The latest contribution to Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the fittingly cumbersome term means “confronting its past"—is a squat, gray, glass-and-steel box of a building on the site of what had been the Gestapo and SS headquarters. The oddly named Topography of Terror, a museumlike institution that calls itself a “documentation center,” emerges as a striking presence in central Berlin befitting the burdens of history and atonement that it mediates.
Given the proliferation of European museums and memorial sites, along with profuse scholarly considerations and reconsiderations of Hitler’s reign, the recently opened Topography of Terror might seem superfluous. But those few who are still alive to bear witness will die soon, which must inaugurate a new phase of Holocaust studies. And in other ways, too, it seems that it is only now finally possible for Germans to undertake a full-force moral reckoning.
Incomplete moral confrontation of ex-Nazis persisted throughout the 20th century. The Topography of Terror details disturbing failures of resolution that allowed significant numbers of war criminals to escape to countries that shielded them, although their identities were known. Extraditions and trials lingered on even into the 1980s and 1990s; cases were closed or life sentences quietly abridged. As recently as 2008, according to newspaper articles on display, journalists were still uncovering Nazi “old-boy networks” that had prospered for decades in postwar German intelligence and police agencies.
An exhibition this past fall at the German Historical Museum called “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime,” examining the cult of the Führer and his ubiquitous appeal throughout German culture in the vein of Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 Hitler’s Willing Executioners, was said to be the first-ever “Hitler show” in postwar Germany.
So we are still in the process of learning how to memorialize the Holocaust. (By “we,” I mean, on the one hand, Germans, and on the other, everyone else—the work of commemoration is related, but different, for those two constituencies.) The tasks of comprehension, atonement, and uncompromised resistance to future transgressions against humanity are not yet complete. The center’s contemporaneity, reflected in its sleek structure, conveys this surprising timeliness for an effort many might have thought was already achieved in a comfortably distant past.
Hitler installed the Prussian Secret State Police Office (Gestapa) at what was then Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 within a few months of his January 1933 appointment as Reich Chancellor. The imposing, neoclassically ornate structure that had been a school of industrial arts and crafts before the Nazis took it over could not be more unlike the present minimalist building. It’s hard to imagine, walking through the ultramodern space, what the “topography” must have looked like back in the 1930s, and I think that’s exactly the architect Ursula Wilms’s intention as she superimposes our contemporary style, our presence, on top of the historical specter.
Conflicts have simmered for decades over the site’s preservation and development, as well as the larger philosophical question of precisely how to memorialize this institution of oppression. Though devastated by bombing at the war’s end, the building wasn’t completely destroyed; it was ultimately blown up in 1956, a time when Germans were unwilling to undertake serious historical self-examination, and in 1961 the Berlin Wall’s erection on the vacant site further overshadowed and buried its history. A 200-meter section of the wall still stands along one side of the Topography of Terror’s grounds, generating a grim sense of the city’s totalitarian palimpsests.
Evoking clean-cut Bauhaus geometries—Mies van der Rohe’s 1968 New National Gallery in the nearby Tiergarten neighborhood seems especially influential—the structure would have been despised by the Nazis. What now stands on the nerve center of their Reich aesthetically opposes their ideologies. Wilms’s design balances consciousness between past and present in a place different from, architecturally and ethically, yet the same as, historically and memorially, the core of the police state.
Directly outside the building, sparse but resonant archaeological excavations include cells from the Gestapo “house prison,” an SS mess hut, and crumbling pieces of the complex’s walls and foundation. In 1987, an open-air exhibition presented these ruins, which construction workers had accidentally discovered. Meant to be temporary, the exhibit lasted more than 20 years because of its popularity. Rudy Koshar describes its impact in From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 (University of California Press, 2000): “In contrast to a museum, which by its nature tends to muffle the emotional impact of historical events with a rationalistic approach to artifacts,” the outdoor display “was an austere site whose very impermanence and proximity to the tangible effects of Hitler’s regime gave it the character of an open wound in the landscape.”
In the 1980s, a design competition was held for a permanent building, and a winner chosen, but the Berlin Senate decided not to proceed. Another competition in the 1990s was won by Peter Zumthor, and construction was actually begun but then halted amid controversies. That creation was architecturally spectacular, which was belatedly judged wrong for the site, explained Thomas Lutz, head of the documentation center’s memorial-museums department and a prominent Holocaust educator; the design needed to be more understated. “Zumthor’s was a much more powerful building, a symbol in itself, like Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin. Zumthor was a shooting star, an artist. His building was too expensive, and complicated. Wilms’s idea was not to have a building that is itself a symbol.”
