Book Burning Memorial
On the way back from the organ concert, I stopped at a piece of glass that looked into an empty white room below the cobbled sidewalk outside of St. Hedwigs. I don't have a picture of the memorial itself because its something an image could never capture, but I did take a picture of the surrounding area in case you're ever looking for this hole in the ground, because it's so easy to miss something so incredible. This memorial was actually one of my favorite sites in Berlin and was constructed in memory of all the knowledge destroyed during the Third Reich. The Nazis burned all books they deemed unworthy or against Nazi ideals, and in the process destroyed many valuable books and academic information that would not be recovered. I found it beautifully sad that this massive white empty room symbolized all the missing information that would never be read and stories that would be never told. This destroying of knowledge literally left a gap in Germany's literary period, and caused for brilliant intellectuals like Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx to emigrate to the United States and other European countries.
