Commemorative House and Archive Neuengamme Concentration Camp Location: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial Jean-Dolidier-Weg 21039 Hamburg Phone: +49 40 / 428 96 03; Fax +49 40 / 428 96 525 Open: April-September: Tuesday - Friday: 10.00 - 17.00hr, Saturday & Sunday: 10.00 - 18.00hr October - March: Tuesday - Sunday: 10.00 - 17.00hr Public Transport: S21 Bergedorf, and then Bus 227 to Neuengamme KZ-Gedenkstätte (Commemorative House and Archive). Road: Motorway A 25 direction Geesthacht, exit Curslack, thereon signposted. Commemorative House and Archive Neuengamme Concentration Camp Through the transfer of the former Neuengamme Concentration Camp historic exhibition in 1995 the building housing the exhibition became available for the long desired Commemorative House and Archive. The Düsseldorf artist Thomas Schütte, born in Oldenburg in 1954, made fundamental changes to the original 1981 building. In collaboration with the architect Gerhard Scharf, one of the architects working on the renovation of the entire complex, the basic structure of the building was revealed. Walls of undressed concrete, and applied with a many layered, varnished red, create a varying intensity of light. It is possible but not obligatory to associate the red of the walls with fire or blood. Main Hall Raw, non-dyed lengths of material, carrying the names of the victims listed according to date, hang from the red walls of the gallery. As there is room on the walls for only around 40% of the over 20,000 names of the victims, and because many names are unknown, an adjacent room houses a palette of rolls of raw material carrying the inscription "In memory of the unknown victims."   After 50 years it is necessary not only to honour the dead victims but also to reflect upon the the use to which the complex has since been put. For this reason Thomas Schütte has installed two models of the former and current concentration camp complex in the centre of the house as a wordless commentary. One model is an exact replica of the original concentration camp constructed by the Nazi guards when imprisoned by the English occupying army; the other is a modern architects model of the contemporary complex with the two current integrated prisons. Models of the Concentration Camp Complex An adjacent room, with walls and ceiling of undressed concrete, houses the former bureaucratic machinery of extermination, with the original concentration camp books of the dead displayed in desk display cases. Books of the Dead From this room one has a view, through narrow windows, over the surrounding lawn, over which the ashes of the dead were spread as fertilizer for the concentration camp's market garden. Thomas Schütte has planted rows of mock cypresses here to give it more the character of a cemetery. Thomas Schütte, several times a contributor to the 5 yearly Kassel documenta exhibition, as a child of the 1950s, accepted the commission as a personal attempt to come to terms with Germany's horrific Nazi history. For the graphic artist Arne Petersen it was a difficult and painful procedure, necessitating the suppression of the knowledge that each of the names he added to the rolls of material represented a murdered human being. Thomas Schütte has intentionally dispensed with any accompanying written text, working without recourse to word, symbol, or quotation. These means are used with almost all holocaust memorials, and according to Schütte are not especially helpful. Only the colours black, red, and undressed concrete are employed together with certain principles of organization: sequencing, listing, accumulation, symmetry, reflection, etc., and are made as obvious as possible. At the same time there is an atmosphere of the sacred. For the architect Gerhard Scharf, who constructed the original building and who collaborated with Thomas Schütte in its restructuring, inside this house one should hear one's heart beating.