Tucked in a copse of trees opposite Berlin’s Reichstag parliament building, the circular pool of still, mirror-like water is the heart of the memorial to one of Germany’s ugliest crimes.
A dozen years after it was opened, however, the future is uncertain for Berlin’s memorial to up to 500,000 Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism.
On Friday evening, dozens of people gathered to protest against plans for a new train tunnel under the memorial that, speakers said, would “attack the integrity and dignity of this memorial”.
During construction, the pool will be fenced off for at least five years and the memorial’s mature trees, a visual and acoustic shield for the memorial, will be felled. Representatives of Germany’s Sinti and Roma community are deeply ambivalent about the planned tunnel. Many fear the reflective silence of the memorial, designed by the late Israeli artist Dani Karavan, will be lost forever.
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“I’m not very optimistic,” said Romeo Franz, a well-known Sinti-Jazz musician and secretary general of Germany’s federal organisation of Sinti und Roma. He lost six family members in the Porajmos, the Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma people, and visitors to the memorial hear a recording of his song, Mare Manuschenge (Our People).
The idea of train sounds and vibrations from beneath the memorial, said Franz, was “macabre” given how many Sinti and Roma were deported by rail to their deaths.
With other campaigners, Franz has initiated a protest letter calling the tunnel plan “a scandalous failure of the culture of remembrance in Germany”.
“For the Sinti and Roma in Europe – and worldwide – the memorial in Berlin is a symbolic grave,” says the letter. “Nobody would ever consider tampering with the [nearby] memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe” and the Sinti and Roma memorial “clearly merits the same degree of respect”.
Among the signatories of the letter are film-makers Wim Wenders, Irish writers Sebastian Barry and Colum McCann, Catherine Punch of Holocaust Awareness Ireland, and South African-born and Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz.
Germany’s federal rail authority said the route of the planned tunnel was particularly complicated, given its planners must avoid the adjacent Reichstag building and three other underground tunnels.
State rail company Deutsche Bahn described the tunnel as “an important building block for a future-proof Berlin suburban train system” while Berlin’s state government said it was “doing everything we can to ensure that the monument is protected as much as possible”.
At a time of growing violence against Sinti and Roma in Germany and across Europe, protesters at the memorial on Friday carried signs reading “save the memorial” and “f**k your selective memory culture”.
Speakers at the gathering demanded that alternative tunnel routes, discounted on cost grounds, be reconsidered because the site-specific memorial cannot be moved.
“It’s an outrage that anyone even came up with this idea, that they clearly forgot to remember the memorial was even there,” said Helena, a 73-year-old Berliner.
The Berlin gathering came on European Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma, when the last 4,300 Sinti and Roma in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp were murdered by the SS on August 2nd, 1944.
“This is a symbolic grave for all those who lost their lives, and it is a shame if it is up to this minority to defend it,” said Alexandra Senfft, co-author of Great Uncle Paul’s Violin Bow, a memoir about Romeo Franz and his family. “This is also a memorial for the German people and it is our responsibility, as the majority in the society, to save it.”
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