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Guides in tour buses passing the Brandenburg Gate explain that a “crazy artist” once wanted to demolish it and spread its remains on the site where the Field of Stelae currently stands as the Holocaust Memorial. The idea of grinding the Brandenburg Gate to dust as the Holocaust Memorial has spread like a rumour to reach present-day city tours. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people” (2). Young wrote: “Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with yet another constructed edifice, Hoheisel would mark destruction with destruction. However, the idea prevailed more and more like a radical alternative to all the suggested new memorial structures and attracted international attention. It goes without saying that I was eliminated from the competition in the first round of judging. Would the German people sacrifice their national symbol to be a Holocaust memorial? Would they bear the void of these two places: instead of a national monument to the victims, simply an empty space instead of an immense field of stelae, an empty accessible site with the pulverised remains of the Brandenburg Gate, the national symbol of the nation of the perpetrators? The site would be covered with granite plates, as are typical on the pavements of Berlin. The light of the present could no longer be separated from the shadow of the past.Ī few years before in 1994/95, I submitted the following concept for the competition to design the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: destroying the Brandenburg Gate, grinding it to dust and scattering the remains onto the proposed memorial site. In this lighting display, “Die Tore der Deutschen”, both gateways fuse into one single image for a night of remembrance and commemoration. If the Germans celebrate their Brandenburg Gate as a national symbol, they should never forget the other gateways they have also built – the gateways to the concentration camps. Along with the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial does not mark a clean break with history. However, the German people have lived in the shadow of a rupture in civilisation since Auschwitz. After reunification, the reopened Brandenburg Gate became a national symbol for the German people representing unfractured German identity and historical continuity.
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On 27 January 1997, the German Holocaust Remembrance Day that marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, I projected ARBEIT MACHT FREI onto the Brandenburg Gate. Picture: Horst Hoheisel, Die Tore der Deutschen, 1997, lighting display on the Brandenburg Gate.Īleida Assmann, who will be awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade together with her husband Jan Assmann this year (14 October 2018), has chosen one of my works (1) as the title image for her book “Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity”.