Uncementing Narratives

Abstract

When the design competition for Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE) was published in 1994, Sarajevo was under a brutal siege that lasted from April 1992 until February 1996. In December 1995, the war was officially over when the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in Paris. Visiting in 1997 to pay a pre-Christmas visit to German troops in Sarajevo protecting a fragile newborn peace, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl–one of the key figures behind both the Dayton Peace Agreement and the process of creating the MMJE in Berlin–met Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three members of the collective presidency and instructed them to work with the world on cementing that peace. In a way, this is what Chancellor Kohl aimed to do with remembering the Holocaust in Germany with the MMJE. The lengthy and contested process of creating the MMJE started in the late1980s and developed parallel to the discussion about how to memorialize the existence of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s. Upon its inauguration in 2005, the MMJE became one of the most famous case studies for addressing multiple crises of the contemporary world and the rising interest among both scholars and the public in re-examining memorial architecture in terms of purpose and agency in the transmission of memory. The contested process of cementing the remembrance through memorial architecture, however, only demonstrated how very complicated official materializations of remembrance can be regardless of whether a society is dealing with the traumas and difficult heritage of historical or living memories, which is the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Importantly, the process of creating the MMJE also demonstrated that the designer is pivotal in the process of creating permanent memorial architecture that translates collective sentiment into a built space.