Memorial to the Jewish Victims of National Socialism in Mannheim 2003
Memorial to the Jewish Victims of National Socialism in Mannheim 2003 | Planken outside P2 | glass, stainless steel, light | 300 x 300 x 300 cm | Photographies: picture 1+2: Photography: 1+2 Martin Albrecht †, picture 3,4,5: Kathrin Schwab
The blind spot of Mannheim - Dialectical irritation: Jochen Kitzbihler's memorial crystal in the pedestrian zone between pretzel boy and ice cream vendor
Enrico Santifaller, 10. July 2006 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
A disturbance in the visual chaos, a brilliantly pale blob in the midst of commercial city space furnishings, a pale, fragile patch among all the colorful excitement of a shopping mile: The glass cube on Mannheim's Planken is transparent and yet appears as a monolith, seems graceful and delicate and yet withstands the impact of motorcycles, creates its own, introverted space and yet stands in the middle of life between pretzel boy and ice cream vendor, streetcar stop and department store.
The memorial sculpture for the Jewish victims of National Socialism in Mannheim is most impressive in the evening or at night: illuminated from below by a dozen fluorescent tubes, the artefact appears from afar as an iridescent field of light. A seemingly floating shrine of remembrance, with over two thousand names engraved on its walls in mirror writing - names of Jewish Mannheimers who were rounded up by the Gestapo in broad daylight at the end of October 1940 in an operation carried out by regional Gauleiter Wagner and Bürckel to the applause of the population and then deported to Gurs in southern France.
The memorial was designed by sculptor Jochen Kitzbihler. However, overcoming a whole series of bureaucratic and technical difficulties required the support of architect and mentor Helmut Striffler and Darmstadt statics professor Johann-Dietrich Wörner. It was only with their help that the artistic concept was given the necessary architectural stringency to realize the pure geometry of a glass cuboid with an edge length of three metres, which leans towards the center of the Paradeplatz at a barely perceptible angle of three degrees without bars or struts.
The reduction to the almost immaterial body, which, as it were, punches a square of remembrance out of the city of Mannheim squares, creates the distance to the trivial context. Nevertheless, Kitzbihler uses the orthogonal structure of the surroundings as a foil to emphasize what is out of plumb through the slight slant of the cube and a rotation of the square that forms the base.
Kitzbihler's preferred material is usually broken and sawn stone, which he leaves largely unprocessed. Only with extremely subtle interventions and careful placement in space does he condense the rough and rugged nature of his stones into an artistic statement. For "transversal" at the Europabrücke bridge in Kehl, for example, he alternately stacked twenty-four square blocks of Vosges and Black Forest granite to create an 11.70-meter-high sculpture. Each stone was slightly rotated around the central axis, so that the projection of the first and last block on top of each other creates an octagonal star - exactly the shape that Vauban had planned for his fortress on the other side of the Rhine, in front of Strasbourg. For the spatial installation "Inside", Kitzbihler combined crushed limestone with a laser device that casts a sharp, red-horizontal strip of light onto the rocks, making them appear to have been cut open and giving the viewer a glimpse of the already crystallized, still glowing magma.
The quiet, multi-layered concentration with its reduction taken to the extreme also gives the glass crystal on the planks its power and forcefulness. Kitzbihler does not rely on loud, didactic staging of horror, nor on narrative material such as Corten steel. The smooth, cool, almost frozen elegance and glass set with pencil-thin profiles, which does not acquire a patina and thus remains timeless, reveal the disturbing nature of the monolithic empty space.
The dialectical irritation of the sheer geometry and its light-filled resolution, as complicated as it sounds to a shopping public, does not fail to have an effect: probably also thanks to its prominent placement on the planks, the sculpture has neither been smeared nor damaged since its unveiling. At least so far, which may also be the result of the fact that the Mannheim memorial went completely unnoticed by the media when it was completed, under the spell of the Berlin Holocaust memorial.