Water from melting snow drips down one of the stelae in the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
I think the fact that I don’t really understand the Holocaust Memorial’s artistic/architectural nature and yet was still affected by it speaks to how well done the memorial is. I don’t get how or why a field of concrete stelae is supposed to or can memorialise the Holocaust – but it *does*. You walk between the rows of these blocks, which are of various heights – in the middle you are completely dwarfed by them – taking turns as and when you want to turn to find your own way through the field. If it is a metaphor for history, then it’s almost scarily effective – each turn has its own impact on the trail you leave behind you, and can cause you to end up emerging somewhere else around the edge of the field – and with no distinguishing features on the blocks there is very little to aid you in picking out a very specific path as you go through or reaching a specific destination. You could walk through in a straight line and miss a lot. You could very deliberately count your way through, taking certain rows, and still miss a lot. You could aim for an exit point and wander as vaguely as you liked towards that goal. Or you could wander at will, and end up anywhere, or get completely lost. It’s dislocating and chilling – especially in the snow.
The day I was there the sun was starting to melt the snow that had settled on top of some of the stelae, with water droplets running down the sides of the blocks like tears. I wanted to capture some of these drops – but also to give a sense of the memorial as a larger structure that you can get lost in. It was a little tricky to get both, since the stelae are laid out in straight lines – which means it was hard to get them into the background of a photograph whose focal point was some small drops of water on the face of a block. In the end, this is what I managed to capture. Now I have it, I feel like, in a way, the ‘tears’ of the melting snow in focus in front of the bright white snowy, straight path up out of the maze of stelae might say something about the importance of tears, grief and memorialising in finding a way through the maze of history as it impacts upon us. Which isn’t at all what I was initially aiming for – which was the tears caught in the middle of the field of blocks. Maybe my camera is smarter than me.
