Berlin: Wannsee to the Reichstag
This was the day Berlin showed me its full range. Morning at the house where the Final Solution was coordinated over cognac and a catered lunch. Evening inside the glass dome of the Reichstag, looking down through a transparent floor into the chamber where Germany’s parliament now meets. The distance between those two experiences was about eight hours and seventy years, and Berlin held both of them without apparent contradiction.
The Wannsee Conference House
The villa at Am Großen Wannsee 56–58 is beautiful. That is the first thing you notice, and it is supposed to be uncomfortable. The building is a large neoclassical villa in a prosperous lakeside suburb, surrounded by mature gardens that slope down to the water. It looks like what it was before the war: a private home for a wealthy family, the kind of place that hosted garden parties. On January 20, 1942, fifteen senior Nazi officials gathered here for a working meeting that lasted approximately ninety minutes, during which they coordinated the administrative machinery for the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe.
The Wannsee Conference did not decide to carry out the Holocaust—the killing had already begun in the east, with mobile killing units operating behind the German front lines since the summer of 1941. What the conference did was coordinate the bureaucratic apparatus. Which agencies were responsible for which territories. How the rail network would be used. What would happen to Jews in mixed marriages and to partial Jews. It was an administrative meeting, attended by department heads and state secretaries, most of them holding advanced degrees. The minutes, taken by Adolf Eichmann and edited by Reinhard Heydrich, survived the war because a copy was found in German Foreign Ministry files in 1947. They are displayed in the room where the meeting took place, behind glass.
The minutes are written in the vocabulary of bureaucratic euphemism. “Evacuation” meant deportation. “Special treatment” meant murder. “Resettlement in the east” meant death. Eleven million Jews across Europe—the document listed them country by country, with numbers—were identified for what the minutes called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The table reads like a logistics report. The view from the window where I stood reading it was the lake in the morning light.
The Jewish Museum and the Tiergarten
Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is a building that does not let you be comfortable in it. The zinc-clad exterior is cut with angular windows that have no obvious relationship to the interior—they follow a different geometry, the geometry of addresses of deported Jews mapped onto the building’s surface. Inside, three axes run through the building: the Axis of Exile, which ends in a garden of tilted concrete columns; the Axis of the Holocaust, which ends in a dark, sealed tower you can enter but not fully illuminate; and the Axis of Continuity, which leads to the permanent exhibition. The floors tilt. The walls lean. Spaces are designed to produce disorientation as a physical experience rather than an intellectual one.
Afterward, I walked through the Tiergarten and found the Goethe monument—white marble, the poet seated in thought, surrounded by allegorical figures representing his major works. Goethe in the park, on a pleasant afternoon, near the building that documented the administrative coordination of genocide. Both are Germany. The same country that produced Faust produced the Wannsee Protocol. This is not a paradox to be resolved; it is a fact to be held.
Brandenburg Gate at Sunset
By evening I had walked miles. The Brandenburg Gate at sunset was full of tourists and pedal cars and vendors selling currywurst, the pink sky visible through the Doric columns. People were taking photographs of themselves in front of it. Children were running. The gate that once marked the edge of the no-man’s-land between East and West—the gate that stood sealed and unreachable for twenty-eight years, visible from both sides but passable by neither—was now a backdrop for vacation photographs, a symbol of a city that had reassembled itself.
I didn’t know what to make of that, so I just stood and watched for a while. Maybe the tourism is a form of continuation. Maybe the vacation photographs are how ordinary life asserts itself over the uses a place has been put to. The gate has been many things. Now it’s also this.
Inside the Reichstag Dome
The Reichstag—Germany’s parliament building—was the site of the fire in February 1933 that the Nazis used as the pretext to suspend civil liberties and consolidate power. The building was bombed heavily during the war, left as a ruin during the Cold War while Soviet soldiers’ graffiti remained on its interior walls, and then, after reunification, given to the British architect Norman Foster for renovation. Foster’s most significant addition was the glass dome on top of the building: transparent, spiral-ramped, open to the public without charge, with a glass floor through which visitors can look down into the parliamentary chamber while their elected representatives are in session. The transparency is a deliberate architectural argument about democratic governance.
I climbed the ramp as the sky outside went dark and the city lights came on. Looking down through the glass floor at the Bundestag chamber below. Looking up through the mirrored cone that funnels natural light into the building during the day. From the top of the dome, Berlin spread out in every direction—the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe a few blocks to the south, the Wannsee suburbs somewhere in the darkness to the west, the line where the Wall had run traced by a slightly different density of streetlights. I was twenty-one, from Michigan, and I had spent the day reading the Wannsee Protocol and standing in the Gestapo cellars. And now I was standing inside a rebuilt democracy looking out over the city where all of it had happened. I did not have the words for it then. I am still not sure I do.
