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27 May 08
A monument with the video footage of two men kissing will be
unveiled Tuesday in Berlin in memory of the thousands of homosexuals
persecuted, tortured and murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and
1945.
Laborers completed the last preparations around the memorial, an
imposing gray concrete slab about four meters high near the
Brandenburg Gate, opposite the main Holocaust memorial. At eye level
inside the monument, designed by Norwegian-Danish duo Ingar Dragset
and Michael Elmgreen at a cost of 450,000 euros, is a gap containing
a television screen showing two men kissing.
Tuesday's official inauguration ceremony follows years of
controversy.
The commemoration of homosexuals' persecution, the
monument's location near the Holocaust memorial and its design has
all been subject to public debate in Germany in recent years.
The monument's unveiling will be attended by Berlin's openly gay
mayor Klaus Wowereit, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann and
representatives of Germany's Jewish and Roma communities.
No survivors will attend, however. The last known survivor, Pierre
Seel, a Frenchman deported in 1941 when he was 17 years old, died in
November 2005. He described in his memoirs how his first love, 18-
year-old Jo, was torn apart by dogs in front of other prisoners.
Police will be on hand at the unveiling to prevent any trouble by
radical right wingers.
In two years and after more than half a million public kisses, the
two Danish models in the looped video will be replaced by two women.
The monument's unveiling date is significant. Seventy-five years
ago, in May 1933, Nazi stormtroopers burst into the Institute for
Sexual Research in Berlin, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a German
physician, sexologist and gay-rights advocate. They took the
institute's books to nearby Opera Square and burned them. This was
one of the first stages of the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals.
The Gestapo had lists of homosexuals, arrested them, forced them to
recant officially and sent them to labor and extermination camps.
Historians estimate that thousands of homosexuals were murdered in
World War II. Ironically, Ernst Roehm, commander and co-founder of
the SA stormtroopers who burned the institute's books, was a
homosexual himself, which enabled Hitler to justify his execution in
1934.
The main controversy regarding the new monument was over whether to
commemorate all the Nazis' victims together or grant each persecuted
group representation. The German parliament's decision in 1999 to
allocate a generous area in the capital to commemorate the Holocaust
gave the go-ahead to other groups to demand their own monuments. In
2003 the Bundestag decided to put up a monument for the homosexuals'
persecution, and in 2006 a competition was held to select its
designer.
On the facade is a text detailing the suffering of homosexuals under
Hitler, who outlawed homosexuality in 1936 and convicted around
50,000 people for "unnatural" behavior deemed unbecoming of
the "Aryan master race."
"What we wanted to emphasize is that the different groups the Nazis
persecuted experienced the same horrors," said one of the artists.
This is why their monument's concrete slab resonates with the theme
of the Holocaust memorial across the road.
"This is the correct way to commemorate the persecution,
" says
Volker Beck, a Green Party representative in the Bundestag and a gay-
rights activist throughout Europe. "Visitors to Berlin will see the
huge Holocaust monument on one side, the much smaller one for gays
on the other side ¬ and understand that we've learned something in
Germany about human rights from World War II."