"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?" said Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz on Friday in Erfurt. "Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility."
And as you look around Berlin and see entire city blocks devoted to striking, thought and discussion provoking pieces, memorials to a past designed by its future, you can only admire the honesty in their recognition of all that has gone before. Is admiration enough, though, to wash away truth and replace it with feel-good-warmth? Can tonnes of concrete and stone, arranged artistically by talented artists truly depict forgiveness and not just glorify, beautify, make more interesting, something so utterly horrific? Do these monuments just become some form of a symbolic Mecca: once reached, forgiveness is granted for all sins gone before.
I watch Jakob as we take the tram from the Berlin Wall museum (school) back to our apartment block, as his eyes follow the TV tower, as we ride through the death strip, as we see the stones dedicated to escapees from the East who were shot, and I wonder whether any of this will strike him at all, or will he just see them for their aesthetic beauty and nor place any weight on their symbolic meaning?
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