Walking Through the Maze
It rained this morning. I could tell because the slabs collected condensation. That isn’t the noticeable part though. I wouldn’t notice at all if it weren’t for the drawings along every side, of A+M forever, circled in a heart, of the handprints, of the slang, of the flowers.
An autumn, Saturday afternoon, I walk towards the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I can tell I am getting close, because numbers of people move to and from. Then there it is, smack down amongst government buildings and a park full of trees.
The architectural design is one I’d read about but couldn’t grasp until I was in the midst of it. It’s not a maze– the lines are too straight, too symmetrical. You might feel as though you’re in a tunnel, but every tunnel literally has the light at the end. You can see the other side, and if you turn, you see the end of that line too. But walking through, the ground fools you, moving up and down, side to side, you have to reorient yourself. The power is not looking from the outskirts, but walking through.
It isn’t until I emerge on the opposite side that I realize I am suddenly significantly warmer. The way the concrete slabs tower over you, they must shelter in the cold, blocking out the sunlight. So I emerge, feeling an actual wave of warmth. That’s the logistical reason at least. The one my cognitive processes reminds me of. I feel a sense of wrong though. It’s more than that. Maybe it’s not, but maybe it’s part of the design, made to chill you, which makes you think, is this what it was like?
I’d read all about it. Holocaust memorialization is my topic in history for the semester. I’d read about the good, the bad, the ugly. But I didn’t realize how bad it would be. People are here, just like in the photos, walking across the tops, taking selfies, laughing, running like it is just a game. Every person I see has their phone pulled out. It’s a Saturday. There’s a lot of people to see.
What is historical remembrance? What does it mean to remember, to bring past into present?
The architect’s intentions might have been to make this something for today, but that might be a flaw. Because almost no face I see is solemn. No one is thinking about the representation. So being here, I wonder if it actually solved a problem.
But on one end of the memorial, trees are planted in between the blocks. It springs of new life, even in the brisk autumn chill. A ladybug crawls right in front of me, as I sit under a tree and write. So I ask again, if it’s doing something right. If the memorial here is to breathe new life, born from the ashes. Because while no one should ever forget, no one should be stuck, drowning in the gray.
So I think I get what he meant now, Peter Eisenman. He said,
“The holocaust cannot be remembered in the first nostalgic mode (a nostalgia located in the past, touched with a sentimentality that remembers things not as they were but as we want to remember them), as its horror forever ruptured the link between nostalgia and memory. It can only be a living condition in which the past remains active in the present.”

