Berlin’s public landscape places institutions of knowledge, sites of persecution, monuments to victims, and traces of Jewish life within the same urban field. Read together, these places reveal not only how modern systems of administration, transportation, education, and medicine were turned toward exclusion and violence, but also how postwar Germany has chosen to confront that history. The city’s memorial geography becomes especially revealing when viewed alongside Shanghai, where German knowledge was inherited and German-speaking exiles rebuilt fragments of life.
How Institutions Become Violence
The inquiry in Berlin begins on Niederkirchnerstraße. Between Potsdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie lies an unassuming open space. Today, it is a modern open-air exhibition site: the Topography of Terror. Before the Second World War, this was the center of power and terror under the Nazi regime. The headquarters of the Gestapo, the central command of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, and the Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA, were all concentrated here. This piece of land once determined the life and death of millions.1
The Gestapo headquarters was not only an administrative center, but also a place where violence was directly exercised. Basements and adjoining buildings were converted into detention and torture rooms. Thousands of political dissidents, Jews, homosexuals, clergy, resistance members, and foreign spies were imprisoned, tortured, or executed here. Those arrested often “disappeared” without trial; months later, their families would receive only an official death notice.
From 1933 to 1945, this complex formed the nerve center of the Nazi state’s reign of terror. The Gestapo headquarters not only controlled the network of political police within Germany, but also extended the system of terror across occupied Europe.
The headquarters of the Reich Security Main Office was also located here, becoming the central hub of the Nazi state’s terror apparatus. The agency contained seven offices, or Ämter, each responsible for different functions of repression, intelligence, and racial policy.
In the late 1970s, historians and citizens in West Berlin began calling for the establishment of a memorial site here. In 1987, to mark the 750th anniversary of Berlin’s founding, the first temporary exhibition, “Topography of Terror,” opened to the public, presenting the institutional structure and crimes of Nazi tyranny. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the memorial was formally incorporated into the city’s reconstruction plans. In 2005, the German government approved the construction of a new building, which was finally completed and opened to the public in 2010.
Today, the Topography of Terror memorial consists of both indoor and open-air sections. The outdoor exhibition displays the preserved remains of prison cells and original foundations of the walls. The indoor exhibition systematically introduces the organizational structures, operational networks, and crimes of the Gestapo, SS, and RSHA, while also presenting archival exhibitions on Nazi occupation policy, resistance movements, and the individual fates of victims.
Within this complex, many orders and plans that determined the fate of countless people were formulated: the directives for the persecutions of Kristallnacht in 1938; the orders concerning Soviet prisoners of war and the killing of Jews from 1941 onward; and the administrative implementation of the “Final Solution” after the Wannsee Conference in 1942. The fate of millions of Jews, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and political dissidents was decided here with chilling composure. What one sees here is not the devastation of a battlefield, but the spine-chilling quality of institutionalization. The core of the permanent exhibition clearly shows how these agencies organized police power, intelligence, and mass crime. The orderly photographs of offices, precise chains of command, and detailed divisions of archival labor allow visitors to sense directly that violence did not appear only in the form of disorder, chaos, or frenzy. Violence became an administrative procedure operating with efficiency.
In Shanghai, Tongji represented the way Germany brought a system of modern professional knowledge into the city through medicine, engineering, and language. Here in Berlin, this site represents the way the state transformed another set of equally modern and highly organized capacities into a regime of terror. Institutions can be double-edged. They can train doctors, engineers, and teachers; they can also train police officers, intelligence personnel, and administrative executors. They can allow knowledge to spread more efficiently, but they can also allow persecution to be carried out more efficiently. The thread connecting knowledge, institutions, and German modernity in Shanghai reveals its latent shadow in Berlin. Yet Berlin has not sealed this history within ruins. The Topography of Terror is not only a historical exhibition site; it is also a symbol of Germany’s politics of memory. It embodies the way postwar German society has reflected upon its own history: without concealment, without embellishment, and by openly displaying the sites where crimes took place.
How Guilt Enters the Center of the Capital
In the center of Berlin, not far from the Topography of Terror, stands the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
A vast grid of gray concrete extends silently toward the edge of sight. It is not only Germany’s national memorial to the victims of the Nazi genocide, but also a symbol of European collective memory and historical reflection in the second half of the twentieth century. For decades after the end of the Second World War, West German society largely remained silent about Nazi crimes. It was not until the 1980s, with the Historikerstreit, or “historians’ dispute,” and renewed public debate over the memory of the war, that German society gradually formed a consensus around confronting the past directly. After German reunification in 1990, this reflection further became an important component of national identity.
