Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) and the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror)

Our class visit this past Wednesday to the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) and the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror) presented me with one of most emotionally challenging trips we have gone on during this course. Floating on top of the steady waves of sorrow that always attend me during visits to these kind of places was a series of complicated dialectics, ones difficult to resolve or even develop at the current moment, save for their brief mention: (the victims/the perpetrators), (reason/unreason), (above ground, light filled/subterranean, dark), (site/non-site), (information aesthetic/aesthetic impenetrability), (text/image), (unfathomability/directness of story and narrative). Unfortunately, I remain, at least at the time of this writing, stuck in the silence that Georges Didi-Huberman so earnestly asks us to break in his excellent Images in Spite of All, a silence that sticks to and is complicated by the 2,711 uneven, rectangular stele that reside above the Information Center of the memorial.