Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism

The Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism was unveiled on 27 May 2008, sixty-three years after the war's end. It is Germany's federal memorial to the estimated 50,000-100,000 men convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Third Reich, of whom at least 5,000-15,000 were deported to concentration camps and worked to death. The memorial itself is a single grey concrete cube — 3.6 m tall, on a low plinth, at a deliberately tilted angle — in the Tiergarten's southeast corner. Danish-Norwegian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset placed it directly across Ebertstraße from Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, so that the two memorials sit in silent geographic dialogue. Inside a small window carved into one face, a looping video shows two men kissing (the video is periodically replaced — the current loop is by Berlin filmmaker Yael Bartana). That the memorial exists at all took decades of activism, largely by Berlin's LGBTQ+ community — including a 1980s campaign led by the Homosexuelle Selbsthilfe collective. The federal parliament finally passed the enabling legislation in 2003; the design competition ran through 2005. It was one of the last publicly financed monuments the reunified Bundestag commissioned before pausing its Berlin memorial programme. The memorial is free, open 24/7, and — like most of Tiergarten — unfenced. Come at dusk when the video inside the cube is most visible. Combine with the Homosexuals Memorial's neighbour, the Roma & Sinti memorial across the park, for a quiet forty minutes of walking Berlin's twentieth century.