrado a otro
empezó a usarse con el instituto de la dictadura, puesto que e
imperium del dictador hacía ineficaz el del cónsul; más tarde, cuando
fue instituida la pretura frente al consulado, volvió a hacerse uso de
una gradación análoga. La lugartenencia que en el régimen de la
guerra se permitió pudo conducir al mismo resultado; pues, en efecto
cuando por excepción continuaba existiendo el lugarteniente al lado de
los magistrados efectivos de iguales atribuciones, se le consideró
como inferior a estos: el procónsul cedía ante el cónsul. Por otra vía se
llegó también a la subordinación, y fue cambiando los auxiliares de la
magistratura suprema en magistrados: el cuestor obedecía tanto a
cónsul como al tribuno militar; pero después que empezó a recibir su
mandato interviniendo la cooperación de los Comicios, esta obediencia
se cambió en subordinación del magistrado inferior al superior.
La relación entre poderes iguales es precisamente la colegialidad
que hemos estudiado. Por eso es por lo que al cónsul le corresponde
la intercesión contra el cónsul, y al cuestor contra el cuestor; entre
poderes de competencia desigual no puede existir colegialidad. La
diferencia de rango no es subordinación; el censor es antes que e
cuestor, pero no le preside ni puede anular sus órdenes.
El círculo de los funcionarios con facultad de ejercer la intercesión
hubo de ampliarse por efecto del derecho especial reconocido desde
muy antiguo por la Constitución a la plebe, esto es, por efecto de
derecho de intercesión de sus tribunos. Aun cuando al tribuno no se le
consideró en algún tiempo, y en rigor estricto nunca, como magistrado
de la comunidad, y por consecuencia careció del derecho que los
magistrados tenían para dar mandatos, sin embargo, se le concedió la
facultad de oponer su veto a todo mandato que estos dieran; y esta
intercesión tribunicia fue ejercida con tal extensión y tanta energía, que
realmente se subrogó a la efectiva de los magistrados, condenándola
al silencio.
La intercesión se derivaba de la idea, según la cual ambos
funcionarios nombrados para desempeñar un cargo eran competentes
para el acto en cuestión; y puesto que el no ejercicio de la intercesión
se interpretaba como aprobación efectiva, es claro que la intercesión
de los colegas puede referirse al concepto general de la cooperación
Queda, sin embargo, por averiguar si era o no considerado como
competente el magistrado que en aquel momento no funcionara
ahora, esta concepción no se compadece en general con la intercesión
ejercida por el poder más fuerte. También el dictador, el cual no ejercía
jurisdicción civil, y el cónsul después que se le privó legalmente de
ejercerla, tenían derecho de intercesión frente al pretor, lo cual era
debido, tanto a que el derecho de los mismos era superior y más fuerte
que el del pretor, como a que el imperium no podía menos de se
siempre virtualmente completo. Finalmente, el tribuno popular no tenía
competencia, mientras que sí le correspondía la intercesión.