I like being alone in public places. It’s a big part of my life. I spend a lot of time looking, particularly at people.
I especially like looking at other people who are alone in public, doing the same things that I am doing: walking, drinking coffee, writing in a notebook or just staring into space.
I’ve written several columns recently about how we, as individuals in our contemporary culture, occupy shared public spaces. Last fall, I explored the private space that each of us has when we are in public, the comfortable bubble that allows daydreaming, observing and zoning out. We make a space in which we allow our thoughts to roam in any direction, without restriction.
My next column was about another aspect of this personal/public space: when we are alone in public, we often build virtual walls to shut others out, consciously or unconsciously, using technology like iPods or cell phones.
These “walls” can be inclusive or exclusive; sometimes we incorporate our surroundings in our meandering thoughts, and sometimes we retreat to a private place in our mind’s eye. In either case, we each make the construction individually, by choice.
My interest—and the point of these columns—is to increase awareness (mine and that of my readers) about how we navigate personal/public space, and how we choose to interact with others. But most importantly, I want to be aware of the most precious of liberties: freedom of thought.
This past October I went on a two-week trip to Eastern Europe. Like most tourists, I sought out the remnants of, and references to, World War II and the subsequent authoritarian regimes. As we toured different cities, I often heard: “This whole area was rubble.” Or “This was the train station where deportation occurred.”
I saw pictures and diagrams of bombed or torched buildings, with less than half their structure left. In front of me, in actuality, I saw brand-new office buildings and malls designed by contemporary architects, and renovated churches and synagogues that were replicated as closely as possible to the originals.
As places like East Berlin become more westernized (i.e., more modern and commercial), the physical evidence of past destruction and repression continues to disappear. While that evidence disappears, there is a simultaneous building of memorials of remembrance.
Partly because of my own background, I have always been mindful of the need to remember the murders carried out by the fascist and communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Though what I experienced, mostly by spending time at, and in, these newly built memorials, was a more visceral reaction to the enormity of the psychological devastation.
The first memorial I saw was in Berlin: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by the architect Peter Eisenman. When it opened in May of 2005, it was described by reporters as “an undulating labyrinth of tilting stone plinths, covering 204,440 square feet with 2,711 slabs of varying sizes and heights.”
At first I saw only its sculptural beauty. (I was not surprised to hear that Richard Serra, the sculptor, had been involved early on.) My reaction had nothing to do with the content (i.e., the message) of the memorial. But as I walked through, I began to feel the intended effect: now I was faced with disorientation and the slight claustrophobia of being in tunnel-like spaces. While I was there, kids were playing hide and seek, jumping out unexpectedly in front of me. I’ve heard that there is a reference to the cemetery in Prague, where the ancient headstones have all tilted to different angles. For me, however, the intensity came from physically wading into the space, losing peripheral sight and being forced to watch my step, literally.
Also in Berlin, we visited the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind. Inside the museum, we entered the Holocaust Tower, a high, narrow concrete room that had an extreme effect on my senses. I experienced the space through touch, sound and smell, plus a minimalist sliver of window for sight. My senses got confused; it smelled cold.
The space projected me into the minutes ahead; how long do I have to stay in this uncomfortable room? How odd that an empty space was forcing my thoughts into something so specific and narrow as the next few minutes.
Several days later, in Vienna, we sought out the Holocaust Memorial designed by the sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Again, I went there thinking more about the “art” than the events it represented. And again, the physicality of the work brought me to its intention.
In this monument, the empty room that walls would typically enclose is, instead, filled in. The monument is a concrete cast of the interior of a library. In a BBC interview, Whiteread said, “...it was as if one of the rooms from the surrounding buildings had been taken and put in the centre of the (Judenplatz) square, and all of the books were completely blank... the pages were facing outwards so you couldn’t read the spines of the books.” (For the transcript, see
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/whiteread_transcript.shtml.)
Looking at the monument, I was conscious of the space that had been taken away, filled in, inaccessible and at the same time suffocating. I felt closed out.
The next morning, having coffee in my hotel, I thought about Whiteread’s “library room” in terms of a public library, one of the best examples of a public/personal space. It is a very solitary place, but also the most public. The books and space are shared, and at the same time it is an atmosphere that is utterly respectful of one’s privacy. It is hushed (picture the librarian, her fingers to her lips) so that one’s thoughts won’t be interrupted.
We each look at the world with our own filters. In my own privileged life, there has rarely been a wall—physical or psychological—that truly curtailed my freedom. My personal walls are built by me, by choice. On my trip, I saw these monuments as metaphors for cities where the personal spaces were others’ constructions, and were made not to protect freedom of thought but to annihilate it.
During our visit to Prague, we took a bus to the town of Terezin. Here was a different kind of memorial: not renovated, not newly designed and built, but instead a preservation of a town.
People live there. It looks, to the uniformed eye, quaint. However, its role in the years 1940 through 1945 was for devastation. It was used for Nazi propaganda films to depict their so-called “beautification” campaign, a “self-administered Jewish settlement territory.” In fact, it was a transit camp for Jews before they were sent to other concentration camps, as well as a place of death.
An elderly gentleman accompanied us to help guide our tour. He had, as a nine-year-old boy, spent six months in this town and was then deported to Auschwitz. Before our group got back on our bus, I walked along the edge of the peaceful, quiet park in the center of the town. As I looked at the trees and my thoughts began to roam, I heard our guide say, “We were not allowed to go there.”
CA© 2007 W. Richmond