The Aschrott-Brunnen Monument

In 1908, Sigmund Aschrott, a successful Jewish businessman, funded the creation of a fountain in front of the City Hall in his German town of Kassel. Since it was a gift from a Jew, the Nazis tore down the Aschrott-Brunnen Fountain in April of 1939, leaving only the sandstone base. 

Original Monument

Within three years after that, more than 3,000 Jews from Kassel had been transported east a concentration camps in Poland and Latvia, and all were murdered.

In the 1980s, the Society for the Rescue of Historical Monuments initiated an effort to restore some type of fountain on the site that would memorialize the founders and benefactors of the town, especially Sigmund Aschrott. By that point in time, almost no one in the town remembered the actual history of the ruined fountain. The common assumption was that it had been destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.

The new project was awarded to a local artist, Horst Hoheisel, who wrestled with the history of the original fountain and the role that a new monument would play in the community.

Hoheisel proposed recreating the original fountain as a hollow concrete shell, displaying it for a short time upright in the City Hall Square, and then burying it upside down in the exact location of the original monument. This hollow, inverted version of the fountain would be covered by glass and a grate that traced the outline of its bottom, so that people could walk across it and look into its emptiness. They would also hear water falling to the bottom of the inverted fountain, suggesting its 12 meter depth below ground.

Hoheisel's goal was to recreate the old fountain, but in a way that suggested loss, emptiness, and the painful history that had been blurred and forgotten by the town. A reconstruction of the fountain in its original form would have suggested what some countermonument artists refer to as Widergutmachen,, or making something again, or simply repairing it.

Hoheisel did not want his response to the Aschrott-Brunnen to suggest anything redeeming, comforting, or corrected. The history of the fountain and of Kassel's Jews could not be mitigated or softened by a monument that was inadvertently soothing or aesthetically pleasing.

For Hoheisel, the sunken fountain

is not the memorial at all. It is only history turned into a pedestal, an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.
The only way I know to make this loss visible is through a perceptibly empty space, representing the space once occupied. Instead of continuously searching for yet another explanation or interpretation of that which has been lost, I prefer facing the loss as a vanished form. A reflective listening into the void, into the negative of an irretrievable form, where the memory of that which has been lost resounds, is preferable to a mere numb endurance of the facts.