The Future of Auschwitz

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/article/la-et-cm-auschwitz-memorial-idea-office/20141128-story.html#page=1

Auschwitz Memorial Plaque
en.wikipedia.org

Hello Everyone:

Back in January of this year, yours truly posted a piece on the debate over the preservation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp-"Holocaust Memorial Day" (January 27, 2014).  Today, we are going to pick up this conversation with a recent Los Angeles Times article by Mike Boehm titled, "What to do at Auschwitz? Hide site behind logs, Idea Office proposes."  The story looks at a proposal by Los Angeles-based architectural firm Idea Office to hide the Death Camp as a way to "...evoke the nothingness the death camp produced by removing Birkenau from that beautiful landscape."  It is an unsolicited proposal, years in the making, and not without backlash.  The proposed memorial is also not without precedent, taking its cues from Maya Lin's Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and more recently "Reflecting Absence," at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum which preserves the footprints of the collapsed towers.  The proposed memorial by Idea Office asks to reconsider how we memorialize catastrophic events in our history.

Conceptual memorial
Russell Thomsen, co-founding partner
latimes.com

In the summer of 2013, Idea Office founding partner Russell Thomsen (co-founding partner Eric Kahn passed away this year) travelled to Poland to tour Birkenau.  What Mr. Thomsen saw, startled him.  For a site known for the most unspeakable cruelty and destruction, "It was incredibly beautiful, which is not something you expect," said the architect.  When most people think of Auschwitz, the immediate image that comes to mind is Auschwitz I with its infamous gate, inscribed Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free), and where about 300,000 mostly Jewish victims were killed.  Birkenau is a larger more barren place punctuated by four crematories where the ashes of one million people rose high into the sky.  The crematories were reduced to rubble by the Nazis, in advance of the Soviet Army, eager to destroy evidence of their crimes.  "'Birkenau' means 'birch forest,' and it's very beautiful," said Mr. Thomsen.  He adds, "You see wild deer running through the camp.  I wanted to feel something, and it was very difficult."

Proposal for the future of Auschwitz
Idea Office
archinect.com

Very difficult to feel something, indeed.  You are numbed by the site.  However, the visit confirmed for Mr. Thomsen that he could make a relevant argument for a shocking memorial that he and his late partner spent years thinking about and preparing plans for without anyone commissioning the architecture studio.  The concept is deceptively simple, evoke the feeling of nothingness by erasing the the physical remnants from the landscape.  Mr. Thomsen is the first to admit that the memorial will never be built.  Idea Office's proposal conflicts with the official preservation plans undertaken by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, whose supporting foundation is close to its goal of raising $150 million endowment fund.  The earnings will provide money building restoration document and photograph conservation, and object conservation.  From an architect's perspective, "...it's worth thinking about  how to create emotionally charged structures, even ones that will never be more than drawings or models," say Mr. Thomsen.

"Thinking About The Future Of Auschwitz
sciarc.edu

Idea Office's proposed memorial will be on exhibit through December 5 at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Mr. Thomsen teaches.  Upon entering the SCI Arc Library Gallery, the visitor is confronted by an 8-foot high wall covered with strips of white paper.  The confetti-like cladding is the front façade of a fortress that conceals what lied within.  The white fort's outline mimics Birkenau's perimter.  Hypothetically, if the memorial were built, the afore mentioned perimeter would become a 30-foot high wall of logs made of the trees cut from the nations which the Nazis deported people to the death camps.  Fascinating.  The forty acre interior would be allowed to go fallow as time passes. Mike Boehm speculates, "In time-maybe 200 years? the log wall itself would decay and tumble.  Birkenau-or what time and nature had made of Birkenau-would be visible once again. And a new generation would face the challenge of what, if anything, to do to perpetuate the memory of Birkenau."

The inspiration for the design comes from the Torah, part of a long sermon in the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 13 in which Moses outlines the principles the Israelites are live under once they enter the promised land.  Specifically the chapter details the consequences of any Israelite town that rejects G-d in favor of pagan deities.  Verses 16-17 state,

... You shall surely strike down the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroy it with all that is is in it and its livestock, with the edge of the sword.  And you shall collect all its spoil into the midst of its open square and burn with fire the city and all its spoil, completely, for the Lord, your God; and it shall be a heap of destruction forever, never to be rebuilt.  (http://www.chabad.org)

The site of this town would become a Tel Olam, Hebrew for 'eternal mound,' never rebuilt.