The memorial covers 19,000 square meters and consists of 2,711 concrete stelae. Each occupies the same ground area, but their heights range from ground level to 4.7 meters. The entire field is laid out on uneven ground. Once visitors enter, they are gradually swallowed by the towering stone blocks. As they move through the forest of stelae, the noise of the city is cut off and replaced by echoes, shadows, and a loss of direction. This oppressive and ambiguous psychological space becomes one of the most powerful metaphors for the memory of violence. It forms a subtle contrast with the way memory is preserved in Hongkou, Shanghai.2
The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum preserves the history that unfolded after refugees arrived in Shanghai: the synagogue, the Wall of Names, the neighborhood, oral histories, and the ways people reorganized life in a place of refuge. Its permanent exhibition is arranged around sections such as “Flight to Shanghai,” “Starting a New Life,” and “Memories of Joy and Sorrow,” while the Wall of Names anchors the experience of refuge in specific human lives. Berlin adopts an entirely different approach. It does not reconstruct neighborhood life, nor does it place memory in a marginal historical site. Instead, it turns memory into an abstract field of stone at the center of the capital.
What deserves attention is why Germany chose to place this history in one of the most visible areas of its own capital. Historical records show that this was not a self-evident decision. German society went through nearly a decade of public debate over the memorial’s location, form, and mode of communication. In the end, the Bundestag decided to build it near the Brandenburg Gate and to add an information center. The information center beneath the stelae records the history of Nazi persecution and the extermination of Europe’s Jews, presenting historical context, family fates, and individual experiences across different exhibition rooms.
The abstract stelae above ground and the documentary materials below ground form a division of labor. Above, visitors experience unease, disorientation, and oppression. Below, history is restored to names, families, timelines, and the fates of victims. Unlike the Shanghai museum, which relies on a synagogue, artifacts, and oral histories to keep history at the scale of lived experience, Berlin here turns “the state’s responsibility to bear memory” into a double structure: a symbolic public space and an educational documentary narrative. This is not merely a place for commemorating victims. It is also a public statement about how Germany understands its postwar political ethics.
In Berlin, however, this memorial allows us to see how Germany today actively preserves the memory of its own historical guilt. Shanghai received the rupture within German history; Berlin places that rupture back at the center of the nation.
The Point of Departure for Exile
To reach the most direct connection with Hongkou in Shanghai, one must go to Platform 17 at Grunewald Station.
On October 18, 1941, the first large deportation train from Berlin carried more than one thousand Jews from Grunewald station toward the Łódź ghetto. From that moment, the organized Nazi deportation of Berlin’s Jews began.
Deutsche Bahn explicitly describes Gleis 17 as a “central memorial site” commemorating the role of the German national railway, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, in the deportation of Jewish citizens during the Nazi period. The core of the memorial consists of 186 steel plaques embedded in the railway ballast. Arranged chronologically, they record the date, destination, and number of deportees for each deportation train. In other words, what is commemorated here is not a single act of violence, but the way violence was incorporated into a transport system, placed onto a timetable, and turned into an administrative institution.3
If the station and Hongkou are viewed side by side, Shanghai preserves the memory of life after arrival. Jewish refugees set up coal stoves in the lanes, founded schools, and opened clinics and cafés in Tilanqiao. Gleis 17, by contrast, compresses living beings into data: dates, train numbers, numbers of people, destinations.
Gleis 17 feels colder than many grand memorial sites. The Wall of Names and oral histories at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum record how exiles, after reaching a foreign place, learned to survive again. Those narratives restore history to relationships between human beings. Berlin’s Gleis 17 forces us to look backward: before these names arrived in Shanghai, how were they defined by the German state? They were first deprived of their names and of the meaning of their lives, then written into transport lists, forcibly taken from their homes, and assigned numbers on the platform.
Between Berlin and Shanghai, a mirror image takes shape. The state machine expelled people from the world of ordinary life; in the place of refuge, the exiles reopened life.
The Holocaust did not occur only in concentration camps. It also took place within ordinary modern infrastructure. Railway stations and timetables—things that originally belonged to modern efficiency and order—were once part of persecution.
Jewish Berlin before Its Destruction
The Holocaust did not occur only in concentration camps. It also took place within ordinary modern infrastructure. Railway stations and timetables—things that originally belonged to modern efficiency and order—were once part of persecution.
Yet such a historical narrative would leave a vast absence. We would still be unable to sense what kind of world this state machine destroyed. The New Synagogue and the Jewish center in which it is located, the Centrum Judaicum, bring that world “before destruction” back into historical view.
