have you seen the movie “the downfall“? (if you’ve seen one of those movies on youtube with hitler screaming at everyone, you’ve seen a bit of it at least.)

if you’ve seen the whole movie though, you might remember the scene where hitler and albert speer, his architect, look wistfully over a mockup of germania, the “new berlin”, future capital of the world.

their plan was to build two huge avenues, forming two axis that crossed the city, a huge domed people’s hall, and a big arch of triumph – much much larger than the one in paris. but because they didn’t know if the sandy ground of berlin could withstand such heavy things, they decided to test it first, by building a large concrete structure: the Schwerbelastungskörper (heavy load-bearing body). it is one of the few traces of hitler’s megalomanic germania in today’s berlin.

the massive structure was to function as a feasibility study for further constructions: if it were to sink less than 6 cm, the soil would be deemed sound enough for big buildings.

it sank 18 cm in three years.

not that it mattered in the end. as the war raged on in berlin, plans were quickly scraped.

the city wanted blow it to smithereens, but was afraid of the effects on the nearby buildings… and so to this day, the heavy cylinder remains, on the corner of dudenstraße and general-pape-straße. it is now an historical monument. from the observation deck next to it, you can pretty much see the whole city, and imagine the huge axis of avenues, with its triumphal arch that never was.

stolperstein, or stumbling blocks, are the name of these little brass cubes that you can find on the sidewalks of berlin. they’re small and unremarkable in the hustle and bustle of the city. but if you take the time to stop and really look, you’ll notice they’re more like silent memorials. each one of these blocks marks the last place of living of a victim of nazism, who was later deported and murdered. they’re made by artist gunter demnig, who started this project in 1993 – today there are over 20000 of them, all over europe.

in the words of cambridge historian, ioseph pearson:

“It is not what is written on the stolpersteine which intrigues, because the inscription is insufficient to conjure a person. It is the emptiness, void, lack of information, the maw of the forgotten, which gives the monuments their power and lifts them from the banality of a statistic.”

more from this series.

“That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.”

the quote is by heinrich heine, a german-jewish poet. it was written in 1820, over a century before the nazi book burnings that took place in the square where it is now displayed. heine’s books where among those destroyed, along with titles by karl marx, bertolt brecht, thomas mann, ernest hemingway, etc.