How Not To Memorialize A Tragedy

How do you build a memorial to a tragedy? How can you properly commemorate human deaths while also creating something enticing enough to draw spectators? New York is struggling with this problem at Ground Zero, of course, and Christopher Knight has spotted a textbook example of what not to do: Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial. “Your mind knows that the place is supposed to confuse and disorient. It creates a theatrical sense of slowly enveloping claustrophobia and entrapment, meant to parallel the rising tide of Nazism 70 years ago. But you never feel it in your body. Walking among the tombstone-like shafts, there is no sense of threat. Menace is absent. Absurdity begins to loom.”