Holocaust Mahnmal

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

It consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, one for each page of the Talmud arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38m (7.8′) long, 0.95m (3′ 1.5″) wide and vary in height from 0.2 m to 4.8m (8″ to 15’9″). Apparently, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.

Building began on April 1, 2003 and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public on May 12 of the same year. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood.


Comments are closed.