In another case of absence and presence, I visited the memorial to the book burning that took place during the Third Reich. The one most well known happened on May 10, 1933 in the Opernplatz —where this memorial is sited—four short months after Hitler became chancellor. A meter square window of plexiglass placed level with the cobbles looks down into a room of white, empty bookshelves, large enough to fit the 20,000 books that were burned on that day. The statement is blunt and unforgiving, coming along with a lack of information similar to many of the other Denkmäler I have seen in Berlin. One of the horrors of these remembered events is their perpetration by the students attending Humboldt University, which stands right across the street.

It was a blustery day upon my visit to Tuefelsberg, a large hill made of rubble from the clean up after the end of WWII. Due to the wind, there were a large number of people flying kites or simply enjoying the view. It was a strange experience to be standing in relatively bucolic space physically made of the debris of war. A friend of mine mentioned that all you have to do is dig past the thin layer of top soil and hit the brick and concrete produced by the leveling of the city. If one doesn’t bring a shovel to do some real digging, this imagined space of the ruins is a strange production, an experience that requires a caption of information to produce itself. Upon seeing Seigessäule (the Tower to Victory) oft in the distance, I remembered thinking, “Oh, look! A hill in Berlin.” Actually going to this hill, to stand upon what I had previously failed to know the contents of, was a touch surreal to say the least.

I don’t feel I was there long enough to develop a long description adequate to this beautiful city on the Elbe, one that stands as proof to the German people’s Romantic period pride at keeping the cultural depth of Greek Civilization alive in the 18th and 19th centuries. (It really is that beautiful.) Yet, being in a city whose fundamental artifacts are buildings that have been reconstructed, some of them quite recently, gave me pause to think about tourism in general and the sentimentality that can sometimes take place in the moment of experience: a projection of the current into a future reflection. I was sitting in the grass along the river, alone, across from the inevitably touristy altstadt, looking at the completely reconstructed Frauenkirche under the light of a full moon: my mind shot immediately to a time in which I would recall this moment, a corner stone of experience to reconstruct my brief visit to this city demolished by allied bombs in the closing days of World War II.

Yesterday, I paid a visit to the Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen (Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism) which which sits across the street from the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. Both have some privacy from the other, produced by a stand of scrubby trees. The memorial is a singular stele of similar proportion to the stones across the way, but is of much larger size and canted more dramatically than those that make up the vast array of rectangular stele in the adjacent site. (The designers are different, however.) While the stele for the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas look as if they have been excavated archaeologically, dug and uncovered from the earth, this memorial appears as if it has fallen out of the sky, appearing suddenly, without warning. Apparently absent of any signage or documentation, there is an almost happenstance quality to this mausoleum like object: if one wasn’t looking for it, it would be surprising to come across. (Later, upon looking at the memorial’s wikipedia page, there is a low, ground level sign, but, I did not see this during my visit.)

Standing about 3.5 meters tall and 2 meters wide, the concrete block could be described as a peep show viewed through a windowed trapezoidal cut formed into one face the block, a cut who’s shape is reminiscent of neo-brutalism. Upon looking in, a viewer is confronted with a short black & white video loop of two young men, looking in their early 20’s, standing in a park and sharing a moment of intimacy: a kiss, a caress and a whisper. After the whisper, the whispered-to offers a facial expression of joy and mystery; a sly, knowing, excited smile passes over his face. Edited to present itself as seamless, the video loop was shot at the exact cite of viewing. The trees that one sees in the video are the same ones sit behind the block, putting the video it what seems like a contemporary space. Yet, due to the black & white capture, the 1.375:1 “Academy Format” aspect ratio (one that was the standard format in the 1930s), the seeming timelessness of both the haircuts and dress of the two young men; the work speaks to the presence of lost possibility, of robbed chances, of experiences never had. In further, because the law prohibiting homosexual acts by men, §175, was only truly enforceable by members of the public informing on their fellow citizens, a visitor is placed in the position to make the choice to allow these two people to be undisturbed as they share their private moment, engaging in what was then an activity punishable by imprisonment, even if this position is an imagined one.