The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

This step is often and more abstrusely labeled the “historicization” of the Third Reich. Some see it as desirable, others as inevitable, still others as something to be resisted at all costs. The historians and artists who have so creatively engaged history in the city—in the Bendlerblock, the Topography of Terror, and elsewhere—generally see their work as contributing to a confrontation with the Nazi past that is far from complete. They use the power of place to make that past vivid, comprehensible, and inextricable from the lives of today’s Berliners. In showing how thoroughly the Third Reich permeated the daily life of the city, their work implies that that era is far more than mere history. Rosh’s Holocaust memorial, standing apart from the visible remnants of Nazi Berlin, would offer a different message. Perhaps it should not be directly compared to these other, lesser memorials: it is larger, simpler, more palatable, and therefore likely to reach a far wider public. Most important, it eschews the relentlessly rational confrontation with the past in favor of a grand symbolic gesture.