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.