Starting in April 1990, the artist Jochen Gerz, with the assistance of 61 Jewish communities in Germany, undertook an investigation to locate all the Jewish cemeteries that existed in the country at the time the Nazis came to power. With the final result of 2146, the next step taken by the author together with many of his students from the State School of Fine Arts was the removal of the same number of cobblestones from the approximately 8000 that make up the esplanade of the Castle’s Square, to engrave on each one the name of one of the cemeteries and put it back in its place. Initially, Gerz and his students worked on the work at night, without any official commission or even permission from the Municipality of Saarbrücken. As people and the media echoed what was happening in the place, the artist informed the regional government authorities, who in a vote and by a narrow majority resolved that the work be completed, commissioning it retrospectively.

The “Monument Against Racism” is considered one of the main works of anti-monumentalism, a trend in contemporary art that intentionally challenges all aspects (form, theme, meaning, etc.) of traditional public monuments. This “anti-monument” questions the regime of visibility and exhibition usually related to memorialization processes: in these, the inscription of the traumatic past for a community is inscribed and made present in space through the monument. In this work, artist and community face the question of how to commemoratively compensate for a form of horror that is considered unrepresentable, as well as others that are also raised in different memorials about the Holocaust: the moral obligation of artists to represent and reveal heinous crimes. versus the possibility that aesthetic pleasure may emanate from the experience of the victim, or the intention to give significant form to the extermination of a people.

By inserting a conflictive element (absence) for the established institutional narratives, “2146 stones” challenges citizens by appealing to the subjective experience of remembering rather than to conventional commemorative policies, which are usually imposed through image. Invisibility may be the key condition to create this state of contemplation, of remembrance of the Holocaust, without being interrupted by a visual entity, be it figurative or abstract. Without distractions, objects or inscriptions to reflect on and avoiding in this case the possibility of being vandalized, the work proposes the knowledge that it is a place of remembrance. That knowledge, with the accompanying references to cemeteries, is sufficient for personal, imaginative, and subjective contemplation.

The Invisible Monument thus recalls the disappearance of Jewish life that existed in Germany before 1933 in at least 2,146 communities through the “emptiness” with which it confronts the viewer. In Gerz’s words: “The invisibility of our monument was like a cure. To represent absence, absence must be created. That same absence also allows each person to become the author of their own commemorative work.”