Europe, indeed the whole world, is littered with concentration-camp memorials, information centres, memorial plaques, and other signs that have been set up as a reminder of the atrocities committed by the National Socialists and their numerous willing helpers. In the United States alone, there are around 100 Holocaust memorials. In Germany, there are over 500 of all kinds of memorial facilities commemorating the Nazi victims (without the uncounted "Stolpersteine" by Gunter Demnig installed in memory of individual Nazi victims). Perhaps without these facilities, the deeds of that time would have long since been forgotten. Nevertheless, the memories of what happened are fading everywhere. Almost all of those once affected, victims and perpetrators, have now passed away, and many of us today would rather not be bothered by it.
How should we deal with this? Remembrance can only be present and have an effect in the future if those dealing with the subject succeed in touching us emotionally in such a way that what we hear, read and see causes us to begin to deal intensively with what happened and and ask questions: How could so many of our ancestors be so merciless, so inhuman? How could these monstrosities happen? How was this possible, especially in Germany, against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, German Humanism, German Classicism, German Romanticism and the highly developed German culture in general? And as the present unfortunately shows, much of this has since been repeated – even in places where one would no longer have expected it.
The author has visited over 60 memorial sites himself in the last 40 years and has been personally involved in many of them as an architect, designer and artist. The book presents his views on the design of Nazi memorials and information centres with numerous examples of his own, illustrated with photographs and drawings. For the author, the creative confrontation with the Nazi past is a means of naming and visualising the suffering and cruelty of which people are capable, using all the artistic means at his disposal.
