A sad monument for sad days when ghosts from the past are reappearing

@ElentirENG ES 10·10·2023 · 23:03 0

When I started publishing Exploring I did it for entertainment. But what to talk about here when do you have news like this?

Lídice and Ležáky: the monuments of two towns that were wiped off the map
The Berlin 1939–1945 War Cemetery that honors 3,595 allied soldiers

How can you escape and disconnect when there is news that seems to have exhaled a cold and sinister air on your soul? I consider myself an old-school romantic and that is why I have always liked abandoned places and ruins. But today is not the day to visit material ruins. Today is a day to explore the ruins of the human soul.

I admit that I have never gotten along well with contemporary art, but there are some examples of it that I do like. One of them is this one that I bring you today. This monument is in the city of Berlin, the capital of Germany, and it seems like a good place to walk on a sad day like today (photo: Michael Fousert).

Its designer was the architect Peter Eisenman, an American of Jewish origin who also designed the City of Culture, in Santiago de Compostela (photo: Craig Cooper).

This monument clearly reminds us of a cemetery. It is made up of 2,711 concrete slabs of different sizes (photo: Ryen).

This sad and heartbreaking monument was built to remember the Jews murdered in the Holocaustduring World War II. Its shape is a paradox, since many of the victims were cremated or buried in mass graves, not in cemeteries (photo: Andrea Nardi).

Eisenman has never explained the meaning of the monument, if it has any. I guess it's like trying to make sense of the Holocaust itself. Why so much horror? How to explain something like that? (photo: Stefaan Van Parys).

One of the worst risks any civilization runs is forgetting the past, because it exposes us to repeating the mistakes and horrors that occurred then. That is why places like this are very necessary, and even more so when it seems that the ghosts of the past are reappearing, moved by the same irrational anti-Semitism that led the nazis to commit that genocide (photo: Augustine Wong).

Our society believed itself to be immune to these ghosts, it acted as if the Holocaust were the result of an abnormality that could never be repeated again because we are better. And here, in this civilized society of ours, we still have wretches justifying the indiscriminate murder of Jews, including the beheading of babies and young children at the hands of Hamas terrorists (photo: Ricardo Gomez Angel).

Today is a day to let the soul walk through places like this, wondering how we came back to this, what each of us have done to prevent history from repeating itself, and if we couldn't have done something more (photo: Tobias Rademacher).

Anyway, I'm sorry for such an atypical entry, but today I don't have the body for anything else. I leave you with my soul wandering like a ghost among those enormous slabs, even though they are very far from the place where I live. In this video from City by Foot you can see them better: