Berlin Inaugurates Memorial to Nazi’s Gay Victims PVNN
Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset, left, and Danish artist Michael Elmgreen stand in front of their monument dedicated to gay victims of the Nazi regime in Berlin on Monday, May 26. (Markus Schreiber/AP)
Berlin — Germany unveiled a memorial this week to the Nazis’ long-ignored gay victims, a monument that also aims to address ongoing discrimination by confronting visitors with an image of a same-sex couple kissing. The memorial — a sloping gray concrete slab on the edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten park — echoes the vast field of smaller slabs that make up Germany’s memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, opened three years ago just across the road. The pavilion-sized slab includes a small window where visitors can view a video clip of two men kissing. Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who is gay, said the monument was a reminder of the struggles that still confront gays. “This memorial is important from two points of view — to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily,” Wowereit said as he inaugurated the memorial alongside Culture Minister Bernd Neumann. Nazi Germany declared homosexuality a threat to the German race and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived. “This is a story that many people don’t know about, and I think it’s fantastic ... that the German state finally decided to make a memorial to honor these victims as well,” said Ingar Dragset, a Berlin-based Norwegian who designed the memorial along with Danish-born Michael Elmgreen. Few gays convicted by the Nazis came forward after World War II because of the stigma attached to homosexuality. The law used against them remained on the books in West Germany until 1969, and Dworek said there were 50,000 convictions under the law after the war. The federal government financed the $945,660 in building costs, while Berlin’s city government provided the site. The first film — a repeating clip of two men kissing, shot at the site of the memorial before it was built — was done by photographer Robby Mueller and directed by Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg. “It was quite important to have a direct imagery of a love scene, a passionate scene ... because that is the main problem in homophobia,” designer Elmgreen told AP Television News. “You can get acceptance on an abstract level, but they don’t want to look at us.”
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | May 2008 
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