The competition for the "Commemorative Monument For The Homosexual Victims Under The Nazis” was in its endlessly protracted, undemocratic procedures, narrow-mindedness and incompetence, a desaster defying any description. But being the son of an architect who was time and again sorely tried by challenges more simple if you please, but certainly not less exposed to post WWII bureaucratic demands, I had expected the worst - in fact, the curators in charge, amongst them Josef Strau, had to mobilize all the powers of persuasion to convince me of the validity of my participation.
Besides, I had never been interested in monuments -- with the exception of fountains, monuments to the distribution of the indispensable element of existence. Especially the hypocritical austerity of the memorials to the slain and massacred left me cold. Didn’t they rather add insult to injury, their sleek surfaces reinforce the indifference and inhumanity that had led to those piles of anonymous rotting bodies in the first place ? It reminded me of the stripped-down catholic churches of the post WWII era, their penitential aesthetics serving as a cover-up for the notorious deal struck up with the Nazis : Do with the Jews whatever you like, but leave our flock alone.
After I agreed, the first step to be taken was to attend a congress which lasted for a week, twelve hours a day. It brought together experts of monuments and public gardens, representatives of the biggest gay groups, museologists, politicians, historians, etc and included visits of concentration camps, the already completed memorial for the Jews, the future sites of the gay and gypsie monuments and, of course, endless lectures.
These lectures stipulated, again and again, that a figurative monument was out of the question.
But I had taken stock of the site and its surroundings: A park surrounded by the new embassies after reunification, cubes of a predetermined height of 21 m, predominantly coated with bulletproof glass ; an amassment of bleak stone sarcophagusses in an artificially created depression ( The Peter Eisenmann designed Commemorative Monument Of The Jewish Victims Under The Nazis ) ; the not yet built Gypsy memorial, a black round pond with a swimming red rose in the middle to be constantly replaced, very nice but also dug into the ground, a formal device seemingly deployed to express the sinister weight of a murderous history ; and finally, in the distance, the only round shape rising above the trees, allowed to soar higher than the legally fixed “ Traufhöhe “, the Norman Forster cuppola of the new Reichstag. But rising cuppolas, onion domes and turrets had been once ubiquitous in Berlin, the most extravagant of them crowning the immense pleasure palaces of nearby Potsdamer Platz. These bulbous shapes were mostly covered in copper which after oxidation turnes into that inimitable aquatic green hovering between stone and sky, susceptible to ever-changing shadings through rain and shine, just like the sea. Maybe not anyone from the provinces chose these cathedrals of sin as their first destination after getting out of the trainstation, but amongst those who did the number of gay adventurers must have always been substantial. Descriptions in surviving letters tell you about airtube connections between tables for hooking up and giant soup-terrines whose lids were hydraulically lifted to reveal guilded live cupids flashing arrows amid volcanic steam.
The remembrance of that defunct world with all its delights of the flesh and its voluptuous forms had laid, in my mind, the foundation on which this monument was to be built.
You may say : To hell with soup terrines and teapots, palaces and cuppolas, when we have to face the ashen annihilation of life ! But I doubt that to impose dogmatic forms of what is proper to commemorate, and how to mourn, can be helpful in bestowing the dignity upon the victims, the dignity of which they once had been so cruelly divested.
But next to those flickers from the past, right in front of our eyes, the present situation of the chosen site in the park spread all around us, breathing and basking in the sun. As we were standing on the meadow, sprinkled with dandelions and pansies, the trees gently swaying in the breeze, while listening to yet another expert, I recalled the merciless, stony claustrophobia of Peter Eisenmann’s Jewish Memorial just across the street. In that moment I almost jumped to the conclusion that not only should the surface covered by the monument be reduced to a minimum, the flower – embroidered grass not be touched more than by fingertips, but that the entire structure should joyfully rise in a steel filigree like the unobstructing, desire – inducing electric pylons which always had so fascinated my father as examples for “ the beauty of pure engineering “
Thus the premisses were set : Defiant, soaring, playful, baroque – and social, since in the belly of the teapot whose spout in the shape of a limp hand pointed towards the Reichstag, was to be a speak–easy.
But nothing was to come of it. My proposition was vilified in an uproar of indignation to the point that the infuriated jury had to be told to relax and have a coffeebreak before returning in a more “democratic“ mood to negotiating table.
The competıtıon had turned into a trial about what was legitimate in a culture of mourning or not. The USA – imported Gay Lib, affiliated with the civil right movement, had turned from a struggle for equality into a coercive and punitive administring by powerful Gay lobbies for all – out assimiliation. Gay marriage, gay soldiers, gay police, I spare you the rest. The collateral damage to the faculties of aesthetics, morals, expression, even common sense are often overlooked, and put into question the culture of mourning which Germany claims amongst her highest achievements.