Wilms’s design, too, has engendered opposition. Some critics felt that the original “temporary” exhibition may in fact have been an ideal commemoration of the site, that the Gestapo headquarters should remain in ruins, as fitting testament to its corruption and defeat. The idea of “rebuilding” or resurrecting the Gestapo headquarters (even symbolically, to create this center) struck some as profane. The Architectural Review criticized Wilms for having “washed away too much dirt in presenting Nazi history.”
Inside this gray box, the Topography of Terror features photographs, film clips, posters, and a massive collection of police documents, communications, and reports, all accompanied by insightfully detailed explanatory texts (many by academic historians). There are no conventional artifacts, which is why it’s not a conventional museum. “What does it help if you have a black uniform, to explain what happened here?” asked Lutz. “After 25 years of discussion about what to show—hats, weapons, artifacts,” Lutz told me, the curators finally decided the central focus should be simply “good historical documentation, with pictures.”
The institution’s resources include a prominent academic component: It hosts a scholarly speakers’ series, a film program, and large conferences for both scholars and the wider public. “We have programs for police and soldiers,” Lutz said, “to make them more self-critical and self-aware about how close the structures they’re in today are to the Nazi structures, and how quickly you can switch from democracy to totalitarianism.”
Some guides and staff members are student interns from local public-history programs, including Touro College’s M.A. program in Holocaust communication and tolerance, where Topography of Terror’s director, Rabbi Andreas Nachama, serves as dean. A 29,000-volume library is one of Germany’s best collections of historical and academic sources on such topics as Nazi-era police, ghettos, resistance, forced labor, and anti-Semitism. The center has published more than a dozen titles (in both German and English) under its own imprint, invaluable catalogs of its permanent and temporary exhibitions such as The Face of the Ghetto: Pictures Taken by Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 1940-44 (2010) and Fire! Anti-Jewish Terror on “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 (2008).
This documentation center directly rebukes the Nazis’ organizational praxis. They were consummate documenters, and it struck me that the Topography of Terror’s essential intent is to “counterdocument,” fighting fire with fire. Just as the building’s architecture resists the original structure, so too the depth and density of the modern documentation is a response against the Nazis’ own compulsive accounting and recording.
As defeat approached in 1945, foreseeing the case that humanity would make against them, Nazi leaders tried to erase evidence of their crimes: destroying concentration camps as they abandoned them, and destroying themselves in a rash of suicides at the end. But their bureaucratic legacy—their forms, archives, and images—survived them, and the exhibition here examines the small, quotidian bits of the totalitarian regime that is more often confronted in terms of its enormity. While that larger perspective is obviously valuable, so, too, is a focus upon the microcosmic details.
Holocaust scholars distinguish between Opferorte, Nazi victim sites, and Täterorte, perpetrator sites. Visiting concentration camps, ghettos, and synagogue ruins, however anguishing, is relatively straightforward: a pilgrimage, a mitzvah, a journey of commemoration, introspection, and prayer. But, especially in Berlin, there cannot be just Opferorte. That would suggest that there were only victims but no perpetrators, no place to locate the sources responsible for the depravities.
The Täterorte present ethical as well as museological challenges. What should we feel at such places? Might they attract the wrong crowd, admirers of the tyrants? (Lutz said he worries about this but has seen no evidence of neo-Nazi visitors.) The Topography of Terror teaches a great deal about the perpetrators. Many of the images depicted the kinds of scenes I’d seen before at Holocaust museums and in documentaries, but my attention was redirected so that instead of being totally engaged with, for instance, traumatized Jews walking in lines carrying their possessions awkwardly toward the train station, I now also noticed, and thought about, the SS officers standing alongside the ranks of deportees.
I began to see “the other side” of these pictures, learning what the world looked like from the oppressors’ perspective. It’s not that one focuses only on the police: It’s impossible to do so without also seeing women whose heads were shaved for consorting with undesirables, people paraded through crowds wearing humiliating signs explaining their transgressions against the Reich, Jewish store-owners being shamed in boycotts. But the exhibition texts, while describing what’s happening to the victims who initially claim our stunned empathy, also note the presence, the identity, and the specific function of the Gestapo agents orchestrating (and almost always, also recording) the events.
