Melissa Madsen’s Posthaven

First on the plus side, Berlin is a city on a much more human scale compared with Paris.  It's like Canberra to Paris' Sydney, fewer people and tourists, less noise and busy-ness.  Berlin has a young and funky vibe, obviously attractive to younger travellers, but with plenty to entice older fogies like myself.

The food is great, surprisingly since one doesn't often think of great food and Germanic tradition in the same thought.  And cheap.  Rolls filled with salad and meat for a few Euro in bakeries everywhere.  Curry wurst at streetside stalls.  Great Turkish pita filled with yiros-style meat.  REALLY good Thai-style food - best I have had outside Thailand.  And berliners and streusel buns and cakes and all manner of sweet baked goods.  We have had excellent lunches in department store cafeterias - the best in KaDeWe (http://www.kadewe.de/en) where I had a fillet of salmon cooked to order. (Sidenote: why did Australian department stores abandon cafeterias?  This was a grave mistake, IMHO.)

The public transport is excellent, frequent and whilst not as cheap as Paris, still cheaper than Adelaide.  On the intersection where our hotel sits, we have a bus route, three tram routes and an underground train station, all of which are wheelchair accessible.  And the weather has been mostly excellent - sunny, with some cold spells.  

So why the hesitation?  This should be everything I like in a city to visit?  Reminders of the Holocaust are everywhere, as you would expect, but a certain mindset must need to be acquired to prevent thoughts of what happened to the people who lived here - including Tova's relatives - from pervading every interaction and action.  

We visited the Holocaust Memorial (

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe^[1] (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal), is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 m² (4.7-acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 2.38 m (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 m (3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 m (7.9 in to 15 ft 9.0 in). According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. However, observers have noted the memorial's resemblance to a cemetery.^[2][3][4] An attached underground "Place of Information" (German: Ort der Information) holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.

Building began on April 1, 2003 and was finished on December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II, and opened to the public two days later. It is located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. The cost of construction was approximately €25 million.

The memorial is controversial, and was described by Ignatz Bubis, the then leader of the German Jewish community, as unnecessary.^{[citation needed]}

), which was very moving, but unexpectedly disturbing that a full security screening is required before entry.  Indeed, it was distressing that there seemed to be a very visible police presence at most identifiably Jewish sites we visited, including the remains of the Neue Synagogue and the Beth Cafe where we had coffee today.  Even the old cemetery in Grosse Hamburger Strasse, where only Moses Mendelssohn's reconstructed grave remains, has multiple security cameras.  

However, as much as these sites affected me, the memorial that most gave me pause for thought was the simple plaque acknowledging the location of a villa where the systematic 'euthanasia' of people with disabilities was administered during the 1930s - a program known as Aktion T4 (

Action T4 (German: Aktion T4, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ]) was the name used after World War II^[1] for Nazi Germany's "euthanasia programme" during which physicians murdered thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".^[2] In October 1939 Hitler signed an "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Phillipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt to carry out the programme of euthanasia (translated into English as follows):

"Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the competence of certain physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [Gnadentod] after a discerning diagnosis."^[3][4]

In addition to 'euthanasia' various other rationales for the programme have been offered, including eugenics, Darwinism, racial hygiene, and cost effectiveness.

) that served as a means to refine methods of mass-murder that would later be used on Jewish people.

So many words have been written about the Holocaust - perhaps it's better to use someone else's:

"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope."

"Elie Wiesel - Nobel Lecture". Nobelprize.org. 5 May 2011 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-lecture.html