It went from sunny, to drizzling, to pouring pretty suddenly during the opening information and discussion session at the memorial. I haven’t been wearing sunglasses very often since I began wearing normal glasses again, but it was bright enough out when we began, and seemed like it might stay that way, so I cased-up my glasses and put on my sun glasses. Within a few minutes it was dark and we were getting soaked by rain. Thankfully our tour guide was able to secure us a seminar room so he could continue preparing us with information and context for the experience of the memorial’s documentation center. It’s nice to have exits and contingencies.

There’s not really a lot I want to say about the things I saw and read in the center, except that both the particulay intensity and the vastness of atrocity are extremely difficult to hold in your mind, and to hold both at once is just about impossible, and so I think the choice of the curators to focus on the two separately (and the latter only after acquainting you with the former) is the right choice.

With regard to the Topography des Terrors memorial, I was much more intellectually engaged there. There were, of course, many nightmarish images and historical accounts, and it may have been determined in part by the tone and focus of our guide, but I found myself mostly concerned with the logistical question of how the Nazi regime established itself and its various arms of violence. The most interesting aspect of what I read was, I think, the role played by the ‘normal’ criminal and order police in not only the day to day functioning of the regime, but specifically in the production of the technologies and practices of “euthanasia” and extermination. It’s clear that the images of the criminal, the insane, the infirm, and the deviant, are images produced by the most dangerous and odious forms of power. Maybe the functionalists are right that the police (in some generic sense) are essential to social being, but they should nevertheless at no point be trusted.

After visiting both the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Topography of Terror in one day, so much was on my mind that I needed a day of recovery to gather myself to properly convey what it was that I had just experienced.

Beginning with the Memorial, I decided to read through the whole chronological timeline first when I arrived. Although it took quite a bit of time, as I read it I increasingly felt that it was more and more important to finish. As I was reading the information, I noticed that a lot of the people around me where looking up at the section written in German. I wondered how they felt about reading this. I saw the word German referring  to forces, authorities and soldiers many times and I realized that these were the ancestors of some of the people standing next to me. I can’t begin to know how one should go about dealing with being associated with such monstrosities. I know that these people could not have possibly been part of what happened to the Jews, and I guess what I’m wish I could tell them was that I knew that. History is filled with wrongdoings, that is why it is essential in schools, we must learn from our mistakes. I  claim American citizenship, yet I wish that Oppenheimer had never built the atom bomb. I also wish that we would not have invaded Iraq and Vietnam, and, and, and…

As you can see, my thoughts have strayed from the primary reason for the Memorial, but I like to believe that is one of the purposes. Our tour guide Boris mentioned a way that people should feel. Usually I am against enforcing a certain mentality, however, in this case, I feel it is certainly appropriate that at boy the Memorial and the Topography of Terror, people attempt to remain both self conscious as well as open to influence. After reading the Huberman, this is a good time to remind people that sometimes we have to force ourselves to imagine the unimaginable.

What a long, depressing day of witnessing the products of the reign of National Socialism! Although I had already visited the information center under the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, this second experience of it was certainly different in the context of my 4-years-older brain. I consider myself pretty well informed as far as WWII and the Holocaust go, but this memorial is very powerful in that it paints a much more personal picture of the atrocities of the Nazis’ “final solution”. Boris, our tour guide, gave a very interesting and informative talk prior to our entrance into the exhibit, in which he described to us the degree of controversy and the many years of planning and re-planning that went into the construction of the monument and the information center below, and tried (only somewhat successfully) to engage us in a discussion of some of the potential meanings of this intentionally ambiguous memorial. We then proceeded into the exhibit itself, which consists of various rooms with various focus. The first room has rectangles of light on the floor with fragments of writings from survivors and witnesses of the different stages of Jewish persecution in Germany during the Nazi era. One of the most striking of these was a poem written by a Hungarian Jew which gives a vivid description seemingly from the perspective of a living person in one of the mass graves, corpses of his neighbors falling onto him. The next room provides short biographies of different Jewish families from various areas of Nazi occupation, describing their lives and their fates. This was a very sobering experience and Boris’s attempts to entice us to discussion after our trip through the various rooms even less successful.

We then proceeded directly to the Topography of Terror which stands on the former site of the SS headquarters and is dedicated to documenting their rise to power and the subsequent horrors committed by them throughout Europe. At this point, though, it seemed as though everyone–including myself–was pretty much Nazi-ed out for the day, and our lack of enthusiasm was almost certainly apparent to our tour guide.

The best thing about this outing, for me, was seeing the lengths to which modern-day Germany has gone to be transparent about their bloody and terrible past. It was also very heartening to note that neither of these two memorial sites charged entrance fees–perhaps in order to avoid profiting from the atrocious deeds of their past.

After some miscommunication that lead our group to two different meeting spots, we finally came together in front of the information center of the outdoor memorial to the Berlin wall. We began by watching two short documentaries about life surrounding the wall, and the different phases of its use and construction. We then proceeded outside and walked through the park/memorial directly across the street. There was a section of the wall standing in its original spot, and we walked though what during the war would have been the space between the two walls separating east from west, where 30 years earlier we would have all been shot, if we had not already fallen prey to land mines or any of the other myriad forms of discouragement to any would-be escapees. It was interesting to learn that in the east the wall was strictly referred to as the “anti-fascist protection rampart” (because they had always been socialists in east Berlin and couldn’t possibly had anything to do with the actions of the nazi fascists). Further interesting bits of information included: the length of wall that stood along the memorial was in fact one of the first sections to be torn down during the people’s revolution that ended the division of Berlin, but had been replaced for the creation of this memorial; the guard tower on display next to the re-created “death zone” had been similarly replaced after having been purchased back from a private collector on E-Bay; and that the church that stands on the sight of the Church of Reconciliation (which was originally between the two walls and was consequently demolished by the DDR) holds in its basement a disarmed American bomb.

Monday we went as a group to the Jewish museum. We met in front of the building, whose facade was somewhat misleading as to the actual contents of the museum as it was a very typically German-looking building with no traces of modernity. Upon entering, the reality of its contents were revealed. The entrance to the museum itself–beyond the security check, gift shop, coat room, etc.–took us down a set of stairs into a slanted and skewed floor. Our tour guide asked us to interpret this design choice, a request which few of us were eager to answer. He brought us next to one of the 3 or 4 levels of the museum, in which was held information about Jews in the late 19th to 20th century Germany, and gave us some insight into the influence that Jewish people held in those periods. It was refreshing to hear things about German Jews other than the terrible crimes committed against them during the third reich, which seemed to be the main focus of many other tributes to the history of Jews in Germany. It felt like it took agency on the subject of Judaism away from the Nazis and put it in its rightful place.
I’m somewhat biased against these sorts of tours, and they generally make me somewhat uncomfortable, so I was relieved to be able to explore some of the rest of the exhibits independently. It was very interesting to learn about the centuries-long history of Jews in Germany, and to see relics and accounts from before and after the genocide of the Holocaust. Again, it was great to have the focus put on the Jewish people rather than on their victimization during WWII, which I think usually overshadows the hundreds of years that Jews spent as influential members of German and European society. It framed them as something more than victims of a horrific genocide, without ignoring or brushing aside that terrible fact, but also not focusing on it as the most important part of German-Jewish history.