After years of controversy, a monument to homosexual victims of the Holocaust is finally opening in Berlin. Germany's federal commissioner for culture, Bernd Neumann, is to formally open the monument Tuesday together with Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit.
The monument was designed by the Berlin-based Norwegian-Danish artist duo Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen.The monument consists of a single stele or pillar, 3.6 meters high and 1.90 meters wide, located in Berlin's central Tiergarten park.
A video screen set into the monument shows a one-and-a-half minute film loop of two men kissing, directed by the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, best known for his 1998 drama "The Celebration." Visitors can watch the film, which was shot on the same location as the monument, through a small window in the pillar.
The new monument is located opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which consists of 2,711 concrete stelae, and refers to the larger monument in terms of its visual language.
This is the video playing inside the monument.
4 comments:
It's about time.
Frank
in Chile
I find this stupid and actually offensive. I like the idea of a memorial but to have the video playing? We are already viewed by the public as only being sexually charged so why don't the other monuments have un-pc views of Jews like a man with a large nose counting piles of money? And the memorial is very ugly (as are the other 2711). I get that it's supposed to give weight to the monstrosity but why does it have to look like a coffin or one of the train cars all the prisoners were transported in? In essence, the idea for these memorials is an admirable one but I feel that they ALL were ill conceived.
What an eye-sore. I'm all for a monument, especially since gays were the group that waitest the longest for recognition and continued to suffer from nazi-born homophobia even after the war. That said though, this thing is terrible. Is this the best they could do? And so small compared to the other monument! What a disgrace, especially when you consider how much more cruel the treatment of gays was compared to any other group.
This is truly one of the ugliest "monuments" raised anywhere to any group. It's design begs to be defaced with grafitti. How the German's have gone 63 years since the end of the war in which they killed as a government policy millions and millions of Jews, gays, communists, Gypsies, Poles, intellectuals,etc., etc. and are only now throwing up a bunch of concrete boxes as a "monument" is a hideous joke. The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. is an example of what should be placed in Berlin,right next to the Brandenburg Gate.
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