Completed in 1866, this synagogue was once the largest Jewish religious building in all of Germany, with 3,200 seats. It continued the tradition of liberal Judaism that dominated Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century: services were conducted in German and accompanied by an organ and choir. When Berlin’s Jewish community chose this site in the heart of the city, it carried a clear and determined aspiration. Jews were not merely to live in Berlin; they were to become fully integrated into German society as Berliners and German citizens. The New Synagogue was a religious landmark, but even more, it was a miniature of a German-Jewish public life that had truly existed. Its grand scale, prominent location, and magnificent appearance together proclaimed that Berlin’s Jewish community wished to move from the geographical center toward the social center. The belief conveyed by the building is condensed by the museum into one sentence: “to be German, to be Berlin citizens, and at the same time to remain Jewish.”
By the early 1930s, Berlin’s Jewish community numbered around 160,000 people, making it the largest Jewish community in Germany. This means that what the Nazis later systematically erased was not only individual lives, but a highly urbanized, modern, and fully public Jewish-German world of life. The refugees who fled to Shanghai had once belonged to a complete urban civilization. They had been members of the middle class and intellectual circles of the German-speaking world, originally living within a public world supported by newspapers, associations, and educational institutions. The existence of the New Synagogue makes us realize that before the exiles of Hongkou were forced to anchor themselves in the Far East, they had also been a living and substantial part of the metropolis of Berlin.
For this reason, the later fate of this building appears especially glaring. During the November Pogrom of 1938, the synagogue was set on fire but escaped total destruction through the intervention of police officer Wilhelm Krützfeld. Yet the process of alienation that followed was even heavier. The archives inside the building were used by Nazi institutions for so-called “racial research”; from 1940 onward, the synagogue was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht as a warehouse; from 1943, its neighboring building was used by the Gestapo as a prison and site of torture. A sacred building that had symbolized “German-Jewish citizenship” was transformed into a tool for state examination, storage, and confinement. The complete betrayal of the space’s function signaled the destruction of the very possibility that Jews could belong to the center of German society.
After the war, the fate of this building reflected the complex choices involved in preservation, interpretation, and compromise. Located in the Soviet occupation zone, its neighboring building once became an administrative center where survivors gathered again. In 1958, the severely damaged main prayer hall was demolished, and only the front section facing the street was preserved as a memorial. From the late 1980s onward, a foundation began the work of reconstruction. By the early 1990s, Berlin’s Jewish community had regained ownership of the property. In 1998, a prayer room was once again established here. Its value today does not lie in being “restored to its original state,” but in preserving rupture. It is both a rebirth after ruin and a memorial site that refuses to erase scars, one that cannot truly return to the past.4
The New Synagogue in Berlin and the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Shanghai form a powerful mirror image. Ohel Moshe is a synagogue of refuge. It witnessed how people maintained prayer and community in displacement, preserving the resilience of living on after loss. The New Synagogue in Berlin is a synagogue of reconstruction. It reveals the Jewish public life that existed before disappearance, recording what was lost and how that loss was later acknowledged. Shanghai shows the resettlement of exiles, while Berlin reveals the mature and modern world they had once possessed.
The Nazis destroyed a community that had once existed openly at the center of civilization. Before examining its destruction, we must first see what it originally looked like.
Language, Knowledge, and the Boundaries of “Germanness”
How can language and knowledge themselves both carry the faint light of Enlightenment and be appropriated by the state as a sharp blade for drawing exclusionary boundaries?
The view now turns to Bebelplatz and Humboldt University, which coldly expose one of the most contradictory dimensions of the modern German spirit. In its official narrative, Humboldt University has always traced its origin back to 1810. That year marked the beginning of the modern ideal of the university: the close unity of research and teaching, the absolute defense of academic freedom, and the full cultivation of the human being through science and education. This grand ideal once became a universal model, shaping how universities around the world understood themselves. In that historical context, the German language, the university, and knowledge seemed naturally intertwined with the openness of Enlightenment. This ideal made Humboldt possible; it also makes the flames at Bebelplatz appear all the more glaring.
On May 10, 1933, more than twenty thousand books were burned in Bebelplatz. Official records of the city of Berlin document the disaster with clarity. In the name of eliminating the “un-German spirit,” the Nazis threw into the flames works by major intellectual figures such as Erich Kästner, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, and Karl Marx. This catastrophe of civilization was jointly planned and carried out by students of what was then Humboldt University, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, and the Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler, in Opernplatz before the university’s main entrance.5
How could an institution whose soul was academic freedom so easily become an accomplice in a state project of cultural purification, and so smoothly fall into the state’s narrow definition of the “German nation”? In Humboldt University’s ideal declaration, knowledge meant the boundlessness of inquiry. Yet in Bebelplatz in 1933, language and knowledge were recoded. Certain books were judged “un-German”; certain authors were expelled from the cultural community; certain ideas were deprived of the right to exist. The book burning was not, in essence, blind anti-intellectualism. It was a precise act of boundary-making. Through its power to interpret language and culture, the state drew a dividing line among human beings: who belonged to Germany, and who did not.
