We’re standing on undulated ground. To the right and left is a sea of 2,711 concrete blocks; some are hardly knee-high, others tower more than three metres above our heads. American architect Peter Eisenman has created a huge walk-around sculpture with this field of pillars. From above it looks like a billowing ocean of stones. In 2005 it became Germany’s central place of remembrance dedicated to the six million European Jews who were murdered during the National Socialist era. Almost every visitor to Berlin comes to see it. The memorial, a reminder of Germany’s darkest chapter in history, a place of remembrance – and a tourist attraction – is very much part of the present, and it’s hard to imagine Berlin without it. It is located in the heart of the capital, near the Brandenburg Gate.
In Berlin history is a permanent part of the backdrop. That may sound simplistic, but where else is the course of time, and especially the 20th century, concentrated so intensely as if seen through a magnifying glass? The area where the Holocaust Memorial now stands was traversed by the Wall from 1961 to 1989, dividing the city into East and West Berlin. During the Second World War the ground was occupied by the bunker of propaganda chief Goebbels.
The capital takes on the challenge of German history: numerous memorial sites act as reminders of, and provide information about, National Socialism, resistance and the division of Germany. Plötzensee Memorial, for instance: between 1933 and 1945 almost 3,000 people were executed here under Nazi law. The room in which the executions took place is now a place of silent remembrance. In the neighbouring area the practices of the Nazi judiciary are documented. At Niederkirchnerstrasse an open-air exhibition presented by the Topography of Terror Foundation informs visitors about the key institutions of Nazi persecution. It is one of Berlin’s most frequented places with over 500,000 visitors a year; construction recently started on its new documentation centre. The Memorial to the German Resistance is located in the Bendlerblock in Berlin-Mitte. This is where the plan to overthrow the Nazi regime was centred – and it was here, in today’s memorial courtyard, that Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and three other officers were summarily executed after the attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944.
Recent German history surrounding the division and the building of the Wall is documented at the Berlin Wall Documentation Center in Bernauerstrasse and the House at Checkpoint Charlie, a former American checkpoint. A five-kilometre trail of dual cobblestones traces the course of the Berlin Wall – a ribbon of remembrance, quietly inconspicuous, but always present. The Bundestag recently decided on a new memorial for Berlin in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall: a memorial to freedom and unity, a reminder of the historic weeks when the Wall fell.
