Activists Used a Sledgehammer to Attack Berlin’s Newest Holocaust Memorial, Objecting to the Use of Victims’ Ashes

A group of activists failed in their attempt to dismantle
Berlin’s most controversial Holocaust memorial. They were upset
that the provocative sculpture originally contained the ashes of
victims of the Nazi regime along with soil collected from the sites
of concentration camps.

Around 20 members of the Action Artists Committee (AKK) tried to
take down the temporary monument near the Reichstag, Germany’s
federal parliamentary building, on January 5. The activists, who
were stopped by police, used an angle grinder and a sledgehammer
against the eight-foot-tall steel column installed by the art
collective the Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) in December.

“No one should make art and politics with ashes of Holocaust
victims,” AKK group member Eliyah Havemann told the German media.
During their action, members carried the flag of Israel. Havemann’s
grandfather, Dagobert Biermann, was a German resistance
fighter in World War II who was murdered by the Nazis in
Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.

The Center for Political Beauty, a self-described “assault
team,” had installed the monument, which it claimed contained
remains of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. The ZPS apologized
for the upset caused to Holocaust survivors and their relatives. It
has since said it has removed the human remains.

The monument was originally intended as an artistic gesture to
warn German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU, against
cooperating with the far-right AfD party. In 2017, the ZPS installed another
Holocaust memorial near the home of an AfD politician.

The column is said to contain soil gathered at 23 sites near
Nazi death camps across Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. The ZPS said
it found traces of human remains in around 70 percent of the more
than 200 samples it collected. After the outcry in December, the
group says that it gave the human ashes to the Orthodox Rabbinical
Conference so they could be properly buried in a Jewish cemetery.
It is against Jewish religious law to use human remains.

“We would like to sincerely apologize to those affected, their
relatives and surviving dependants, who we have hurt in their
feelings,” the collective said, according to Die Zeit. 

For the time being, the collective’s memorial remains in place,
though the local government office told rbb that it is
trying to remove the installation as quickly as possible.

The controversial column stands on the former site of
the Kroll Opera House, which served as a home for the German
parliament after the Reichstag burned down in 1933. Hitler used the
fire as a pretext to seize power as a dictator.

The post Activists Used a Sledgehammer to Attack Berlin’s
Newest Holocaust Memorial, Objecting to the Use of Victims’
Ashes appeared first on artnet News.