Berlin Opens Holocaust Memorial - Essay Example

One of the controversies that dog the memorial is the criticism that it exclusively commemorates only the extermination of Jews, disregarding the countless other victims of Nazi oppression, including homosexuals and gypsies. A later monument to Nazi homosexual victims stands opposite the Jewish memorial. The visitors’ information center constructed under the stele is a compromise against the criticism that the entire implications of the Holocaust and its history are not appropriately represented by the public sculpture aboveground.

The information center ensures that the memorial combines the aims of memory and pedagogy. The accusation of unjust exclusivity also dogs the United States’ Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. in the context of the absence of national memorials to the victims of slavery or the genocide of the Indians. While the unmatched horror of the Holocaust cannot be denied, I believe that slavery and the massacre of the Indians are ethnic events that require commemoration in the nation of their occurrence.

In my opinion, memorials to such atrocities serve a vital need in society. They are not just contemporary symbols of regret for the horrors of the past but serve as documentation of history, and living gate-keepers to the conscience of the nation.