GERMANY: Berlin's Holocaust Memorial was officially opened yesterday, marking the end of a 17-year campaign by journalist Lea Rosh, sarcastically dubbed Germany's "Holocaust Cassandra".
The €25 million memorial, 2,700 gleaming concrete pillars sprouting from the tainted soil between the Brandenburg Gate and the site of Hitler's chancellery, is intended as a place of reflection on the Nazis' systematic murder of Europe's Jews.
But it is also a testament to the absolute determination and, some would say, ego-driven bloody mindedness of Lea Rosh. Just mentioning her name is probably the quickest way to start an argument at a Berlin dinner table.
She was born into a Protestant Berlin family in 1936, changed her name from Edith to Lea aged 18 and rose to prominence as a television journalist.
Her second career began in 1988 with her proposal for a central German monument to the murdered Jews of Europe.
"[ I] realised that the German memorials commemorate the murder of German Jews, who made up only 2½ per cent of the total six million," she said.
"The Germans rounded up, deported and murdered the other 97½ per cent from 17 other countries.
"I began to campaign for a memorial [ and] at first people didn't take it seriously. Opposition strengthened later, when people realised that it was really going to happen."
Then the chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was an early backer of the project until he vetoed the first design chosen, a vast concrete plaque engraved with millions of names.
The present design, by US architect Peter Eisenman, dates back to 1999, but his original 4,000-pillar design was cut back to 2,700.
Rosh campaigned for, and got, an underground information centre, despite Eisenman's opposition.
Many Jewish leaders, historians and artists opposed the project, arguing that the idea of a central, monumental memorial is out of step with the times.
"Generations of artists since the 1970s have developed anti-memorials, which force the viewer not to delegate the work of remembering to the memorial but to do the work themselves," said Salomon Korn, vice-president of the Committee for Jews in Germany.
Rosh has never accepted criticism of the memorial's monumental size, arguing that it reflects the monumental size of the crime.
"I didn't set out with any image of how it should look, only that it had to be big and impossible to overlook," said Ms Rosh. "A small monument for six million murdered Jews would have been worse than nothing."
So intertwined is Ms Rosh with the memorial that it was often difficult to separate criticism of the memorial itself from the bitter attacks on Ms Rosh.
Her admirers say she is a valuable thorn in Germany's side, continuing to ask uncomfortable questions about the Holocaust and German shame as public memory fades and survivors die.
Her critics accuse her of hijacking the Holocaust to further her own career.
"Just who has given Lea Rosh the right to represent the rights of Holocaust victims in public?" asked Michael Brenner, professor of Jewish history at Munich University.
His argument reflects a common resentment of Ms Rosh, that she has built her career by co-opting the memory of the Holocaust dead to sit in moral judgment on her fellow-Germans.
Ms Rosh says she cannot explain her lifelong obsession with the Holocaust, nor the motivation for her 17-year-campaign for the memorial. Now that it is a reality, she says she is unsure what to do with herself.
"The Holocaust just won't let me go," she said in a recent interview, prompting her interviewer to suggest: "Perhaps it is Ms Rosh who won't let the Holocaust go."
