Activists build a mini-Holocaust memorial outside German far-right politician’s house

audacityinblack:

queeranarchism:

[Image of the mini Holocaust memorial and the house]

A group of activists on Wednesday unveiled a replica of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial secretly erected outside the home of a far-right AfD politician who has urged Germany to ‘stop atoning for Nazi guilt’.

With 24 large concrete slabs set up in a garden next to Bjorn Hoecke’s house, the art collective “Centre for Political Beauty” said it wanted to send a daily reminder of the World War II horrors that led to deaths of six million Jews.

“We are doing our neighbourly duty,” the group’s leader Philipp Ruch told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. "We hope he enjoys the view every day when he looks out the window.“

The slabs are a smaller-sized replica of the famed Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which consists of a solemn field of 2,700 grey blocks meant to evoke a cemetery.

Leading Alternative for Germany (AfD) member Hoecke provoked outrage in January when he labelled the tribute to the victims a “monument of shame in the heart of the capital” and urged Germans to focus less on their WWII guilt.

Ruch revealed that the protest group had secretly begun renting the property next door to Hoecke’s house in the bucolic central village of Bornhagen 10 months ago, in response to the controversial speech.

“He will now have to deal with the fact that he has neighbours who don’t consider the Holocaust Memorial a ‘monument of shame’, but who try to remember what had happened, to prevent it from happening again,” Ruch told the daily.

[Image of the large Holocaust memorial in the centre of Berlin. ]

…Can anyone explain why the slabs in the original are at different heights?

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin has several layers of meaning. Here are some of the reasons that I have heard given:

• While they form a uniform whole, every stone is unique in shape, size and angle to symbolize the indivual human life of every victim. 
• The whole thing is build to resemble an ancient Jewish cemetary where the headstones differ in size and some are not quite upright anymore. 
• The stones are highest in the centre and smallest at the edges, there they seem to disappear into the sidewalk, creating the illusion of an endless monument continuing underground, to symbolise a crime bigger than the mind can comprehend. 
• Because the stones start small and get higher and higher while the ground slopes down, walking into the monument means slowly decending from a crowded city intointo a quiet, dark place in a transition so subtle that you hardly notice it.