Berlin. A city like no other. -- I had hoped when first there to see the Berlin Wall. To see it. Naive me. It has vanished entirely except for a few blocks of cement here and there. During my last visit, a giant diaroma had been constructed in an enclosed exhibit to mimic what the very street outside would have looked like before the fall of the wall. -- Put another way, one may visit Auschwitz -- there are remnants enough to make the visit a bizarre but somehow "educational" tourist site (I do not say attraction). But the Wall is gone. -- It introduced me to the thought that the destruction or obliteration or annihilation of the offending thing (thing here as something that might have had a monumental afterlife) ironically makes it infinitely harder to recall or commemorate the offending thing. Between the desire to erase the object that recalls atrocity and the desire to preserve that object as a means to recall it so as not to repeat it, where does one land? I suppose no general rules are applicable... like most things, one would have to decide case by case... But I will say that I wish they had preserved more of the Berlin Wall. Its absence makes the reality of its as historical past ... less real. As usual, a stirring and searching post -- MK has a gift for the elegaic, I think -- not unsurprising in a context where one principle is "we study history to honour ancestors" [Post #4].
Berlin. A city like no other. -- I had hoped when first there to see the Berlin Wall. To see it. Naive me. It has vanished entirely except for a few blocks of cement here and there. During my last visit, a giant diaroma had been constructed in an enclosed exhibit to mimic what the very street outside would have looked like before the fall of the wall. -- Put another way, one may visit Auschwitz -- there are remnants enough to make the visit a bizarre but somehow "educational" tourist site (I do not say attraction). But the Wall is gone. -- It introduced me to the thought that the destruction or obliteration or annihilation of the offending thing (thing here as something that might have had a monumental afterlife) ironically makes it infinitely harder to recall or commemorate the offending thing. Between the desire to erase the object that recalls atrocity and the desire to preserve that object as a means to recall it so as not to repeat it, where does one land? I suppose no general rules are applicable... like most things, one would have to decide case by case... But I will say that I wish they had preserved more of the Berlin Wall. Its absence makes the reality of its as historical past ... less real. As usual, a stirring and searching post -- MK has a gift for the elegaic, I think -- not unsurprising in a context where one principle is "we study history to honour ancestors" [Post #4].