The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is an intervention in a complex of buildings and squares celebrating the cultural and political history of Germany. It was placed there after that complex was reactivated, made effective and relevant again, when the wall dividing the city was removed. The history of its construction is summarized in this Wikipedia article.
A German-language piece describing "warning memorials" says that they are to carry memory across generations. When one encounters the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, from the main street next to it, there is very little to describe it and nothing about how to use it. It looks like badly designed picnic tables and benches, at the shallow ends, and people try to sit on them, to cluster around them, to play with them, but they are unfriendly to this use. Nobody says not to use them that way, but they don't work very well. And deeper into the monument, the tables become pillars in rows, getting taller as the visitor walks into a depression in ground. Children attempt to play tag, but it doesn't quite work. The space is dank like a basement; you can only see this one row and column, and the ways are narrow enough that you wouldn't want to run around. You might hurt yourself. The deep part becomes more frightening as it gets dark. One wants to ask, as a visitor, "What do I do with this thing?" It is 4.7 acres, too big to ignore, obviously important, and it resists any attempt at summary or storytelling.
Comparing this memorial to the sculptures in Friedrichstraße of children being deported: realistic sculptures of a suitcase, a violin case, warm clothing - that all says something about the different power of different sculptural media. Now, the Friedrichstraße memorial will win people's hearts, stir their imaginations, confront them with a reality about which they must form an opinion. In the long term, over generations, people may come to resist this effort to take charge of their emotions. But the warning memorial puts visitors into a space that feels wrong, and then more wrong, and then frightening and inhuman. If visitors, of any age, can dismiss that as an alien landscape, a curiosity, that is one way it communicates across generations. If visitors find it oddly familiar, like what is happening to them at work, at school, in their private family life, then that is another way it communicates. It refuses to let the visitor be finished with it by having an appropriate feeling and moving on.
When I look for parallels, Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial comes to mind: also, an experienced monument in which what matters is what one does with it, as a visitor; also, a descent into depths and then an ascent to the light; also, a warning about what we gradually get ourselves into. But it is somehow easier, more narrative: it is natural to leave memorials, to do rubbings. There is nothing natural to do with the memorial in Berlin, and that is how it communicates across generations.
