Berlin/Topography of Terror - JOURNAL • BRIAN ROSE

Topography of Terror, 2019 — © Brian Rose

One of the goals for my recent trip to Berlin was to do a series of pictures describing the documentation site known as the Topography of Terror. Of all the many locations in this city layered with history, this is the most profoundly sobering. This was the epicenter of the Holocaust. The place where the Nazi policy of genocide was formulated and implemented. Quoting Wikipedia, “It is located on Niederkirchnerstrasse, formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, on the site of buildings which during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 was the SS Reich Main Security Office, the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei, SD, Einsatzgruppen and Gestapo.”

The buildings forming this ensemble facing Wilhelmstrasse and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse were damaged during the bombing of Berlin in World War II and were later demolished. When I first encountered the site in 1985 it was a vast open wasteland adjacent to the Berlin Wall and half of it was used as an off-road driving track. In 1987, the freshly excavated foundation walls of the SS/Gestapo buildings were used as a backdrop for an exhibition about the site and its role central to the Holocaust.

Excavated foundation wall, 1987 — © Brian Rose

Topography of Terror, 2019 — © Brian Rose

The photographs above show the same stretch of Berlin Wall with the former Nazi Reichsluftfahrtministerium (air ministry) and the excavated wall of the SS/Gestapo buildings. Both walls are now protected from damage.

For me, the most powerful aspect of the Topography of Terror is that it a relatively raw site with preserved ruins and open landscape. Much of the grounds have been covered with dark gray gravel, and a low steel and glass museum sits at the center. To the rear is an undisturbed wooded area with a path that partly follows the old automobile driving track.

At this point, I have enough pictures of the Topography of Terror to stand alone as a series or serve as a “chapter” in my still unfinished Berlin book. The photographs are straightforward documents of the landscape and architecture consistent with the conceptual basis of the memorial itself. It is also consistent with my attitude about photography — that images should describe faithfully what one encounters — relatively unencumbered by artifice — open to the perspective of the viewer. Witness to the known and the unknowable.