Its official name is "Memorial to the Destroyed Jews of Europe". It is a cobblestone field with 2,711 steles. They vary in height, at the boundaries of the ensemble they are no higher than ordinary benches, in the center they reach 4 m - among them it is easy for a person to get lost, according to the author, there the visitor should feel a sense of loss and despair.
The memorial is in no way separated from the surrounding urban space; the plan for the installation of the steles continues the grid of the surrounding streets.
The site for the construction was not chosen by chance: Hitler's Reich Chancellery, built according to the project of Albert Speer and demolished after the fall of the Nazi regime, stood nearby; the Fuhrer's bunker is also located under a parking lot nearby. Initially, Eisenman planned to place the information center in the Goebbels bunker, but the authorities feared that it would become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. As a result, it is located underground in the eastern part of the complex and is solved in a somewhat discordant with the abstraction of the ground part in a specific illustrative manner (the exposition consists of photographs, documents, artifacts) - against the wishes of the architect. The steles, which can be interpreted as tombstones, are "imprinted" in the ceiling of the center in the form of caissons, reminiscent of coffin lids.
The idea for the memorial dates back to 1988 - it was sponsored by journalist Lea Roche and historian Eberhard Eckel. The history of the implementation turned out to be very difficult - the initial project of the Berlin artist Christina Jakob-Marx did not like the Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who curated the memorial, because of him the American artist Richard Serra, the co-author of Eisenman, left the project.
But the architect himself showed perseverance, and in 1999 construction began.
