It took the Nazis one day in Wannsee to coordinate the Final Solution. Creating a central memorial in Berlin to their victims took considerably longer. Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), which was inaugurated in the capital last May, was first discussed in 1988, when the site near the Brandenburg Gate was still part of a no-man’s land just inside the East German border. Two competitions (in 1994 and 1998) later, Peter Eisenman’s second design was accepted by the Bundestag in 1999. During construction, every element was hotly contested, but these