On Place and Memory: Berlin, Scars and Social Memory

The Cresswell (2004) reading on “Place and Memory” reminded me (memories brought to present) of a city that impacted me when I visited it exactly because of its way of making memories feel alive in such an effective way you cannot help but cry sometimes when you are visiting some of its spaces, memorials or monuments. I’m talking about Berlin in Germany. I visited it back in 2011 and went on the historical tour that took me throughout the city where they have practically all of it marked with historic points of interest from the Nazi period. 

One very interesting thing to highlight is how the place where Hitler committed suicide (his bunker) is purposefully not made a tourist attraction point, nevertheless is not erased from the city's history. Actually there is a housing development built in the 80s and only an informational board set up in the midst of the parking lot gives information in the form of facts and myths of Hitler’s defeat and suicide. At a public level, like Cresswell (p. 90) says, which memories get to be promoted and how is a political decision. And this is clearly a very smart and thoughtful one.

Hitler's bunker and suicide place is intentionally marked only with this 
information board in the middle of a parking lot of a contemporary housing 
project  built over the destroyed bunker. HNAPEL/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Hitler’s bunker and suicide place is an example. The way it’s marked within the city is clearly an intentional political decision of how they want history to remember the deranged leader of this dark episode of German and world history. They did not want to either make it a place for supremacists to peregrine, nor they wanted it to be a target for attacks. I think it was a brilliant way to solve it: a contemporary housing project built over the destroy bunker where regular citizens live and at the same time not erasing it from history by marking the place with a factual information board in a marginal place such as a parking lot.

Another place that came to my memory while reading Cresswell is the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. A huge artistic display that features concrete vertical pieces set up sort of like a city or sometimes like a huge concrete orderly maze. 

Intriguing and controversial Holocaust Memorial space in Berlin designed by an American architect is a place that does not leave anyone indifferent. Getty Images.

The first thing that comes to mind when you are there is that they resemble graves. But there are all plain, no inscriptions or names or any marks; they are all of different sizes sometimes bigger than you, sometimes just a step up your feet. You can get lost in its corridors at some parts. And it is also interesting to notice how small kids climb them sometimes as it was a playground. At times it looks like a city’s buildings, at times as a graveyard. 

Like the architect has said, it was built to get any personal interpretation, although it has been criticized precisely for being too abstract. To me, it was a place where at the same time you could feel a tense calm and peace but disturbing too. This mixed emotions that such a huge and imposing place generates is a sign of the brilliancy of how this place was design and built for memories to interact with the monument. What you know about the Holocaust, what you learn about it while being in this country and experiencing the places, what you feel while your knowledge interacts with your feelings and memories that aren’t even yours but of a collective group that suffered so much.

Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. A controversial monument - place - that invites diverse interpretations and meanings. Photos from Getty Images.

Underground this memorial is an information center that is like a museum with also amazingly arranged rooms to bring history to the present, as Cresswell says. Each room is very different and two of them caught more my attention. One rather small room very dimly lit with people walking around a few tomb graves with light coming out of them. 

Each one has a name, date and story told through a real letter that was recovered, handwritten by someone going to the extermination camps that managed to throw the letters outside the cramped trains. Sometimes there are pictures of the person, sometimes not. But as you move from tomb to tomb reading the handwritten letters and placing a name or a face to it, the experience is overwhelming with emotions and you cant help sobbing, and hearing other people around sobbing as well. It is very moving.

But one of the most impactful rooms to me was one that uses sound more than vision and it is called the Room of Names, simple concept: name the fallen, make them exist for you. You go into a tall room with tall white walls and a few benches. You sit down or stand up and then a voice starts reading names and last names, birth and death dates while the four walls show at once the name that is being read out loud. This seemed so simple to me and yet so moving because the assassinated were named, each their single stories and lives were being honored and not forgotten every time we hear their names, we think of the personal private suffering, their identities relived and rescued for collective .

Room of Names is a space where sound is the main medium to link history and the present, the personal and the collective, the person listening the names of the dead produces feelings and ever lasting memories where history and present intertwines. Visitors Center, Berlin.

There are only two more places I want to share with you from this experience with places and memories I had in Berlin. One is the Concentration Camp I visited, and of course many, many things can be said about it (Cresswell takes a critique for the Catholic appropriation intent of one of these camps), but I will just share with you the sight among all that really broke me down from the many there are in such a memory-place. It was a pile of worn out shoes stiff because of passing time; every size shoes, by the crematory ruins. Just to think of each person that worn them and that lost their lives in such horrible conditions is beyond moving.

(PLACE YOUR MEMORY HERE)

Lastly, a place that does not have to do precisely with the Nazi regime but with the Cold War in Berlin is the Berlin Wall. And this reminds me also Alatout’s reading on the Israeli wall. So as to not make this post longer than it is, I will just point out to the fact that after the Berlin wall was torn down in 1989 several sections of it were preserved for memory and history telling. And of course is the first thing you want to see when you go to Berlin, the wall. The very interesting thing to me about how those sections have been preserved is that they have intervened them with art. A piece of the wall is painted by an artist showcasing whatever they want to in relation to the wall, their own memories, thoughts and feelings. A wall that for political-ideological reasons was built to separate bodies and to prevent their mobilization; a wall that was torn down materially by those bodies; a wall today preserved for history and memory through artistic interventions. Freedom and creativity wining over repression and suppression. A new place and experience is built over the old without erasing it so that its consequences are never forgotten, but a re-appropriation of meaning of such place.

(1961) Walls as technology of Ideology. The Berlin wall being reinforced by East German workers near the Brandenburg Gate. Research.archives.gov

(1986) Three years before it came down, graffiti only on the West side of the wall while the East side is 'clean' and guarded. The Guardian.

 

(1989) Wall torn down. Time.com.

(1989) Bodies tearing down the wall of confinement. Time.com

 

Tourists take pictures by preserved sections of the wall which have new
meanings through their appropriation by art. The Guardian 

Other sections:

More Berlin Wall Art: 

https://allthatsinteresting.com/berlin-wall-art

VIDEO from 1989 actual crumbling of the wall:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmRPP2WXX0U

Berlin Art in the city:

https://www.berlinwallart.com/gallery