Berlin – Graffiti, Free Drinks, & The Holocaust Memorial

Graffiti in Friedrichshain

Olivia and our free drinks

Berlin is a sprawling city, and it is impossible to walk from site to site if you trying to do the tourist bit. My friend Olivia and I were visiting Berlin in December 2010, before heading to Poland for Christmas. We only had a few days in the city, so we picked out a few choice places we had to see and got on the move early the day after we arrived. It was cold, but the snowstorm that had rolled through the night before had passed. After wandering around Friedrichshain and taking photos of the art that covers the buildings, we found a place for brunch. We looked around for a place that might have some menu items in a language one of us knew, so we ended at Mirsham and got an amazing spread of cheese, meats, veggies, bread and crepes. The restaurant owner brought us over some free shots, I don’t know what was in them but they were delicious, and just the right thing to warm us up.

Part of the Berlin Wall

After brunch we made our way to the Berlin Wall, which was as beautiful as it was tragic. To step between the East and West and see the colorful graffiti on one side and nothing on the other was a powerful reminder of Germany’s painful past. Walking the length of the wall during a milder time of year is something I would love to do someday.

A view of the memorial

The Holocaust Memorial covers 4.7 acres (or 19,000 square meters) of different sized concrete blocks that rise from the ground at different heights on a grid layout. The first idea for a memorial was thought up back in 1988, and in December 2004 it was completed after over a year of construction. The project, designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold, is meant to make visitors feel uneasy and unstable in its disorienting environment. You can enter from any side of the property and walk through it from any way you want.

Me in the depths of the site.

Olivia and I wandered between the lines of stelae at our own pace, going in different directions while silently observing. In the snow, it felt like being in an old movie, a photograph of a strange dream. The varying sizes and sloping ground produced a feeling of weightlessness in a place that felt, in many way, like a cemetery. When I was at the smaller sized blocks, I could look out at the field of boxed history. My maternal line, until my mother, were Russian Jews. My great-grandmother escaped from Russia during the era of Stalin. I felt the memorial on a much larger scale than the Murdered Jews of Europe, it was representing inequality and discrimination and the insanity that is mass persecution.

Recalling that experience brings one of my favorite quotes to mind, “Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.” (Tryon Edwards). Such zealous hatred is the truest form of deranged delusion. If you are afforded the opportunity to visit Berlin, you must visit the Holocaust Memorial. You must experience physical act of walking through the memorial. The visual confusion of where you are in relation to the site (is that block bigger than that one? or is the ground more sloped there? Am I near the middle or the end?) evokes an emotional and ethereal response from deep within yourself that you can only true experience to understand.