From Ashes to Architecture: Memorialization at Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Buchenwald concentration camp, located in Weimar, Germany, was a place of suffering, cruelty and death during World War II and during the first five years of the cold war. As many were tortured and perished there, it has since become a place of remembrance. Being one of the few concentration camps to not be destroyed by the Nazis before they could be liberated, since its final closure in 1950 numerous memorials have been erected to commemorate the events that took place and the people who fell victim to those events. Following several theorists four of the memorials at Buchenwald are examined using elements of architecture, space versus place and truthfulness. The four memorials are the main camp’s steel plate which was created using the ashes of Buchenwald victims. Second is the clock tower which is permanently set to 3:15, the moment the prisoners liberated themselves, third is the little camp court yard which was reclaimed from the wilderness in 1990. Lastly is the steel pipe memorial in the forest which memorializes those who were killed there during Buchenwald’s time as a Soviet special camp from 1945-1950. Using theorists such as, Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, Brian Ott, James Young and Thomas Gieryn allows me to build an argument in favor of the memorials success compared to other Holocaust memorials which have failed to properly commemorate and negotiate the public memory of events. This argument adds depth not only to the study of collective memory and its ability to act rhetorically but also to the overall body of Holocaust rhetoric