Thoughts on the Wonder-Maze

The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was built in 2005. It was created as a reminder of the Holocaust. Our tour guide from the NewEurope Berlin walking tour told us about how people suggested that instead of building this memorial, the government should instead use the money to provide a free bus service to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (which is 35km north of Berlin). Maybe that would be a more practical use for the funding, but as our tour guide also said, if you are boarding a bus to visit a concentration camp, you have already made the choice to remember the Holocaust. This memorial serves as a constant, daily reminder to the people of Germany that it is their responsibility to never let something like that happen again. It is located a block south of the Brandenburg Gate and across the street from the Tiergarten (which holds other memorials to other prosecuted groups), both of which are major tourist attractions. It is also across the street from Berlin's financial district, and down the street from the Reichstag, which is Germany's parliament building. It is difficult to miss, with its 2700+ concrete blocks, all of which are the same size except in height (so I guess technically they aren't all the ame size...), almost five acres of straight lines and sloping fields. The architecht who designed it never stated his purpose for the form he chose when he designed the memorial. Its meaning is left to the observers.

Some say that the concrete blocks represent train cars, loaded with Jewish prisoners; some say that the heights of the blocks are a bar graph for anti-Semitism through the ages. Some say that it represents the cold, linear nature of the Nazi regime. When we made this stop on our walking tour, we were told to walk through the memorial and find our own meaning.

For me, and probably for many others, the memorial has more than just one meaning. In the simplest sense, it is just what the name says it is: a memorial. A reminder. The tragic beauty of this design gives the place an air of solemnity; it forces you to take a minute to be silent and to think. Pardon the irony of using a Stalin quote to describe a Holocaust memorial, but here it is: "The loss of one life is a tragedy. The loss of thousands of lives is just a statistic." And that is sad, but true: how many of us can really fathom just how much death there was in the Holocaust? In World War II in general? Can any of us really experience that much death and not become de-sensitized or immune to it? I could barely comprehend the fact that there were almost three thousand concrete blocks at this memorial site. Three thousand seems like so much... And that number doesn't even scratch the surface of the number of people who lost their lives in the Holocaust.

Another meaning that this memorial, and this particular design, has for me is that it serves as a chilling reminder of how easy it is to lose someone. When Steve ad I were running around last night, when it was still a wonder-maze and nothing more, we were constantly turning corners and sneaking away from each other so we could scare each other. And there were tons of other people doing the same thing. Running, hiding, sneaking around, and laughing at how easy it was to lose track of each other. Steve can usually find me right away when I'm trying to hide (I have this tendency to giggle uncontrollably when I think I'm being sneaky) but here I could make a quick getaway, and with rows and rows and rows of these huge concrete blocks, it took him some effort to track me down. This meaning is broader than just losing someone in the maze. It encompasses the idea that in that time of Nazi power, and even just life in general, you could lose someone you loved in a very real sense, not just in a maze. And it would only take a heartbeat.

Finally, I find that the strongest meaning is one I realized not from the memorial itself necessarily, but from the people in it. The memorial is said to get around 10,000 visitors PER DAY. And from what I saw, many of those people do exactly what Steve and I did when we first discovered it: they run around, hiding and laughing and running and sneaking up on each other and giggling and having a wonderful time doing it. (There was more than one occasion when Steve or I would sneak up on a random person coming around the corner, or other random people would sneak up on us thinking we were someone else.) This memorial, whether it means to or not, takes a past tragedy and uses it to bring present-day joy. It takes the power of devastation and heartache and channels it into something wonderful. Is there really anything more beautiful, or healing, than a smile on someone's face, especially if it is someone you love?

As I walked through the memorial/wonder-maze, I thought about what other people might get out of this memorial and I wondered how many people came to the same conclusions I did about this place.



On a lighter note, click here to see a video of Steve trying to chase me down as I run in circles around him in the wonder-maze, giggling my pants off. :)