History a Mystery

A painstakingly reconstructed cathedral stands just a few yards away from pillars riddled with bullet holes. The hole left atop the Memorial Church by World War II bombings gapes open to the sky, while Hitler's bunker, the sight of his suicide at the end of the war, lies buried under an unassuming parking lot. Berlin is a place that seems uniquely torn between the desire to preserve, to commemorate, and the desire to rebuild, erase, and move on. It's a strange feeling to enter a building, seemingly built centuries ago, only to find it is a post-war reconstruction of what was. It gives the whole city a kind of eerie, empty feeling, as if the whole of Berlin is a kind of Epcot reconstruction of a lost city, a collection of beautiful yet inauthentic buildings built atop the ashes of atrocity. Even the modern dome atop the Reichstag is a bit unsettling, an attempt to alter the face of a building that figured so prominently in Hitler's regime, an architectural symbol that illustrates this pull between past and future, remembrance and willful forgetfulness. As we walk by the construction surrounding the resurrection of the Hohenzollern Palace on museum island, a palace that was once the seat of Prussia's monarchy, I question why this city, seemingly so forward-thinking, is still continuing to rebuild the past.