German Counter Monuments

Question 1

Counter Monuments

Answer 1

Undermine ideas of healing and closure
Places memory in eye of beholder
No brief moment of pity or shame to cover continuing racial prejudice
Controversy ensures continued debate
Continued debate allows for pubic rehearsal of issues surrounding the events
Public rehearsal ensures memory
Debate itself becomes enshrined
No emotional release
Commemorate absence with absence
Loss remembered with loss
Preoccupied with what is missing
What was lost cannot be replaced
Only standing forms are people standing on site- memorial within people
Concern that making memorials is a substitute for our own actions against injustice
Counter monuments do not substitute for action but act as call to action
Monuments do not remember. Counter monuments provide space for us to remember

Question 2

Harburg Momument Against Fascism

Answer 2

Sign name on monument as commitment to be vigilant against Fascism
Monument lowered over time until only top visible
Empty spot shows only people can rise against injustice not buildings or monuments
Momument’s role: to engage people, consider willingness to fight fascism
Some signed but some graffiti and neo- Nazi response
Mixed response represents German feeling, turmoil
Mixed response proof of need for public awareness, and commitment
Designed to remind, confront, engage and require people to choose
Places burden and responsibility of history in minds of visitor
Not embodiment/resting place of anti-fascist values or beliefs

Question 3

Aschrott Fountain

Answer 3

Hollow reproduction of original fountain
Buried upside down
Ironic commentary on forgetting
Fiercely challenging intellectual statement
Sealing off disturbing memory under cloak of artistic privilege
May be set upright when German people change attitude to Nazi period
Commemorating absence with absence
Look for monument within yourself

Question 4

Bibliothek Memorial

Answer 4

Commemorates burning of 20 000 books
Clear portent of genocide to come
Books selected on ethnic/ political lines
Buried room with empty bookshelves
‘Where books are burned in the end people will burn’ Heinrich Heine 1820
Illuminated at night, little seen in the day
Absence of content causes people to stop and consider
Fully autonomous, unconstrained by script or story to be effective
Stimulus to reflection: can ideas be destroyed
Like a tomb
Camera Obscura- registering people who engage with it

Question 5

The German National Memorial to The Murdered Jews of Europe

Answer 5

Controversial monument
No explicit reference to the Shoah
20 000 square meters. 2711 concrete pillars of same base dimensions, different heights
Underground information centre: Story of Shoah dramatised and explained in extremely selective display
Experience of individuals and small groups

Question 6

Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation de Paris

Answer 6

Almost completely abstract form
Commemorate 160 000 Jews deported from France to Germany
Like a tomb/ crypt
No names or statistics
Poetic statements inscribed in walls
Dark constricted spaces like chapels or prison cells
Heavy concrete slabs with names of camps
No French camps mentioned despite Vichy regime running many camps for deportation
Power of suggestion and metaphor
Narrow steps, past massive concrete slabs to underground space ending in long corridor like funerary space- powerful meaning
Ambiguity: lateral spaces like tombs, chapels or prisons
Funerary shrine to Jewish or Roman Catholic tradition
Communicates without being specific: visitor makes own readings, based on what they know and feel about deportations