ARTINFO.com

Font Size Font Increase Font Decrease

Vandals Damage Berlin Memorial to Gay Holocaust Victims

By ARTINFO

Published: August 19, 2008
BERLIN—A memorial to homosexuals persecuted during the Holocaust, situated in Berlin's Tiergarten across the street from Peter Eisenman's much-discussed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, has been vandalized less than three months after it was inaugurated, reports the Deutsche Presse Agentur.

Designed by Berlin-based Danish-Norwegian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the memorial consists of a single block of concrete — similar to the 2,711 stelae in the Eisenman memorial — that houses a video screen showing a film of a homosexual couple kissing. The screen was smashed over the weekend and a fence pushed over.

The Nazis are thought to have persecuted more than 50,000 people during the war on the basis of their homosexuality. The Eisenman memorial, inaugurated in May 2005, was originally intended to honor these victims as well, but its focus was eventually narrowed to include only Jewish victims. The Elmgreen and Dragset memorial was inaugurated two years later, after years of debate, much of it about the extent to which it should memorialize lesbian Holocaust victims.
advertisements