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Two design contests were held for the purpose of finding a suitable plan for the memorial and hundreds of entries were submitted by architects from all over the world. Eleven designs were picked for the final round of selection. The top two designs were both rejected by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as being too grandiose. One winning design, which was originally considered, called for a huge black wall of concrete with the names of all the known Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. Another winning design, which was also rejected by Kohl, called for a Bus Stop, or a terminal from which red buses would depart for the numerous memorial sites that have been built at the former concentration camps, including the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland. German students must visit these camps as part of their required Holocaust studies. |
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The glass dome of the Reichstag, where the German Bundestag (Parliament) meets, is shown in the center of the photo below, taken from the construction site of the Jewish Memorial, which is located 400 meters south of the Reichstag. To the right of the Reichstag, one can see the Brandenburg gate which was being renovated in 2002. A new American Embassy was under construction on the empty space in the foreground.    In the photo above, Peter Eisenman is shown at the construction site, talking with Lea Rosh, a non-Jewish journalist, who first proposed the plan for the Memorial in 1988. In the background is the dome of the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg gate. By putting a 5.5-acre Memorial for the murdered Jews in such an important and prominent spot, the current generation of German people have confronted their country's past and shown their remorse for what their leaders did three generations ago. The photo below shows a path through the stones of the Jewish memorial with an apartment house in the backgound.  PreviousHome |