Berlin — Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe sits in the heart of Berlin — nearly 3,000 concrete slabs arranged in a vast grid, their varying heights creating something disorienting and oppressive as you move deeper into them. It's not located at the site of a specific atrocity. It's Germany's central monument to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust — a national act of remembrance and atonement, placed deliberately in the middle of a modern, functioning city.

It's also, unavoidably, a tourist site.

That's the contradiction I keep coming back to. Visitors move between the slabs with cameras raised — myself included. Some engage quietly with what the place represents. Others eat snacks, take selfies, laugh at something on their phone. I'm not judging that. I was a tourist too, on a day trip, and within a couple of hours I'd be somewhere else entirely — a restaurant, a bar, the next stop on the itinerary.

I'll be honest — I wasn't especially moved during the visit itself. Whether that was the brevity of it, the crowds, or simply the way the modern world has learned to process these places, I'm not sure. There's an underground Information Centre that apparently offers deeper context. I didn't have time for it.

I've felt the same contradiction more acutely at Auschwitz and Birkenau — sites that dwarf this one in every sense, and where the same strange transaction plays out. The coach pulls in, the groups move through, the coaches leave. Life continues.

These black and white photographs show the memorial as I found it — concrete and crowds, tourists and silence, existing in the same space simultaneously. Make of that what you will.

Fujifilm X-T5