Up till now I’ve always found it easy to blog about our travels, and so had assumed that there would be nowhere that I couldn’t find something interesting to write about. But Berlin has nearly defeated me. So many people have already written so much about this extraordinary city, and after this, our first visit, we’ve found it hard to do more than echo what everyone else says—that it is extraordinary, stimulating, exciting and memorable. In the end, it was obvious – I had to write about memory.

Holocaust Memorial

Judith and I are old enough to have parents who were adult during the War. My father was in the RAF in the Western Desert (and so the Libyan place names in the news just now have an extra resonance for me). But for the multitudes of young people we saw in Berlin, that war is as many as three generations behind them. What does this mean for the traces of what happened in Berlin between 1933 and 1945?

That question hit us full on, during our first walk around the city, when we visited the remarkable Holocaust memorial, or to give it its full title, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, the Memorial covers the equivalent of two football pitches and consists of 2177 grey concrete slabs, all of the same length and width, but varying in height from 0.2 to 4.8 meters. We had expected this to be a solemn scene. Perhaps there would be Jews from many parts of the world silently remembering lost family members, or perhaps there would even be extravagant displays of emotion, as at the Temple Wall in Jerusalem. Well, maybe it was just because it was an Easter holiday, and the sun was shining, but what we found was much more like a huge outdoor party or picnic. If anyone was feeling sorrowful, I didn’t see them.

Moreover, the blocks almost demand to be climbed on, and the gaps between them are narrow enough to tempt the bold to use them as giant stepping stones. A resigned security guard was employed full time in stopping people from doing this, with a weary courtesy. Not, I think, because of a perceived lack of respect, but from health and safety concerns and a fear of falls. When I was a student, abroad for the first time, I was upbraided by a gendarme for taking my shoes off to ease my sore feet while sitting under the Arc de Triomphe. I had offended against French civic pride. That was not, we felt, the issue here.

And it seemed to us entirely right that the Memorial should be used in this way, as a combination of park, adventure playground, and picnic site. It didn’t change the Memorial itself, which does not mourn or teach, but simply exists. Penetrating deep into the grid of narrow lanes between the blocks, as they reared up taller and taller, was an unsettling experience, but also good fun—other visitors would flash past as you peered down the grid rows, like something out a silent movie or a dream.

This seemed a good symbol for Berlin as a whole. I’ve written before about my admiration for how Munich has succeeded in putting its past behind it, while not trying to hide or ignore it. That is Berlin, only squared, because Berlin is also recovering from the Cold War and the Wall. And that era too has become a subject for entertainment and pleasure, no more so than in the figure of Ampelmann the distinctive image of East German traffic lights, which is now an affectionately diversified design icon. We bought the mug, and the key-rings.

After all, what is the alternative? That an entire city becomes a permanent site of commemoration? On the one hand, there are still plenty of opportunities to absorb the history, such as the excellent outdoor exhibit the Topography of Terror which, disconcertingly, includes on one location both a surviving stretch of the Wall and the site of the SS Headquarters. But other sites have been effaced, for very good reasons. I had walked through a fairly nondescript 80s housing estate, thinking it was oddly close to the centre, when at the far end I found a ‘historical map’ and realised that these quiet apartment blocks were built on the site of Hitler’s bunker and the Reich Chancellery. Some things are best not commemorated.

‘Lest we forget’ say countless war memorials throughout Britain. But a few days ago the very last surviving combatant of the First World War died. What, therefore, are we now remembering, when those who suffered through that war are no longer with us? There are many in the Southern States of the US who give the impression that they would like to refight the American Civil War. Terrible atrocities were committed in Kosovo just over a decade ago, in the name of a defeat suffered by the Serbs in the Fourteenth Century.

Are we so very much better? Controversy is being stirred up again with the proposal for a Redcoat memorial at Culloden, and the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn in 2014 has been designated—in a surely rather bizarre conjunction—as Scotland’s next ‘Year of Homecoming’. When does the proper function of memory and commemoration turn into unhealthy obsession? Shouldn’t we just ‘get over it’?

Just last week a court in Munich finally found the 91 year old John Demjanjuk guilty of complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews. The Holocaust Memorial may be an intriguing playground for its younger visitors, but for an older generation, this is clearly still a matter of unfinished business.