Thought-provoking memorials

While I was in Berlin, I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is just south of the Brandenburg Gate. It's the size of several city blocks--4.7 acres--and it's simply covered by enormous concrete slabs. The slabs are all the same width and length, but their height varies from about 6 inches to over 7 feet tall. There are no words. There is no plaque, explaining the meaning of the stone slabs. There isn't even a sign in on corner, explaining what the memorial is for. It's just there.


I was really impressed by this memorial. The size, color, and material of the concrete slabs gives the memorial a weight, a gravitas, if you will, that makes the place quite solemn and even sacred. The design allows visitors to walk in between the slabs, letting them feel as if they are a part of the memorial. And often, this participation can be quite unsettling--the slabs are tall enough that you can lose sight of the edges of the memorial, or lose contact with those you came to the memorial with. It's disconcerting.

Perhaps even more importantly, it allows visitors to figure out for themselves what they think the memorial means. The lack of direct labels on anything allow people to openly interpret what they think something stands for, yet the scale and solemnity of the memorial steer their thoughts in certain directions. It's a memorial that will stay with you, keeping you wondering, for weeks to come.

This is a similar to how I felt when I visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. It's so different from all the other memorials, and so subtle about being a memorial, that it really made me think. And I felt greater reverence there than I did at any of the other nearby memorials.

In his slide essay about the Spire of Dublin, Witold Rybczynski argues much the same thing, saying that since the Spire is open to interpretation, it is more meaningful to those who see it. He also points to the memorial for the World Trade Center disasters as a memorial that doesn't live up to its potential--it is too literal of a representation to really affect people and challenge them to think. I think this is really unfortunate--the disaster of September 11th affected so many people in so many different ways, that creating a memorial with a fixed, definite meaning denies the reality of that day for many. I would like to see more open meanings in national memorials--the chance for the viewer to become an active participant in the event, where the memorial provides a set of questions and the viewer is forced to figure out for him or herself what to think about these questions. Simple tributes are a fitting and nice way to memorialize something, but memorials such as these discussed above are the ones that truly stay with you, that even have the power to change you.