A year ago I was in Berlin with my friend Nancy. On January 13th we had a walking tour booked that was not for the feint of heart - it was called the Topography of Terror.
This 3-hour walking tour explored the 12 years that still gape like an open wound at the center of Germany’s 20th century history: the years between 1933 and 1945 when Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party (the Nazis) steered Germany into war and terror. In the company of a 20th century historian, we explored the rise of the Nazis to power, the horrors and tragedies of their regime, and the events and circumstances that led to their fall. We visited some of the monuments designed and envisioned by Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer that bear active witness to the reign of the Third Reich, trying to come to terms with this traumatic “past that will not pass away,” and in so doing will link Nazi history to the modern Berlin.
We met at the Brandenburg Gate, from where we were able to look down the long, straight Strasse des 17. Juni, one of the main boulevards in Albert Speer’s proposed plan for the new monumental center of “World Capital Germania,” as Nazi Berlin was to be renamed. After a discussion of this plan and the imagined city we found ourselves at the memorial of the central tragedy of the Nazi regime: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
This controversial and enigmatic monument provided us with a context to examine the Nazi policy toward Jews and others whom they identified as “inferior races,” a policy most clearly revealed in the Nuremberg Laws that provided the horrific “final solution to the Jewish question” in 1942.
As we walked through the former Wilhemstrasse government quarter of Berlin we passed many other sites, memorials, and works of architecture that helped us confront the realities of Nazi rule including the former site of Hitler’s Chancellery, the (now built-over) location of the Führerbunker, the former Reich Ministry of Aviation (Luftwaffe), and other major offices that orchestrated the war.
We concluded at the recently opened Topography of Terror exhibition at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, an exhibition that represents the most self-conscious effort in the city to uncover the Nazi legacy of a particular place. The nature and organization of the exhibition will gave us considerable food for thought. Instead of trying to provide a final statement about the horrors of Germany’s Nazi past, the Topography of Terror museum is committed to an active engagement with that past, contextualizing it by using place to make history vivid, comprehensible, and inextricably connected to the present.
This last stop was, in many senses, the primary focus of the entire walking tour. We were encouraged not merely to “historicize” the Third Reich by separating it completely from the present, but rather are trying to grapple with Berlin’s Nazi legacy—and especially with the sites that remain linked to it—in order to understand how this legacy shapes Berlin today. I was shocked at how many of these 'control' strategies are still being used to some extent by governments today to manipulate the public and promote a rather narrow agenda.
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