R P N U N Y E Z
D O C U M E N T A R Y P H O T O G R A P H Y
F11 FULL SCREEN
BERLIN . THE UNBEARABLE BURDEN OF THE PAST.
INTRO
Anhalter Straße, halfway between the Berlin Story Bunker and Checkpoint Charlie, was the address of my first hotel in Berlin.
It was going to be a short cultural trip of little more than a weekend and, for the short time available, I had planned to visit some of the places that make Berlin the European Capital of Culture, such as its modern architecture, its urban art, its museums, the famous East Side Gallery -a witness to the GDR era- or the reconstructed Reichstag, the fire of which in February 1933 was the final blow to Hitler's rise to power.
From my room in Anhalter Straße, on the northern edge of the Kreuzberg quarter, every morning I could see a comforting wooded area that turned out to be the location of one of the nerve centres of the Nazi regime: the headquarters of the Gestapo and the feared SS. Right there today is the “Topographie des Terrors” memorial.
Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Wall Memorial, White Crosses Memorial on the banks of the Spree, Stasi Museum, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp just a few kilometres from the capital and an endless list make Berlin today an immense memorial in which, at every step, on every corner, it is evident the enormous effort that German society has made not to forget its atrocious past. An effort - not without shadows, however, such as the controversial Dreher Law at the end of 1968- unparalleled in any other country in the world, comparable only to the immeasurable suffering caused to millions of people by the rise of Nazism to power.
I’m unaware what effect these memorials have today on the thousands of people, German or otherwise, who visit them, but I’m afraid that the words of the German-Jewish Berthold Auerbach are really relevant here. Berthod said: "Novelty attracts one's attention and even respect, but habit soon makes it disappear; we would barely deign to look at the rainbow if it remained for so long on the horizon".
THE PROJECT
What was going to be a stay of a few days turned into a stay of several weeks almost literally among memorials.
To look at the Berlin memorials is not only to delve into Nazi terror, not only to delve into a dark past from which we have all suffered the consequences -would our world have been the same without the Third Reich?- but to face the essence of the human being.
To realise that hell can be here on earth and that the devil is in ourselves is hard to assimilate; as much as abandoning the ancestral myth that we are, to paraphrase J.L. Arsuaga, the chosen species; as much as to see ourselves as we have demonstrated to be throughout our history: an intelligent, contradictory and cruel dressed ape, capable of creating ideologies, capable of following them to their ultimate consequences, capable of playing the violin, capable of binding books with human skin, and doing it all with the same passion or determination.
Delving into the Berlin memorials was a shocking experience; in a few days the images of the modern Berlin of today began to blur and my dreams became nightmares in which images of horror, of victims and executioners, appeared in a kind of dance of ethereal ghosts whispering to me what they once were and what myself, all of us, could be again.
I would like to believe that the enormous material, pedagogical and emotional effort made by German society has borne fruit and will continue to do so; I would like to believe that, as a species, we are capable of avoiding the mistakes of the past, but considering the rise of the far right across Europe and the scorn for human rights across the globe, it seems more than reasonable to have doubts in this respect.
We have lived for too many years with the firm conviction that so much horror had been a lasting lesson and that such things would never happen again, but our own history doesn’t seem to support that conviction.
As Auerbach predicted, over time the nightmares disappeared, the ghosts vanished and everything returned to normality, that normality that we so desire and that so efficiently aligns with indolence.
In this photographic project, I'm not trying as much to document something as to photograph inwards, nor can I pretend that it is a tribute to the victims of so much horror -without the risk of being infinitely insufficient-, it is simply medicine against oblivion.
Apart from the latter, I can only think of one more reason to bring the project to light. A reason masterfully put into words by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: “It happened, therefore it can happen again … It can happen, and it can happen everywhere”.
© Rpnunyez 2024.
Note:
The images used in this photo project are either the author's copyright or can be seen on public exhibition at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre and the Topography of Terror Memorial.