I wanted to write a bit about the Holocause remembrance site in Berlin:
http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/
It was easily the most impressive experience of this trip, and actually in a very long time for me. This is especially because it is deeply German. It expresses a particular German way of remembering, that is through individual introspection.
The sensation is almost overwhelming once one gets lost among it's grey featureless stela. As one decends from the city one enters into a nameless and solitary space where the inconceivable becomes almost tangible. All human interaction is projected out impossibly far, one might see someone walking past in the distance, but this and the dampened sounds of the city only heigthen the feeling of desperation that creeps in.
As it does not impose any of these reflections on the visitor it is of course highly subjective, my Mexican friend didn't think it fitting, she felt there should be something more enormous, fitting to the enormity of what is remembered (the french didn't seem to care to much...), and certainly many Germans don't get it either. Fair enough when Kids ply catch around and on top of the slabs on the fringes but I was quite upset with "young adults" playing hide and seek, laughing loudly within or seeing a couple kissing in the middle of it (at the same time this weird place manages to symbolically charge all the sounds and sights that occur within, it is very powerfull)
The jewish physicist I was with convinced me it was ok though, since it is so personal. And I personally think that in this way it also is a mirror of our society as it exists today and becomes much more acute then it would be as a pure place of remembrance.
And in the end even among these memories life has gone on and if these memories can't withstand this fact then they are bound to be lost eventually.
Edit: Sorry if I'm only sketchily following journals these days, it's because I'm only browsing from work and don't have much muse for browsing, I promise to catch up soon!
http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/
It was easily the most impressive experience of this trip, and actually in a very long time for me. This is especially because it is deeply German. It expresses a particular German way of remembering, that is through individual introspection.
The sensation is almost overwhelming once one gets lost among it's grey featureless stela. As one decends from the city one enters into a nameless and solitary space where the inconceivable becomes almost tangible. All human interaction is projected out impossibly far, one might see someone walking past in the distance, but this and the dampened sounds of the city only heigthen the feeling of desperation that creeps in.
As it does not impose any of these reflections on the visitor it is of course highly subjective, my Mexican friend didn't think it fitting, she felt there should be something more enormous, fitting to the enormity of what is remembered (the french didn't seem to care to much...), and certainly many Germans don't get it either. Fair enough when Kids ply catch around and on top of the slabs on the fringes but I was quite upset with "young adults" playing hide and seek, laughing loudly within or seeing a couple kissing in the middle of it (at the same time this weird place manages to symbolically charge all the sounds and sights that occur within, it is very powerfull)
The jewish physicist I was with convinced me it was ok though, since it is so personal. And I personally think that in this way it also is a mirror of our society as it exists today and becomes much more acute then it would be as a pure place of remembrance.
And in the end even among these memories life has gone on and if these memories can't withstand this fact then they are bound to be lost eventually.
Edit: Sorry if I'm only sketchily following journals these days, it's because I'm only browsing from work and don't have much muse for browsing, I promise to catch up soon!