Teutonic Shifts, Jewish Voids

This article chronicles several visits to Germany's most prominent Holocaust monuments: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, both located in Berlin. Juxtaposing memories with observation, the author argues that in the German national imaginary Eisenman's and Libeskind's architecture of abstraction offers a space for ‘wall love’: a certain German nostalgia for the innocence of a history that never was; a longing for the return of the Berlin Wall, that safeguard of German post-war identity.