Proceeding through the exhibition, I became overwhelmed by the increasingly complex operations run out of the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse headquarters, which annexed adjoining buildings as its mission and power grew. In 1933 the Gestapa became the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police). The SS (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Hitler’s private force, became a part of this structure, along with the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service) and SA (Sturmabteilung, Stormtroopers). The RHSA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office) developed in tandem with all this, and paramilitary death squads (Einsatzgruppen, Special Police Units) conducted some of the largest genocidal operations. While the Reich’s own organizational flowcharts on display describe all these intricate bureaucracies, the lines between police, intelligence, and army agents become progressively blurred.
Nearby in this same neighborhood, many other organizations, too, abetted Gestapo operations: the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Labor, the SS Race and Settlement Office, the Reich Office for Regional Planning, among many others. Photographs and models illustrate the interactions of these offices revolving around the police at the center of the “polis": The city was a vast institutional government complex that undergirded the Third Reich. It was not simply Hitler, Himmler, and Göring who facilitated Nazism, nor merely ideologies like anti-Semitism or Lebensrahm, but also, we are reminded, an intensively developed array of buildings and bureaucracies.
The police structure’s growth over the years, both physically and organizationally, paralleled the incessant expansions of German empire and sadism. Police operations came to include suppressing the Reich’s opponents; persecuting a growing range of social, racial, and ethnic “others”; controlling political currents and orchestrating propaganda; stealing Jews’ property; performing eugenics, euthanasia, and other medical “experiments”; and, finally, executing the arrangements of the Holocaust.
And all these undertakings are here on display, documented. In the proliferation of forms and the profusion of euphemisms, I came to appreciate better than ever George Orwell’s and (prophetically, from the 1920s) Franz Kafka’s repulsion at the manipulative abuses of logic and of civic structures. A sea of memoranda and reports illustrates Orwell’s and Kafka’s warnings that seemingly innocuous language and agencies have the potential to embody evil, and also, at least temporarily for an audience wanting to live in denial, to mask that evil.
Police agencies bear names such as the Central Reich Administration for Combating Gypsy Malefaction, the Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, the Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom. The epitome of this double-talk is Operation Reinhard, the most lethal phase of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” One of my strongest emotional reactions was a profound sense of the discordance between the banal discourse of the administrative bureaucracy and the incomprehensible extent of its crimes.
Visiting Auschwitz, I had been struck by a similar dichotomy: Compound after compound displayed the obviously horrifying evidence of the Holocaust—confiscated prosthetic limbs, mountains of suitcases and toothbrushes and eyeglasses, immense piles of human hair next to the bolts of fabric made out of that harvest of hair—and, alongside this, equally numerous forms, tabulations, surveys, and accounting reports representing the torturers’ organization.
Such mundane but horrible documents of genocide fill the Topography of Terror (arranged and curated more pointedly than at Auschwitz and other Opferorte, where they seem sometimes random in the background). We see arrest pads, prisoner transfer-and-delivery forms, transport logs with meticulously detailed names and addresses of deportees, activity reports on SD “protective custody” operations. One form is headed Vermögenserklärung, Declaration of Assets, on which Jews themselves had to inventory their holdings (filling in boxes listing how many lamps, pillows, rugs, chairs, and other property they owned) before they were deported, making it more efficient for the Nazis to calculate and regulate the confiscation. Rooms piled high with looted property as exhibited at Auschwitz and other museums are one vital way of representing the Holocaust. The documentation of Nazi paperwork, while less graphically and viscerally searing, provides similarly critical insights into the methodology of terror.
In 10 hours over two days, as I read every document and watched every film clip on display, I began to lose clarity about who was responsible for what. I wondered whether I was failing to process the material so exhaustively displayed and explained. But I realized that my confusion actually, appropriately, belied the Nazis’ claim that their bureaucracies served a logical, coherent mission.
It is not a new revelation that the Nazis were deranged, but it was highly illuminating to see and even vicariously experience the machinations of their organizational rise and fall. It seems trite, but on some level I was aware that, like all academics, I, too, am ensconced in a complex administrative bureaucracy: hence the “vicarious” response. (Of course my own bureaucracy is nothing like theirs, but I think it’s fitting that a visitor’s experiences here might make a person more self-reflectively conscious about one’s own implication in a larger organization.)
My perception of confusion, and of the bureaucratic aporia, mirrored the more familiar significations of Nazi terror. The police network’s miasma of agencies, hierarchies, acronyms, and forms betrayed the increasingly mad German expansion, destruction, and ultimate self-destruction.
