A cube for the forgotten victims
A grey cube in Berlin honours persecuted gay men. One witness was missing at the ceremony and only came forward afterwards.
On 27 May 2008, the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin. It stands on the edge of the Tiergarten, directly opposite the Holocaust Memorial: a tilted grey concrete cube almost five metres long. The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset deliberately took their cue from Peter Eisenman's field of stelae on the other side of the street. Through a window in the corner of the cube you can see a film on an endless loop showing two men kissing.
The road there had been long. The Lesbian and Gay Federation and the initiative "Remember the homosexual victims of Nazism" had fought for it for more than fifteen years, and the Bundestag approved the memorial in December 2003. According to estimates, around fifty-four thousand people were convicted in the Nazi state because of their homosexuality, most of them men. The tightened Paragraph 175 remained in force in the Federal Republic for a long time and was only finally abolished in 1994.
At the unveiling, it was assumed that no survivor who had been held in a concentration camp because of his homosexuality was still alive. But after the coverage, Rudolf Brazda, a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, contacted the federation. On 27 June 2008 he visited the memorial together with Mayor Klaus Wowereit and looked at the monitor for a long time. The French concentration camp survivor and activist Pierre Seel, by contrast, had died back in 2005.
Controversy was also part of it from the start. Women's associations criticised the memorial for ignoring persecuted lesbians; historians saw no comparable evidence for that. The federation calls it an "inclusive memorial". The film has changed every few years since, but the kiss remains the theme.