After 10 years of argument, Berlin's city government is expected to decide within the next two weeks on the form Germany's national Holocaust memorial should take. But the monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, on a 20,000 square metre site next to the Brandenburg Gate, has become one of the most delicate issues in the campaign for next month's federal election.
The Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, is in favour of a memorial but his Social Democrat challenger, Dr Gerhard Schroder, argues that the horror of the Holocaust cannot be portrayed in an abstract way. He claims that the former concentration camps provide the best memorials to their victims and the most potent warning to today's Germans about the consequences of intolerance.
Berlin's mayor, Mr Eberhard Diepgen, is also opposed to the memorial - on the grounds that the city should not become a "capital of repentance" - as are many of Berlin's Jews.
Dr Kohl has taken a personal interest in the project, vetoing one design and ordering adjustments to the current favourite design, by American architect Peter Eisen man. His plan is for a labyrinth of 2,500 stone pillars, designed to create the effect of a meditative garden.
The rejected design by Christine Jakob-Marks would have taken the form of a concrete gravestone bigger than a football pitch with four million names carved on stone slabs set into it. Dr Kohl was not alone in regarding the design as a monstrosity and some critics pointed out that the names of many of Hitler's Jewish victims are unknown.
The idea of building a Holocaust memorial in Berlin came from a German television presenter, Lea Rosh, and it will be partly funded by private contributions. The city of Berlin offered the DM200 million site free of charge and Dr Kohl promised the leader of Germany's Jewish community that he would make sure it was built.
But critics such as the Jewish essayist Henryk Broder believe that the plans have now gone so badly awry that the project ought to be called off altogether.
"They've totally messed it up. Confining it to the Jewish victims is the first mistake. They should commemorate all of Hitler's victims. But the Germans just want to cling to the Jews," he said.
The decision to limit the memorial to murdered Jews has prompted other groups of victims, such as gypsies and homosexuals, to demand memorials of their own.
The panel of experts charged with choosing the design is heavily tilted towards the government's thinking and includes Dr Chris toph Stoelzl, the director of the German Historical Museum and one of Dr Kohl's favourite historians.
Finding the right design for the Holocaust memorial has been a daunting and somewhat unappetising task if the entries to the first competition are anything to go by. They included plans for a giant skull with victims' names engraved around the brain, a huge Star of David with a broken heart in the middle and a giant wheel with railway carriages symbolising "the tension between hope and hopelessness, funfair and genocide".
Among the most bizarre ideas was that the memorial should involve the partial destruction of the Brandenburg Gate, in order to cause pain to the German people.
Mr Broder believes that the entire project has more to do with Germany's view of itself than with genuine remorse about the fate of the Jews.
"They're not setting up a memorial for the Jews. They're setting up a memorial for them selves. The minister for culture tells us it's the German national memorial. I don't think my parents went to the camps for that, thank you very much," he said.
The row over the memorial comes as Berliners are showing an unprecedented interest in all things Jewish, creating a boom in everything from kosher restaurants and Klezmer bands to Hebrew lessons.
"We have people queuing for three hours to enrol in classes and all our classes are full. They're mainly young people who seem less guilt-ridden than the previous generation," said Nicola Galliner, who runs Berlin's Jewish Adult Education Centre.
Berlin's Jewish population has doubled in recent years due to an influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. But there are still only 12,000 Jews in the city and most Germans have never met any of their Jewish neighbours.
Some Jews suspect that the current enthusiasm is for Jewishness rather than for Jews and that it is an attempt to create a mood of "normality" in relations between Germans and Jews. Mr Broder is sceptical about the hype, which he finds somewhat distasteful.
"The fewer Jews there are, the greater the interest in Jewish culture. I don't remember them showing much enthusiasm for Jewish culture when they put my mother on a train," he said.
