During my 2001 visit, the RIAS fellows walked on the vacant lot that is now the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Nine years ago, organizers told us of the plans to give the Holocaust memorial a central place in the heart of Berlin, only a block from the famed Brandenburg Gate and across the street from the US embassy.
Visiting the completed monument in 2010 was somewhat disappointing. Architect Peter Eisenmann placed 2,711 stelae, or concrete blocks on an uneven surface in a grid pattern. The idea was to challenge visitors to find their way out of the maze and experience the lost feeling of the Jewish people. However, the monument was filled with kids, teens and adults playing hide and seek among the blocks. I always think of the Holocaust in terms of the tragic loss of individual human beings, multiplied by millions. The faceless blocks did little to recall the memories of these individual victims, instead lumping them together as a group of anonymous coffins and making them easier to dismiss. I was not motivated to visit the exhibit center underneath the memorial, which appears to have more on individual victims and families. For me, the randomness and lack of symbolism in the memorial was exactly the OPPOSITE of the Nazi's final solution, which was meticulously planned down to the extermination of the very last Jew. Overall, a monumental disappointment.
For a night of culture, we headed to the Komische Oper, or Comic Opera House, which appeared to be a plain mid-century building on the outside but was splendidly baroque inside. The performance of the "Tales of Hoffman,"staged in a 1960s Rat Pack motif, did not disappoint. I knew of E.T.A. Hoffman because he wrote the stories of two famous ballets, the Nutcracker and Coppelia. In the opera, Hoffman falls in love with a woman who is really a mechanical doll and the singer portraying the doll was brilliant in both the singing and the physical comedy of the role. The first two acts of the performance ran a full two hours before intermission and the English-option subtitles in the backs of the seats made it easy to understand what was going on.
For something a bit less highbrow, we also attended a show at the Chameleon Theater called "Versus." The talented performers flexed and contorted themselves into every possible position while swinging above the audience on hoops and ropes. One German disparaged this event as "Cirque du Soleil for poor people," but I found the dancers thoroughly entertaining, if not terribly thought-provoking. Berlin has a tradition of cabaret and it was nice to be part of it.
