The Memorial Places of Remembrance in Berlin

Abstract

While the Holocaust Memorial by P. Eisenman (2005) is visited by millions of tourists, Places of Remembrance by Stih Schnock is hardly known. The location of this work is at the Bayerisches Viertel, an area where many middle-class and wealthy Jews lived until 1933. Eighty plaques, camouflaged among the traffic and urban signs, expose the "normality of horror" of the Holocaust. On one side of each plaque is an innocuous pictogram, on the reverse are texts of Nazi decrees formulated to dehumanize the Jewish population. In contrast to more traditional memorials, this one by Stih Schnock is not fenced off in a precious space, but, rather, is merged with the public space, the same sphere in which the Nazi terror began to develop.