Berlin: The Holocaust Memorial and Topography of Terror
Arriving in Berlin felt like stepping into a city still arguing with itself about what it wanted to be. After the forests and medieval towns of the previous days, the scale was jarring. Cranes in every direction. Construction everywhere—new glass towers going up alongside buildings still bearing shrapnel scars. The Fernsehturm, East Germany’s television tower, rose above Alexanderplatz and was visible from nearly every point in the city, a needle in the sky that had once been a political statement and now was just a landmark. Berlin absorbs its history into its infrastructure in ways that other cities do not. The 20th century is not behind you here. It is in the building next to you, or the gap where a building should be.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe occupies a full city block near the Brandenburg Gate—prime real estate in the center of unified Berlin. It is 2,711 concrete stelae arranged in a grid on gently undulating ground. The number has no specific symbolic meaning; Eisenman has said as much. What the number produces, multiplied out across the field, is a particular experience of scale and repetition.
From the outside, at the edges, the blocks are short—knee-height, waist-height. You walk in. The ground dips. The stelae grow taller. Then they tower over you, eight or nine feet high, and you can no longer see the street, no longer see other visitors except in brief flashes at the intersections of the grid. The stelae lean very slightly at different angles. The ground is uneven underfoot. It is disorienting in a way that is not theatrical—it happens to you before you have decided to let it happen. The memorial works on you physically before it works on you intellectually, which may be the point.
Underneath the stelae field, an underground information center. Dimly lit rooms with backlit panels. Names, dates, photographs, and letters. The Room of Families presents documented cases of individual families, following them from ordinary lives to deportation and death. You read dates of birth, occupations, names of children, and then dates of deportation, and then nothing. The memorial above is deliberately abstract, designed to resist easy interpretation. The information center below is deliberately specific, and specificity is harder than abstraction. The abstraction generates an experience of dislocation. The specificity gives you a person to think about, and then records the moment when that person stopped being recorded.
Topography of Terror
A short walk from the memorial: the Topography of Terror, built on the site where the Gestapo and SS headquarters once stood. The buildings were destroyed in Allied bombing and then demolished after the war. The site sat abandoned in the no-man’s-land between East and West Berlin for decades—a preserved section of the Berlin Wall still runs along one edge, the Wall having been built directly over the rubble of the Gestapo cellars. In 1987, archaeologists began excavating. They found the cells. The exhibition was built around and over what they found.
The outdoor exhibit runs along the excavated foundations. Photographs and documents are mounted on panels that face the excavations and the preserved wall section. Orders signed by named officials. Photographs of men in uniform at their desks, looking entirely ordinary. Organizational charts of the SS and Gestapo. The apparatus of systematic murder rendered in the visual language of administration—org charts, memoranda, stamped forms, signatures. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil after covering Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. The Topography of Terror is a visual argument for the same thesis: this was carried out by offices, by bureaucrats, by paperwork, by the same organizational tools that any large institution uses.
Evening at Alexanderplatz
By evening, I needed to come up for air. Alexanderplatz was alive with what cities always have in them: crowds moving in all directions, bicycles everywhere, a stage set up for something, the U-Bahn rumbling under the plaza. People eating at outdoor tables. Children running. Berlin doing what cities do—moving forward, living on top of what came before. I sat for a while and watched. The juxtaposition between the day’s sites and this evening crowd was not something to resolve. It was just true. This is what cities look like when they continue. They continue.
