Bare, white library shelves underground: Memorial to the May 10, 1933 book burning in Berlin's bebelplatz where Nazi youth groups destroyed 20,000 books
Spray paint inscription on the Berlin Wall: "TO: ASTRID MAYBE SOMEDAY WE WILL BE TOGETHER"
It's been almost two years since I went to Berlin but these two images have made themselves at home in my head. I remember how it felt to stumble across the glass pane, to peer down and down at the stark shelves, to see my reflection beaming back up to me so that my face became a book on the shelf. Or when I walked with my fingers trailing across the wall until they reached a fissure large enough to clasp two hands through, and how everything zoomed outwards and inwards when I read (like millions of other tourists have before me--and yet) the inscription. There needs to be poems, paintings, songs, everythings about these two images. I want there to be all of that because there is too much distance between my hand clicking the camera shutter shut and that gorgeous, tragic fissure, too much distance between the me two years later from the me standing in Bebelplatz with my heart spasming in my ribcage..there is just way too much of so much, which makes thinking about these things important, and wanting to take the abstract mess of the past and turn it into something personal: to create.
2 comments:
my heart has gone --
there are almost no words for what this has made me feel. thank you - thank you - thank you for posting this.
if you wikipedia "bebelplatz" you get the whole story. i remember reading somewhere that a year or so ago they dedicated a peace organization in the square, which was such a beautiful rewriting of the history that took place there.
Post a Comment