Urban Memorials

Abstract

The Urban Memorials chapter is subdivided into two parts: Remembering the Divided City and Holocaust Memorials in Berlin. Memorials confront us with the choice of how we are going to treat them and raise the question of how they should be classified. The Remembering the Divided City section helps us to discover works in remembrance of the Berlin Wall, before and after its fall. The historical background of Bernhard Heiliger’s Flame begins with Ernst Reuter, who was a famous figure in the City of Berlin, the mayor of Berlin from 1948. In 1953, shortly after his death, the traffic roundabout and square at the end of Otto Suhr Allee was renamed as Ernst Reuter Platz (the location had been completely destroyed during the war and was reconstructed by Ernst Hermkes and Hans Scharoun at the beginning of the 50s). Wolfgang Rüppel’s work is another historically related public artwork in Berlin, which was completed in 2000 in Leipziger Straße in front of the Federal Ministry of Finance where the House of Ministries in the former DDR used to be. Rüppel’s work 17 June 1953 refers to the workers’ uprising that began on June 16, 1953, the day before thousands of protesters marched toward the House of Ministries protesting against the DDR government. Karla Sachse’s project Field of rabbits at the site of the old border checkpoint between the Wedding and Mitte districts aimed to remind people of the former no-man’s land inhabitants. Only rabbits had the freedom of movement, and so for people in East Berlin, they were the symbol of hope. This chapter also includes an interview with Karla Sachse. Frank Thiel’s work at Checkpoint Charlie, the best known border crossing in the divided Berlin, that served as the main entrance and departure point to East Berlin for non-Germans, diplomats, and journalists who wanted to enter East Berlin on a day visa, is an example of how an art in public space project can raise the attractiveness of a place. Thiel’s light boxes are a metaphor for the years of separation, with the portrait of a young American soldier on one side of the box and a young Russian on the other side. Frank Thiel’s interview is found here. The location at Bernauer Straße became a commemorative site, and in the place of the former border, an installation was raised in the form of a seven-meter-tall steel wall which spread to a length of 60 m. Next to the steel wall is the Chapel of Reconciliation by Martin Rauch, Rudolf Reitermann, and Peter Sassenroth, also part of the Berlin Wall Commemoration Center ensemble. The building has special meaning as it was built on the site of the Church of Reconciliation, which was detonated in 1985 by border troops. The second part of the Urban Memorials chapter is Holocaust Memorials in Berlin in which several selected projects are introduced. The Deserted Room by Karl Biedermann is a room composition with no walls. The room includes a table and two chairs, all made of bronze. One of the chairs appears to have been knocked over as the people that were sitting at the table left the room in a hurry. Another featured work is the Empty Library at Bebelplatz by Israeli artist Micha Ullman. A subterranean room lined with empty white shelves commemorates the historical events that happened there during the Third Reich period when the Nazis burned books. The Missing House work in a former Jewish Quarter in Berlin’s Mitte district by French artist Christian Boltanski underlines the notion of the void. Boltanski’s work was developed as site research with his students on a 1990 field study trip in which he found out that Große Hamburger Straße 15 and 16 had been burned down in a bombing raid in February 1945, and that most of the residents who had lived there between 1930 and 1945 were Jews who had been deported or non-Jewish Germans who had hidden them. Famous Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan explained in his interview how he came up with the idea of a round water basin for the Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial, “a dark pond, with black water, like a deep hole.” Karavan was commissioned in 1999 by the German Minister of Culture and worked for almost 14 years on this project (its inauguration was in 2012). Two memorials at the same location in front of Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic Hall are introduced in this unit. One is Richard Serra’s Berlin Junction, and the other is Opposite by Ursula Wilms, Nikolaus Koliusis, and Heinz Hallmann. Serra’s Berlin Junction was not originally created as a memorial, but became one due to where it was placed after the exhibition in Martin-Gropius-Bau. As Serra’s abstract sculptural form did not have any direct visual indication of the historical background of its location, it provoked controversy. The Opposite (Gegenüber) memorial for victims of the Nazi euthanasia program Aktion T4 is a sculpture, but it is at the same time an information center. The book also contains an interview with Nikolaus Koliusis, one of the memorial’s authors.