At today’s unveiling of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Germans will finally see what 17 years of agonizing debates and 27 million euros of tax money have bought them: a place with no meaning. That, at least, is what New York architect Peter Eisenman calls this undulating field of 2,711 featureless concrete pillars – most observers say they look like tombstones – in the heart of Germany’s capital.

Yet the debates of the past years have shown how utopian this architect’s ambition was. Even something as mundane as the generic name “memorial” can prove tricky in German, which offers the words “Mahnmal” – derived from the word “mahnen,” to warn or admonish – or “Denkmal” – derived from “gedenken,” to remember. According to its official title, Mr. Eisenman’s memorial is a Denkmal for the Murdered Jews of Europe. But the Jewish community in Germany, which has said that memorial is not of their concern, is probably more inclined to think of it as a Mahnmal.

The tensions upon the design of a memorial between the demands of the living and the demands of the dead, between its commemorative and polemical functions, and between its nihilistic and life-affirming impulses, is a topic on which Moshe Safdie has had more than one occasion to dwell. The Israeli born, Cambridge, Mass.-based architect is the creator of several significant memorials, including the tombs of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin, the Sikh Khalsa memorial museum in Punjab, India, and the children’s memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust remembrance site in Jerusalem. Most recently, he designed Yad Vashem’s striking new museum, a long, triangular structure that literally burrows from one end of the hillside to the other. Its opening was attended in March by the entire government of Israel, as well as by Mayor Bloomberg, Kofi Annan, and the prime ministers of France and Poland.

On the matter of whom memorials serve, Mr. Safdie is adamant: “The victims are dead,” he told me last week. “You are not serving the victims. You are honoring them.” Whether as a cause or result of this conviction, Mr. Safdie’s designs tend toward a kind of humanism and optimism.

“In Yad Vashem,” he said, “I had the notion of taking you into the mountain … with sloping floors and spaces that are more like archaeology than architecture. Then, after the exhibition on the death camps, you see light at the end of the tunnel, and the floor begins to rise again – then you come out and see the landscape, and there is a sense of renewal and hope.”

This sensibility informs his attitude to the rebuilding at ground zero. Mr. Safdie did not submit a proposal for the site, but he did outline his ideas in an article in the New Republic shortly after the attacks.

“No great artist commission is necessary,” he said, in reference to the memorial part of the project itself. “Rather, simply arranged on two squares of land should be a stone for each person, with his or her name carved upon it, set in a meadow.” Mr. Safdie also called the towers’ footprints “sacred ground,” a phrase later popularized by Mayor Giuliani. As for the rest of the site, Mr. Safdie called for a “vital urban space, enhancing our idea of publicness,” and warned of the risk of “symbolism [taking] precedence over human needs.”

But that, Mr. Safdie says now, is precisely what is happening. “What we are doing is creating a giant memorial,” he said of the current plans for ground zero. “My sense is our agenda should have been the reverse. Some memorialization occurred immediately. Some should and could have been built as we go along. But that’s a small part of the agenda, not in importance but in scale. The main question is: are we creating a wonderful urban space?”

Naturally, this raises the subject of his fellow Israeli architect, Daniel Libeskind. “Libeskind emphasizes destruction, pessimism,” Mr. Safdie said. As for Mr. Libeskind’s idea of leaving the World Trade Center’s huge, belowground slurry walls exposed, “it is as if after the blitz they’d left signs of destruction all over London.”

He is no less critical of Mr. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. “He was asked to do a museum that celebrates Jewish culture, and what he ended up doing is a Holocaust memorial.” Indeed, the structure – its walls like shattered glass, its purposefully void spaces and its always sloping floors intended to nauseate the people within – was so resonant of the Holocaust that there were calls to leave it empty, an act that would have transformed an ostensible work of architecture into something approaching a mammoth piece of sculpture.

German Jewry, said Mr. Safdie, was “an extraordinary culture, and it was destroyed. But there were also hundreds of years of extraordinary Jewish culture and history.” What space exists in Germany today where that achievement can be properly celebrated?

As for Mr. Eisenman’s Denkmal, Mr. Safdie said he recognizes that building in Berlin, rather than Jerusalem or New York, presents its own set of difficulties. In Berlin the signs of continuity – whether they are glimpses of the Reichstag building, now housing the German parliament, or the chemical coating of the concrete pillars made by a subsidiary of the company that manufactured Zyklon B – are everywhere, reminders of the difficulty of creating a sacred ground of remembrance on top of sullied ground.

“We all recognize that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin is fundamentally different,” Mr. Safdie said. “If the memorial is the initiative of Jewish organizations or of those that won the war it shouldn’t be there. The memorial can only be understood and accepted if it was the result of a fundamentally German initiative, and because of that I would have preferred it to have been by a German architect. So I’m sorry that it was a Jewish-American architect who did it.”

At the time of the interview, Mr. Safdie had not yet seen the Berlin memorial, and was reluctant to offer an opinion about it, except to say, “I would not be heavy-handed.”

His own current memorial project – the Rabin Center for Israel Studies in Tel Aviv, which opens later this year on the 10th anniversary of Rabin’s murder – suggests his own approach. The center is built atop an old underground electric generation station, on top of which is a much lighter building, with a plastic-fiber roof built in the shape of a bird’s wings. The generator, Mr. Safdie said, “gave me the metaphor for Rabin the warrior,” while the ceiling “represents the breakout of Rabin as peacemaker.”

It is striking that in Israel the architectural vocabulary remains, fundamentally, one of hope, despite the tragedies of recent years. By contrast, the architecture in Berlin, for all the confident building that followed Reunification – Norman Foster’s exuberant glass dome on the Reichstag; the glitzy new architecture of Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center – seems to be forever pulled down by the past.

“Topography of Terror” is the name of a complex of former SS, Gestapo, and Nazi party buildings in the center of Berlin, which has been turned into memorials and museums of the Third Reich. In their own way, Messrs. Eisenman, Libeskind, and Safdie have all had to contend with topographies of terror – the former two keen on preserving them, the latter working to transcend it.

Ms. Da Fonseca-Wollheim last wrote for these pages on Bach and Frederick the Great.