This was a difficult day to write about.

I don’t know how to enter into any information or accounting of it.  Our guide was a man named Boris. He was very kind and seemed to try to do his best not to ask down to us as most tour guides do. It felt it a little odd to me that we would begin by looking at some laminated pictures in a folder in the stones above the exhibition but then the rain came and we all bustled inside. Continuing the introductory seminar it was really interesting to find out all of the different potential models made and Richard Serra’s initial involvement with the design of the site. The thing that struck me the most and stayed in my mind as we continued the day at the Topography of Terror was what Boris said at the beginning about it being an inauthentic site for a memorial. It seems that to make a site in remembrance to a very many 6 million people who were disappeared from all over Europe that to choose a single ‘authentic’ site would take away from an atrocity that whenever representing it on this scale can only be sited in the people and their absence.  That said it was very affective. The entire I walked through the rooms and observed and read, I didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone I knew. I don’t know if this is right but I didn’t want to have a collective-connected experience while in there beyond the acknowledgement that there were many other people around. The room of dimension was the most affective space that I walked through. To read the accounts and see the handwriting of families saying their last words and having to look down in order to do this, into the only light made available in the room which were these illuminated boxes covered in text, totally magnified the feeling of looking into some deeper dimensional intimacies. In the midst of feeling a breadth of hard things, we walked back outside and onward toward the Topography of Terror museum. Kevin and I put our hands on each other’s backs for a second during the walk and both agreed that it feels rather necessary to have a human to human check-in in those kinds of moments.The tour guide at Topography was vastly different than Boris’  guide style and demeanor. We were all accidentally late due to a blameless scheduling error and that seemed to started everyone off on a rather stiff foot. I don’t know why exactly and it seems a bit controversial to say but I rather liked him. His quick and somewhat up-tight demeanor paired with his over-sized looking hiking boots and salmon pink scarf was kind of funny to me. Anyway he framed our viewing of the museum with a straight ruler and held everyone on the tour including himself responsible in the proper assessing of old and making of new histories in a truly passive and aggressive way. I had a moment of anger at my public school education while walking through and reading. I could not believe, I felt so ignorant having it take my whole life thus far until getting to the Topography of Terror museum to find out how little the Nazi’s were punished after the war. This information I soaked in and my anger stunted much of my critical faculties that the moment.  Our time was so short there. In the last moments I walked into a room which had the propaganda films of the Nuremberg Rally and watched one minute of it before it was time to leave, not really processing what I had just glimpsed at.