We began our first full day in Berlin with a typical German buffet in the beautiful restaurant of our hotel. The meal included over ten options of freshly baked bread (more than 3000 types of bread exist in Germany), smoked cold cuts, sausages, fruits, and even pickled herring.
We then embarked on a bus tour from Alexanderplatz, a notable square home to the iconic TV tower in former East Berlin. Our tour guide, Richard, brought us to several monuments and memorials around Berlin related to World War II and the Holocaust. These memorials have become integral to our understanding of how Germany continues to remember the Holocaust.
For me, the most striking of these stops was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial is gigantic, taking up an entire city block in a prominent spot of Berlin, close to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building. It is made up of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern. Each slab varies in height, with some only inches above the ground and others climbing far above my head. As I descended into the memorial I felt as if I was being swallowed into a dark void, lost into nothingness. To me, the memorial seems to represent how the lives of over 6 million fell, or rather, were pushed into this same void. However, this is only my interpretation. The memorial opened quite recently, in 2004, and the designers Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold purposely created it as an open interpretation, allowing each visitor to form a meaning that best helps them develop their understanding of the Holocaust.
Just across Hannah-Arendt-Straße from the memorial is another site of historical significance, yet this one is home to no information. After crossing the street, we found ourselves standing on the gravel of an inconspicuous parking lot. We stood above the site of Hitler’s bunker, where he spent his final days in 1945 before ultimately committing suicide with a cyanide pill. There is absolutely no trace of the bunker, rather it is one of the most mundane apartment parking lots I have ever seen. The German government has carefully chosen what parts of this story we should not memorialize nor even remember, and this is one of them.
