Thought provoking Berlin

We’re confident that we won’t offend too many people by saying that Berlin isn’t the most aesthetically beautiful city in the world. But for what it lacks in beauty, however, it makes up for in incredible history.

Berlin is immediately thought provoking, and does an incredibly good job of recognizing it’s past through some brilliant museums and memorials.

Two memorials in particular stood out. Firstly The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which contained 2711 concrete stelae rising from the ground. As you walk through them, you are quickly engulfed as the ground slopes downwards beneath you. You begin to lose all sense of where you are in the concrete maze. While the architect never said what it is supposed to represent, for us it was incredibly stirring and interactive, and in some small symbolic way provided a sense of scale to the atrocities.

Secondly, Menashe Kadishman's Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves) installation at the Jewish Museum was incredibly chilling. Over 10,000 open-mouthed faces coarsely cut from heavy, circular iron plates cover the floor. The artist expects visitors to walk across the floor, which presents you with a range of emotions as you walk along the pain-stricken faces, with the haunting sound of the iron clinking under your feet. It was incredibly interactive and gave us a chilling sense of scale, anonymity, pain and suffering.