Field of memory: the new memorial to European Jews who perished under the Nazis is an unnerving presence in the heart of Berlin.

'I had an idea about silence--I wanted the monument to speak without speaking.' Peter Eisenman's comment on his monument to the European Jews murdered by the Nazis was an unusually modest and reticent reflection on what he called 'a humbling experience'.

Certainly, the task was difficult. Eisenman's silence has been achieved only after years of acrimonious debate. A citizens' movement began campaigning for a monument in the late '80s, and the federal government, then in Bonn, took the idea up. A site in central Berlin made free by the destruction of the Wall was allocated. A decade of discussion followed, and two international architectural competitions were held (Chancellor Kohl rejected the results of the first one). The design by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra for a 'field of stelae' was chosen in late 1998, but arguments raged on. Serra dropped out. The design was modified. Many asked why the monument should be to Jewish dead only, rather than all the others murdered under Nazi policies, for instance homosexuals, the handicapped, and whole races like the Sinti and Roma (gypsies). Some of these groups have or will have their own monuments, but the arguments have not been completely settled. Against his initial misgivings, Eisenman was persuaded to incorporate an information centre, but it is underground, rather than being a massive block as some had hoped (and at one point Eisenman designed). Another key issue was whether or not the stelae should carry the names of the dead, or (as Eisenman wanted) be left blank. Greek stelae were vertical memorial stones inscribed with the names of the dead, and many people wanted to continue that tradition, particularly as lists of names are so moving in monuments like Lutyens' Thiepval Arch and the Washington memorial to the fallen in Vietnam. But Eisenman was adamant in his argument that the Field of Stelae is intended to conjure 'the unforgettable', while the underground information centre (the Ort der Information) is there to record the 'memorable'; it has for instance direct computer links to the Israeli database on all known murdered Jews.

The shifting cityscape 

The long thin north-south strip of central Berlin, which was razed by the War and then the Wall, is now largely covered by a miscellancous collection of object buildings by famous architects that rub together in uneasy harmony imposed by rigorous planning restrictions. The monument is right in the middle of the strip, just 170 metres south of the Brandenburg Gate. To the west is the edge of the semi-wild Tiergarten, Berlin's huge and magnificent central park. To the north, between memorial and Gate, will be the American embassy on its pre-war site that was extended southwards after 9/11, eating into the memorial plot. Eastwards is a large and heavy lump of prefabricated DDR (East German) housing; south are dull official blocks, the Berlin outposts of some of the Lander.

So the grey, austere abstract forms of over 2700 stelae, which rise and fall to form an abstracted undulating landscape, are a respite from the surrounding mixture of mediocrity and fuss. The landscape is formed and dissected by a grid of 950mm wide paths that divide the 950mm wide stelae that have a long plan dimension of 2375mm. They vary greatly in height. At the edges of the field, where the grid is partially eroded, many stelae are raised only just above the surrounding gravel and black paving stones; they seem like large blank tombstones--no more worrying than those in an English country churchyard. But, as you move towards the middle of the field, the ground falls while the stelae rise in height, so that in the middle, they loom three metres above you and the place becomes oppressive. Down the perfectly straight paths, you can see the buildings on the north, south and west sides of the site, but they seem far away; the noise of the surrounding roads is stilled. As you stand there, the stelae begin to take on an unsettling identity for, here, it finally becomes clear that they are not all vertical, but lean slightly this way and that. They are abstract, but they begin to have the anonymous individuality of members of a tightly packed crowd, grey and mute, but Kafkaesquely frightening: Eisenman is trying to conjure what he calls 'the enormity of the banal'.

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The subterranean realm

But in the Field, fear is only hinted at. It is intensified down in the Ort. Its entrance is unobtrusive, scarcely disturbing the regularity of the grid. Down the grey stairs are four main galleries under a roof that is a reflection of the grid of the stelae and the artificial undulation of the Field overhead. Eisenman says that the grid of the rooms is 'rotated against the logic of the field, thereby thwarting any paradigmatic understanding of its formal arrangement'.

I have only the vaguest notion of what this might mean: the twist seems merely arbitrary. But the galleries are brilliantly organised by Dagmar von Wilcken to convey something of the horrors of the persecution: humiliations, cattle trucks, the camps, the death marches are set against touching examinations of ordinary family life and the incomprehensible insane bureaucratic grimness of the murder tallies. Emerging from the caves of memory, the stelae seem even more sinister, their grey reminiscent of the uniform of the Wehrmacht, their disordered order as incomprehensible as the fact that virtually a whole nation could become psychotic.

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Technical complexity

Detailed examination shows that the Field is a complicated artefact. Ground undulations are entirely artificial. Left untouched, the site would be a flat sandy waste. The monument's large paved surface needs a complicated but inconspicuous drainage system. It was designed by Buro Happold, who were structural and services engineers for the project. Run-off water is taken to an underground reservoir for irrigating trees planted among the low stelae on the west side of the site, just across the road from the Tiergarten. The other tricky engineering problem was the manufacture and erection of the stelae. They are almost perfectly formed monolithic concrete boxes which lack a bottom surface, and are supported on strip foundations. They had to be shimmed to the exact height and angle (up to two degrees from the vertical) specified by the architects for each one.

Cast in self-compacting concrete, the stelae had to be specially cured before being delivered to the site; weathering trials lasted a year. A waterproof coating is covered by an anti-graffiti layer which was itself a source of controversy, for Degussa, the firm that made it, was the manufacturer of Zyklon B, the gas used in the extermination camps. In the end, the argument that our contemporaries cannot be held responsible for the acts of the Nazis prevailed, with the proviso that dreadful deeds must never be forgotten--in effect the ethos of the whole monument.

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It is impossible not to compare the Field of Stelae to Daniel Libeskind's Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum. There is another close-planted forest of inclined pillars, much smaller in area than the Field but more intense. After a short while there, you actually feel nauseated because the ground is inclined in a slope roughly at right angles to the axes of the pillars so your senses sometimes see them as vertical, sometimes at their real angle. The Garden is surrounded by a wall that prevents you seeing out of it, so the whole effect is isolated, claustrophobic and extremely oppressive.

The Field is very different. It is open to the city on every side and is approached gently through its low and patchy fringes (perhaps symbolic of the beginnings of Nazism--or perhaps not), and intensity builds up slowly as you approach the still centre, where the Field is at its deepest and tallest, darkest and most claustrophobic (symbolic, though maybe not, of the regime's power?). But, even there, glimpses of distant surroundings are framed at the end of each cleft.

The Field is part of the city, and yet different from anything built in cities before. Enigmatic and multivalent, it engenders a range of emotions, unlike the Garden, which is a one-liner, even if it hits you in the stomach. Perhaps in his pursuit of silence, as opposed to the polemics and pyrotechnics of most of his other buildings, Eisenman has at last made a real contribution to the art of architecture.