Immensity and emptiness. Two Berlin museums-monuments of the Holocaust

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries a number of projects were carried out in Berlin to commemorate the victims of the Nazis and the traumatic events of the Second World War. Among them, two projects in memory of the Holocaust stand out: the Jewish (Jüdisches) Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind and the Holocaust Mahnmal designed by Peter Eisenman. In both projects special architectural measures were used to create completely unique ways to commemorate the Extermination, understood as a crucial event. The Jewish Museum, opened in 1999, presents the history of the Jews in Germany, and special spaces known as voids Express the emptiness created by the Holocaust. Emptiness constitutes an indelible dimension of the reality remaining after this event. Voids penetrate the architecture of the building and disrupt the continuity of the historical narrative presented in the exhibition. An additional void located in the Holocaust Tower confronts the visitors with a substitute for the victim experience. Immensity as opposed to emptiness became a quality used in the Holocaust Mahnmal opened in 2005, commemorating the Jews murdered by the Nazis. Immensity was created by amassing concrete cubicoid blocks irregularly arranged on a huge plot of land. This expresses the magnitude of the banality and non-sense that defi ned the Holocaust. Its history is recalled in the Place of Information, located in the basement of the memorial. Using architectural means to express emptiness and immensity is an attempt at developing the different ways that memory’s works. Giorgio Agamben distinguishes two types: that which is not forgotten and that which is unforgettable. The not forgotten has no content, is not a memory, and yet we cannot relegate it to the past (we can’t forget in order to be able to remember). The unforgettable is contained in memories. In both the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Mahnmal, these two types of memory are distinguished and opposed. The purpose of this confrontation is to try to capture and express the experience of the Holocaust, an experience that should never be forgotten