You have sometimes become caught up in the heated German debates about what is and is not appropriate to say and express regarding the Holocaust.

Do you mean your comments in the midst of the Degussa debate? [In 2003 construction of the memorial was temporarily stalled when controversy flared up over whether the chemical company Degussa AG, the one-time manufacturer of the poison gas Zyklon-B used in the extermination camps, should be allowed to provide the graffiti-proofing chemicals for the memorial. The ultimate decision was to permit Degussa's participation but to include a documentation of the company's history in the information center. Eisenman's gaffe and the ensuing uproar in the German Jewish community occurred when he told the memorial's board of trustees that his New York dentist, after putting a gold filling in, "said he had just put a Degussa product in my tooth and asked if he should take it out again." Many accused Eisenman of joking about the grisly fact that Degussa had profited from gold and silver extracted from the fillings of Jews.]

I didn't know about Degussa and the teeth. I didn't know that Degussa stood for Deutsche Gold und Silber Anstalt. And I apologized for it. I said I didn't know.

How do you feel about that kind of public reaction in Germany? Is that a necessary counterpart to the culture of ongoing debate that there are often storms of outrage and ultrasensitivity brought on by a single misstep?

Look, I'm a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humor. He once had a program on survivors and he got confused between survivors from one of these reality shows and from the Holocaust. I roared. He says to his wife: "What do you suppose survivors talk about? Do they have reunions? Do they have reunion picnics?" You couldn't do this in Germany--absolutely not that kind of humor.

There's much more contention about what is permissible or appropriate to say, and you came into that head-on.

And I will never do it again. My speech the other day was vetted by everybody. They said, "Look, let's leave Larry David back in the United States."

You once said in an interview that when you travel to Germany you go as a New Yorker and you return as a Jew. What did you mean by that?

I think that's really part of the problem. The Germans treat me with so much deference, and that makes me feel Jewish, right? They step all over themselves to be nice. Nobody treats you this way in New York. In New York a Jew is a Jew, an Italian is an Italian, a Muslim is a Muslim: Nobody's going out of his way to treat you in a special way. I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany. And that's what we're trying to get over. The Germans should stop pretending that they love all Jews.

Paul Spiegel, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has raised some reservations about the memorial that have to do with exactly that issue, of a German attitude of overcompensation toward Jews. He was worried the memorial could contribute to what he called "fixation on the victims," which seems similar to what you're talking about with an excessive identification with Jewish victims instead of confrontation with the German role as perpetrator. And so people have been asking: Is there a sufficient account of the perpetrators in the memorial?

This was brought up on a television show I was on with Willy Brandt's wife. She said, "What about the perpetrators?" I said, "Well, there's no confrontation with the perpetrators. That's not what it was about. It was about the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. What can you say about the perpetrators? What are we going to do--a memorial to the perpetrators? It's tough enough to do one to the murdered Jews, which is an unusual memorial, a memorial to the victims. Suppose I said to you this was done to remember the perpetrators. Wouldn't this be a Nazi icon?"

I think what Spiegel and others mean is the need for an account of the perpetrators, not a tribute to them, of course. The concern comes not so much from your memorial itself as from the attitudes of Germans who might, by going to such a memorial, overly identify with the victims and forget the German history of perpetration of the Holocaust.

Let me ask you: Can architecture do that? I don't know. This one guy who was a concentration camp victim said he'd been in several concentration camps and he said he thought the appropriate thing would be Goya's drawings of torture. And I said you can do that in a drawing, but it would be grotesque to do it in architecture. It would be kitsch to try to do that kind of symbolism in architecture. What's tough about it for me is, very few people really look at the architecture. They look at the nonsymbolism, and they don't ask if it works architecturally. That's what I'm interested in: Does it work architecturally? And the controversy so far has not been about the architecture but about the perpetrators--where are the iconic references and so on.

Some people have questioned the very idea of a central Holocaust memorial for the Jewish victims in Germany's capital.

I love it. It had to be in the center. Somebody said it's the first point in time that the Jews had a place in a capital city. They wanted to put it on Alexanderplatz, and I said absolutely not. They wanted to put it in Kreuzberg, and I said it has to be right here, in your face. That I wouldn't back down from. And having done all my reading for seven years, I must say that gypsies, Sinti, Roma, gays, cripples, mental people, Jehovah's witnesses, etc., were never marked for extinction. The Jewish race was marked for extermination and therefore different. They didn't go after 100 percent of the Poles. They were going to get every last Jew. And to me, that's why it's there.

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