Sunday, April 23, 2017

"All Those Murdered Jews. So Sad."

Located in Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe doesn't exactly evoke hushed reverence amongst visitors:
Four million people visit the memorial every year. School groups, tour groups gather near the northwest corner of the memorial, the informal meeting point, the informal photo vista; visitors pull out their phones, unpack their cameras; students look bored; teenagers jump from stele to stele until a security guard, who has the thankless job of stopping visitors from climbing on a Holocaust memorial, tells them to get down; parents shepherd their kids through the family vacation; children play hide-and-seek, play tag, play games incomprehensible to adults; teenage boys chase teenage girls, eliciting shrieks; boyfriends disappear into the grid, reappear around a corner, eliciting shrieks; weekend jet-setters debate plans for the night, flirt in broken English; girls tan on the slabs with their shirts pulled up to expose more skin, a couple takes a sun nap; photos are staged, iterated, dissected, restaged: curl the hair over my ear, two steps to the left, readjust my bra strap: 87 likes.
No sorrow. No pity. Just bored kids taking selfies.

If that's what Holocaust remembrance boils down to, then why bother?

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