The perimeter for Tel Olam
Idea Office
grahamfoundation.org

The architects decided to do without the hellfire and brimstone element of the verses but kept the basic concept of how to deal with a site where evil was done.  "The first spark, Thomsen said, came in the 1980s when the two friends visited Dachau concentration camp in Germany."  Mr. Thomsen recalled, "It was bucolic, pristine.  It had been carefully restored, and all the grounds were immaculate and clean...The place felt staged and sanitized."  The late Mr. Kahn visited Birkenau in the nineties, rekindling their discussions about designing a memorial.  The flooding of the Vistula River, threatening both Auschwitz sites in the early 2000s, put the camps back in the news.  In the past few years, the partners worked steadily, studying literature about memorials.  The Tel Olam concept evolved out of a 1993 lecture by Jonathan Webber, and the architects discovered that there was an ongoing debate over whether the camp should be restored to the way it was found when the camp was liberated or if it should be left for nature to take its course.  Tel Olam offered a "third way" a memorial built from logs that would be eventually reclaimed by nature.  The visitors could walk the perimeter in contemplation.  The wall would be a symbolic visual presence, ideally a reminder of the "invisible, lost presence-the camp within, and its million dead."  The visitors would walk the perimeter on path already worn by previous visitors

Site plan for Auschwitz Memorial
Idea Office
grahamfoundation.org

While Idea Office's proposal has kinship with recent memorials such as the Viet Nam Memorial and "Reflecting Absence" at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the International Auschwitz Council takes a differing view.  The council, which manages the death camp sites, "respectfully abhors such a void."  According to Mark Rothman, former executive director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and head of the American fundraising campaign for the camp preservations says, "The central tenet is to preserve and not destroy so the stories of those who suffered and died can live on."  Mr. Rothman continues, "Preserving a site as authentically as possible allows for those voices, those whispers of history, to continue to be heard. You don't hear anything from nothing."  Yours truly cannot help but going back to Russell Thomsen's impression of Dachau, sanitized and staged.  As if those overseeing the Dachau site were trying to minimize the horrors that took place.

From the "Thinking About The Future Of Auschwitz
SCI Arc Library Gallery
archrecord,construction.com

Some might accuse Idea Office of being chutzpahdik (yiddish for some with chutzpah), because, who ask them anyway?  Mr. Rothman, who has not attended the exhibition, is familiar with the architects's concept, declaring "it's a worthwhile thought experiment."  Says Mr. Rothman, "They are engaging in a conversation about preservation, a conversation about one of the most important sites in the world...In terms of [furthering] a conversation, more power to them."  Indeed.  Preservation and conservation can sometimes feel like a monologue.  Idea Office is attempting to challenge the sanitized and staged approach of preservation by introducing a radically different approach.  Let the buildings be reclaimed by nature, establish a perimeter walled off by logs that visitors could walk in quiet contemplation.  Eventually the logs and well worn path would be reclaimed by nature.  From a preservation perspective, the Idea Office concept is a fascinating one, worthy of further discussion.

Auschwitz Memorial Glass Plaque
ukstudentlife.com

For Mr. Thomsen, the official plan to restore Auschwitz-Birkenau to the liberation state is 'noble" but faces great odds in the future.  Says Mr. Thomsen, "We're thinking in a much longer frame of time than our own lifetime."  To emphasize this point, the plan calls for delaying turning Birkenau into a Tel Olam for at least thirty years in order to avoid offending Holocaust survivors.  Further, "The next step," says Mr. Thomsen, "will be to perpetuate the conversion by publishing 'Thinking the Future of Auschwitz' as a book including essays by outside experts."  Mr. Thomsen concludes, "Built or not built, architecture has the power to transform how we think about things."  No truer statement.

Idea Office's Auschwitz Memorial Proposal challenges some of the accepted ideas of restoration.  Restoration is about bring a place back to its period of significance.  In the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one has to ask Is it appropriate to restore a place of unspeakable evil to its period of significance?  Should we even make the attempt?  Idea Office's Memorial tries to evoke emotion without the literalness of death camps's physicality.  Whether or not it gets built, Idea Office's proposed memorial is worth considering.