What's Gedenktafel got to do with it?

When you do something completely crazy, like quit your job and put off moving to a place where you can get a job so you can wander around Europe for oh say six weeks, there are times when you can't help but wonder: What the hell am I doing? Why am I here?

What do you do in those moments when it verges on panic and the only thing keeping you from panicking is the very real fact that you have absolutely no way to undo what you have done? 4000 miles don't untravel themselves. You are here to stay. So, you wander the streets of this foreign metropolis because if you are going to indulge in folly, you shouldn't go for half measures - do it all the way or don't do it at all, don't dabble. If you wonder what you are wandering around for, there is nothing to do but wander as resolutely and thoroughly as possible.

Berlin, as I mentioned, is a city full of history, but it's also in a country that is at times obsessed with history and with remembering history. Sometimes history means remembering the weighty and devastating events that shape a nation. Sometimes, it means remembering that Ukrainian nurse or the first German female rabbi. Gedenktafel are strewn throughout the city of Berlin. I had one particular Tafel that I remembered from my first trip here, but as I began looking for them, I couldn't stop seeing them. And I couldn't stop taking pictures of them (which will eventually show up here when I have a less flaky internet connection). Sometimes it was the sad state of the current building that drew my eye. Or it was the kind of chilling juxtaposition that is inevitable in a city with the dark secrets of Berlin: a memorial to two Communists murdered by the Nazis on the outside wall of McDonald's. I came to love finding these Tafel and making people notice them when I took a picture of it (nothing like taking a picture to draw people's eyes), even to the ridiculous and random, like the former site of the Berlin Aquarium on Unter den Linden.

There are of course copious amounts of signs of all shapes and sizes describing the Wall or the Nazi history of Berlin; it is impossible to walk down Wilhelmstrasse without encountering something that reminds people that the Nazis set up shop there. And one particular monumental and obviously government building had the good luck of being home to the Nazis (Göring himself), the Soviets, the leaders of the DDR (sorry, can't type GDR), and now the Bundesministerium der Finanzen. The building should be tiled with Tafel. Berlin remembers more than the Nazis of course, but the odds on favorites after the Communists and the Nazis are the Prussians. You can't walk down Unter den Linden without dealing with Prussian history and its Greco-roman inspired monuments to making monument.

But sometimes you are wandering through the city and the city is just a city and it doesn't matter where you are because your feet still hurt. Traveling has not changed your life or solved any of your problems. What happens then? For me, by sheer accident originally, I stumbled on a random building away from the main streets and places that Berlin wants you to see and you find a reminder of the kind of incredible history that has taken place here. A reminder of something that has nothing to do with Nazis or soldiers or Friedrich or Wilhelm or any combination of thereof, that has nothing to do with war or massacre, but is quite simply about changing the world. It might be a TV studio now, but in 1905 it contained the lecture hall where Max Planck introduced the world to quantum physics. I see a reminder like that and for a moment at least, it is a little clearer, exactly what I am doing here.