In my (admittedly limited) time here, Berlin has felt presented outside of its history. There was often little information easily available for the public to understand the significance of places and monuments – particularly the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. A friend of mine described Berlin as presenting itself as a city under siege, like all the political and social movements of the 20th Century happened to Berlin without its control or consent, when in reality it has always been at the heart of those in power.

The title [of the Memorial] doesn’t say “Holocaust” or “Shoah”; in other words, it doesn’t say anything about who did the murdering or why—there’s nothing along the lines of “by Germany under Hitler’s regime,” and the vagueness is disturbing. Of course, the information is familiar, and few visitors would be unaware of it, but the assumption of this familiarity—the failure to mention it at the country’s main memorial for the Jews killed in the Holocaust—separates the victims from their killers and leaches the moral element from the historical event, shunting it to the category of a natural catastrophe. The reduction of responsibility to an embarrassing, tacit fact that “everybody knows” is the first step on the road to forgetting. From The Inadequacy of Berlin’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” by Richard Brody

I’ve been thinking these past few days about a democratic society’s Responsibility of Speech ;; the imperative that heads of state have to address times of tragedy and violence, that a group of people have to reckon publicly with their history. In discussions about Confederate monuments here in the US, it’s often said that there are no monuments to Hitler in Germany – and there shouldn’t be. But the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe doesn’t call its audience into the moral implications of its title – and it must.

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