The historical layers of Humboldt University are heavier than one might imagine. The university does not smooth over this history in its own narrative. Instead, it openly acknowledges that it did not resist the Nazi regime during the Nazi period and, after 1945, tended to adapt itself to the ideological expectations of the East German state. Today’s Humboldt emphasizes a reflective culture of remembrance. The university’s power of appeal in the present derives not only from the ideal it established in 1810, but also from its public acknowledgment that it betrayed that ideal. It is at once a totem of Enlightenment, testimony to the collapse of Enlightenment, and a site where postwar academic institutions learned again, amid the ruins, to assume historical responsibility.
In Shanghai today, German remains a living and mobile language, a language that is learned and invested with hope. Young people in Shanghai who study German intensely for education or employment may find it difficult to imagine how this same language was once used to determine who had the right to exist on a particular land. German can be a passage through which knowledge enters the world; it has also been used as a tool for drawing contested boundaries of culture and legitimacy.
The Sources of an Intellectual Tradition and Its Ethical Shadow
The Charité is Berlin’s most important medical institution. Robert Koch once discovered the pathogen of tuberculosis here. It is a stronghold of German medical knowledge, and also the matrix of the modern medical system that was institutionalized and exported to Shanghai. The permanent exhibition of the Berlin Museum of Medical History, “Tracing Life,” surveys three hundred years of medical history. The building in which the museum is located is the pathological museum whose foundation stone was laid in 1899 by Rudolf Virchow, the father of modern pathology. In other words, the Charité is not simply a hospital in Germany. It is an entire modern medical system, encompassing research institutions, teaching traditions, and the long accumulation of professional authority. Looking back to Shanghai, Tongji inherited precisely this German medical system: the laboratory paradigm, the system of clinical teaching, pathological thinking, and the logic of shaping medicine into a modern professional institution.
Today the Charité maintains the memorial project GeDenkOrt.Charité, which documents doctors, scientists, and employees who were excluded, expelled, murdered, or driven to death under National Socialism. The project’s memorial columns list 180 identified members of the institution and use individual biographies to show how persecution entered medical and academic life through administrative decisions as well as ideological commitment. Precisely because the Charité stood at the commanding height of German medicine, this history raises a difficult institutional question: how could knowledge whose vocation was to heal become entangled with racial exclusion and pseudo-science? By placing these names and histories in the center of its campus, the Charité treats remembrance not as a secondary addition to scientific achievement, but as part of the institution’s responsibility for how knowledge is used.6
Tongji shows how German medicine was received and inherited as an embodiment of modernity. The Charité, by contrast, offers a bloody historical reminder to the world: knowledge, if deprived of ethical illumination, does not automatically point toward the good. It can just as easily become the servant of power and serve an exclusionary order.
In Shanghai, Germany appears as a set of preserved traces marked by warmth and resilience. In Berlin, Germany appears as a history and responsibility that must be publicly confronted and precisely dissected. Setting out from Shanghai to search for Germany, we ultimately discover not only the connections between two cities, but also a severe reminder about human civilization: knowledge, institutions, and language can become the bricks and stones with which modern metropolises are built, but they can also become tools for destroying individuals. Perhaps the true strength of Shanghai lies in the fact that it not only preserved those excellent sparks of knowledge, but also, within the fissures of history, gently received the lives abandoned by that system of power.
Notes
- Topography of Terror Foundation, ‘Topography of Terror,’ accessed June 26, 2026, https://www.topographie.de/en/. The documentation center occupies the historical site of the Gestapo, SS, and Reich Security Main Office headquarters.
- Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,’ accessed June 26, 2026, https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe/. The foundation lists a field of approximately 19,000 square meters and 2,710 concrete stelae; some earlier publications count 2,711 by including a construction-stage total.
- Berlin.de, ‘Platform 17 Memorial,’ updated January 3, 2025, https://www.berlin.de/en/attractions-and-sights/4193712-3104052-platform-17-memorial.en.html. The memorial was inaugurated in 1998 and records the deportation transports from Grunewald station.
- Berlin.de, ‘New Synagogue,’ updated October 28, 2025, https://www.berlin.de/en/attractions-and-sights/3560461-3104052-new-synagogue.en.html. The synagogue was consecrated in 1866, seated about 3,200 people, and represented the scale and public visibility of Jewish life in Berlin before Nazi persecution.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Nazi Book Burnings,’ Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed June 26, 2026, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning. The Berlin burning at Opernplatz, now Bebelplatz, took place on May 10, 1933, and consumed about 20,000 volumes.
- GeDenkOrt.Charité, ‘Gedenksäulen’ [Memorial Columns], Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, accessed June 26, 2026, https://gedenkort.charite.de/orte/gedenksaeulen. The project reports 180 identified Charité members on its principal memorial column.