by Lionel Bascom — January 26th, 2007 — 1 comment
The Guardian Unlimited says the world is rapidly becoming over crowded with monuments to one holocaust after another. The poignancy of these monuments is slipping away. Our Freedom Tower is just one of the many erected around the world? Are there just too many memories?
“From the Holocaust to 9/11, from Berlin to New York, the world is now studded with memorials to human suffering. But does this really mean we care more than we used to? And does our obsession with terrible events make it any less likely that we will repeat them? Jonathan Jones joins the strange new tourist trail
Until very recently Berlin, a city where you can still find buildings riddled with shrapnel from 1945 and museums that are bombed-out husks, felt no need to build a memorial to 20th-century tragedies. Instead it made do with the neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neue Wache, a 19th-century Doric temple appropriated since 1931 as a war memorial. Yet now this city, where monuments seemed superfluous, has two rival Holocaust memorials just a short walk apart
At the eastern end of the long brooding park, the Tiergarten, close to the sites of Hitler’s bunker and Chancellery, stands Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, unveiled in 2005. What was until recently ruins and waste ground is now a field of grey concrete blocks, designed to evoke a city of death run by featureless bureaucrats. Tomorrow, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this should be a place of unbearable poignancy.”
Does this predict the future of the WTC Memorials?
9:42 PM in Uncategorized, Ground Zero, Related Stories, Freedom Tower News
“Memory and perception meet, and they and their attendant feelings seem to almost write down words in the soul, and when the inscribing feeling writes truly, then true opinion and true propositions which are expressions of opinion come into our souls”(Plato).
Memorials have been built to honor the lives of those victims, taken before they reached fulfillment as perceived by the beloved left behind, maintaining a perception of truth. As long as humankind continues to unleash ignorance and hatred on this planet, the building of memorials should continue.
The WTC Memorial could be symbolic of a renaissance that will end this negativity and replace it with positive resolve through memories and perceptions that coalesque, exposing the human soul by enlightening the world with the beauty of dignified wisdom.
Jeanne · January 27th, 2007 at 12:09 am