Place and memory in Berlin (3)

Many of the sites we visited in Berlin were concerned with the remembrance of violence and the memorialisation of its victims. One these was the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church (left), which we saw on our first afternoon. The church and the surrounding area of the city was bombed almost to pieces towards the end of World War Two. Of the original church, only the bell tower remains. Its original stonework is blackened and the broken steeple juts jaggedly into the sky. The tower has been left as a reminder of the destructiveness of war, and its partially restored interior now houses a small memorial museum. A new church has been erected on the rest of the site.

Unlike the Kaiser Wilhelm church, several of Berlin’s other memorial sites are concerned with violence perpetrated by the German people - whether against others or themselves. One of the most moving of these is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened in 2005. The coffin-like stones that comprise it look at first to be only about knee height. But as you begin to walk among them, the ground slopes down and the cold, grey blocks rise up over your head. I quickly lost sight of my companions as I moved along the narrow rows. For me it evoked a feeling of isolation, even disempowerment, and my emergence on the other side was accompanied by a sense of relief.

Our guide on the walking tour said that some people have questioned the effectiveness of the memorial. Can such an installation remember the victims better, say, than an exhibition with pictures and text? The question goes to the heart of how we think memory works and what we think memory is. In my view, words and images can be powerful tools for remembrance but so too can more physical things. The memorial successfully incorporates remembrance of the murdered Jews into the build space of central Berlin in a way that even the Jewish museum does not. Its physicality makes it difficult to ignore but easy to experience in a bodily way. For me, being able to move among the stones and feel the coldness encouraged sympathy for the victims in a fairly immediate manner.

I found identifying with the perpetrators a far more difficult thing to do. But that, at least in part, is what an installation at the Jewish museum required me to do. At the very end of the gallery of continuity, there is a space filled with iron representations of human heads. Hundreds of these thick, disc-like things with anguished eyes and crying mouths are spread over the floor, next to a sign indicating that visitors may walk on them. The sound as people did so was deeply disturbing to me. It was a memorial space that demanded I acknowledge my own complicity with what had happened, and least in the sense of admitting that as a human being like the perpetrators I have the capacity for great evil too.


[all pics by ML except the last one, which was uploaded from here]