The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the centre of Berlin is the German Holocaust Memorial honouring and remembering the up to six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Located between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, the Memorial consists of the Field of Stelae designed by Peter Eisenman and the subterranean Information Centre.
The final design, approved on 25 June 1999 (»Eisenman II«), envisages around 2,700 concrete slabs (stelae), arranged in a grid pattern. They are 0.95 cm deep and 2.38 m wide and vary only in height. The stelae stand on gently and unevenly sloping ground covering 19,000 square metres. The public is able to enter and walk through the field from all four sides. They experience the wave-like form differently from each different position.
The extraordinary design by Peter Eisenman, New York architect of international renown, has undergone several revisions and represents a radical confrontation with the traditional concept of a memorial.
»The enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate ... Our memorial attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia ... We can only know the past today through a manifestation in the present.« (Peter Eisenman, 1998)
(stiftung-denkmal.de)