Schwarz
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As with many contemporary thinkers, Eisenman rejects the redemptive notion of collective memory and its unexamined links to the sacred, which unite its celebrants in a reassuring cult of remembrance. Memorials, Eisenman has noted, are not about memory but about nostalgia. In this case, architecture becomes a hermeneutic, probing, questioning, withholding solace and thus closure. However challenged or troubled by the work, visitors are never overwhelmed nor reduced to anxious impotence. Nothing affects them without their active, willed participation. By avoiding an iconic design, Eisenman has ensured that the whole cannot be apprehended from any single vantage point. There is no center, no resting spot for the eye or the body, no therapeutic catharsis. The tight weave of the project never loosens its grip on visitors, or allows them to yield attention to apperception. They have to negotiate the narrow fissures between the somber stelae virtually in single file. Anamnesis becomes a personal rather than a collective endeavor, and the injunction to remember is left the responsibility of each individual spectator.