the memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 square metres (4.7 acres) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.

When visiting the Jewish memorial within the ‘Unter den Linden’ the atmosphere changes and seeing the vast distance full of the oblong rectangles really creates a solemn mood. The ground slowly lowering before your feet as you walk you suddenly become overwhelmed with the structures rising above you and almost get lost in the maze-like structure. My interruptions of the oblongs are the representation of the vast amount of Jewish victims in the war, with the different lengths and widths of the rectangles it shows the number of families, religions, individuals and communities affected and with the bricks being a grey colour it symbolizes the repression and sadness. The museum is underground and shows the real photographs and records of what happened, the victims and family portraiture and what happened to them, it is a very disturbing place, which we are told the Germans built out of respect so what happened wasn’t hidden and it allows us to remember this could happen again. Unfortunately getting lost on the way to Alexanderplatz caused us to miss the museum being open, but now we knew where it was (five minutes away from the hostel, yes we need to improve our map reading skills) we would return again tomorrow.