Horst Hoheisel, Die Tore der Deutschen, 1997, lighting display
on the Brandenburg Gate | Horst Hoheisel
A 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. The site
would be covered with granite plates, as are typical on the pavements of Berlin. 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?
It goes without saying that I was eliminated from the competition in the first round
of judging. However, the idea prevailed more and more as a radical alternative to all
the suggested new memorial structures and attracted international attention. James E.
Young wrote: “Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with yet another
constructed edifice, Hoheisel would mark destruction with destruction. 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). The idea of grinding
the Brandenburg Gate to dust as the Holocaust Memorial has spread like a rumour to reach
present-day city tours. 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.
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