Walking down a narrow passage over undulating ground, you find yourself alone, immersed in waves of cement slabs. You see nothing but cold concrete blocks and it seems the distant sky above is the only way out. Suddenly, you catch a glimpse of someone appearing from behind one of the blocks and disappearing behind another. It's hard to escape the feeling of isolation.
The silence arouses a sense of despair, a distant and much-diminished echo of what was endured by persecuted Jews during the 12-year reign of the Nazis.
For most tourists visiting Berlin this year, the completion of the Holocaust Memorial, Germany's first official memorial dedicated to all murdered Jews of Europe, offers an opportunity to review a terrible warning in modern history: the story of the Nazis.
Although today's Federal Republic of Germany has nothing in common with the Third Reich, a new wave of controversial discussions about Germany's "unresolved past" took place in 1988, when German journalist Lea Rosh first proposed the memorial. Seventeen years later, the monument to the mur-dered Jews of Europe finally a couple of months ago in Berlin. The fenceless open area covering the space of about three football fields was once heavily used by high-ranking Nazis.
Reflection
For some Taiwanese people, the Holocaust Memorial offers a chance to reflect on Taiwan's own unresolved past, specifically the poignant history surrounding the 228 Incident and the White Terror -- the brutal military crackdown begun in 1947 that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of innocent Taiwanese, from the intellectual elite to lay people, at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek's (
The shadow of these events on the minds of the Taiwanese people could be similar to the holocaust for the Jewish people. Since the end of World War II it has taken Germany six decades to open its first official Jewish holocaust memorial. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the voice of young generations became stronger, demanding that German people to face up to the crimes of the Nazis.
In Taiwan, however, historical responsibility remains unaccepted and the crime has yet to be fully acknowledged.
"It's a pity perpetrators now still defend themselves and attribute what they did to past postures on political affairs," said Taiwan's representative to Germany, Shieh Jhy-wey (
Germany's self-understanding
The Nazis' systematic murder of 6 million Jews -- including 1.4 million children -- as well as other atrocities still affects German society. On May 12, the field of 2,711 stone slabs near the Brandenburg Gate, Germany's national symbol, was first opened to the public.
Its location in the heart of Berlin -- near the US Embassy, various cultural institutions, businesses, schools, federal structures, apartments, and the city's park, the Tiergarten -- expresses the memorial's public character. Its integration into the historic urban space of the parliament and government district highlights the fact that the memorial is directed toward building a civil society.
Since the public inauguration, the field has been visited by a range of people, including ruminating seniors, curious visitors, noisy teenagers jumping from stele to stele, and kids playing hide-and-seek.
The memorial was planned by New York architect Peter Eisenman, whose radical design does not use any direct symbolism. Even the number of stelae is of no significant relation to the number of victims.
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