CERES faculty member Prof. Doris Bergen has served as the subject-matter advisor on the winning design team for the planned National Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa.
The design, titled “Landscape of Loss, Memory, and Survival,” was selected from among six finalists. The team, led by Lord Cultural Resources Co-president Gail Dexter-Lord, also included architect Daniel Libeskind, artist-photographer Edward Burtynsky, and landscape architect Claude Cormier.
The Monument is conceived as an experiential environment comprised of six triangular, concrete volumes configured to create the points of a star. The star remains the visual symbol of the Holocaust – a symbol that millions of Jews were forced to wear by the Nazi’s to identify them as Jews, exclude them from humanity and mark them for extermination. The triangular spaces are representative of the badges the Nazi’s and their collaborators used to label homosexuals, Roma-Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political and religious prisoners for murder.
Original, large scale monochromatic photographic landscapes of Holocaust sites – death camps, killing fields and forests – will be embedded in the concrete walls of each of the triangular spaces. These photographic installations will change with the light and with the movement of the viewer. Surrounding the spaces, a forest composed of various coniferous trees will emerge from the rocky pebbled ground. This landscape will evolve over time representative of how Canadian survivors and their children have contributed to Canada.
The National Holocaust Monument will be a place of memory and mourning, honouring and commemorating, a space for questioning and learning. The Monument is an experience that combines architecture, art, landscape and scholarship in ways that create an-ever changing engagement with one of the darkest chapters of human history while conveying a powerful message of humanity’s enduring strength and survival.
The National Holocaust Monument will be prominently located in the core of Canada’s Capital, at the corner of Wellington and Booth Streets and is expected to open to the public in September 2015. More information about the Memorial can be found on the official website.
Prof. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. Her books include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (1996); War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003); The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Centuries (edited, 2004); and Lessons and Legacies VIII (edited, 2008). She has held grants and fellowships from the SSHRC, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the DAAD, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and she has taught at the Universities of Warsaw, Pristina, Tuzla, Notre Dame, and Vermont.
