parallel uses. Commuters from the wealthy suburb ride the S-Bahn to work. Others travel to the suburb to wander around the woods. High-speed trains rush by.
The architects wanted people to walk through the memorial: “In passing—that is, while walking—the chronology of a schedule is revealed whose coordinates are embedded on the platform.” The train station is a place of transition, and walking (and reading) places the participant in a dynamic relationship with the transport of Berlin’s Jews: “Applied to the question of the monument, perception is not really about an observer standing opposite a monumental object in order to view it in a state of stasis, but rather more about perceiving things in passing: literally, things directly associated with motion and walking”30.
For such a small site, we FASPE Fellows were given a comparatively large amount of time to explore, to walk and observe each of the 186 cast iron plates, which gave us room to contemplate the ordinariness of the Holocaust. Rather than just reading about the transport, we were able to understand the movement of people through the movement of our bodies, experiencing the platform as a site of transition and movement. Walking creates a dynamic perceptual field, allowing us to imagine the movement of people to the camps. It was here that I began to feel what Zumthor’s initial proposal sought to accomplish in centering the perceptual experience, in feeling the specificity of the site’s history. The architecture formalizes a particular relationship to the site and thus, a particular perception of “power of place.” The specificity of the site as a historical departure place for such transports is central to the experience. This project could not exist at just any train station, and here the architects differentiated themselves from Eisenman’s memorial and its generic monumentality.
Perhaps because Grunewald was a site of ordinary living (a suburb much like the places where many Fellows grew up), it was much easier to feel one’s complicity. I thought about the commuter train stations that I took to school and work and how ordinary those experiences were. It’s not a true analogy, but it opens up the possibility for thinking about the banality of evil—to borrow from Hannah Arendt—that we might do in our everyday work (as physicians, as I was in the medical cohort) even if the ordinariness of it makes it feel normal. Compared to the crematoria at Birkenau, where its unfamiliarity makes it easy for us to other the evil that took place (and thus easier to renounce it), the familiarity of Track 17 opens up the difficult possibility that we are, or could be, that unethical. This is one approach to how I understand the silence on the bus back home after the visit to Track 17. On the one hand, we were able to proprioceptively experience “transport” and the weight of each one of the cast iron panels, which gave heft to the weightless data of train date, destination, and occupancy. On the other, the experience opened up a kind of vulnerability, a questioning of our comfort and sensibility. In the site’s ordinariness, we could understand how easy it is for us to be slotted into either the victim or perpetrator categories. At an ordinary site, I was able to better appreciate what Primo Levi has termed the gray zone,31 the site where victims, collaborators, and perpetrators start to blend into one another. In walking the platform, we feel the pluripotency of our transformation into any one of these figures.
Architecture and “the Power of Place”
If the efforts of a Holocaust-centered culture of memory could have any effect, it would be to make understandable that, under certain circumstances, it is not only bad people who behave inhumanly, but good ones, too. That is the problem. Track 17 is neither located on the site of a former concentration camp, nor in an industrial zone. Instead, it is found in the middle of one of the most bourgeois, most saturated quarters of the capital32.
The quote above from cultural theorist and social psychologist Harald Welzer—from his contribution to the edited volume on Track 17—is an apt summary of the FASPE ethos. In this essay, I have explored an architectural approach to that same memory culture, one that addresses the “power of place” to move people towards emotional experiences and ethical reflection. In examining the architectural form and intent of various Holocaust sites and memorials, both built and unbuilt, I have argued that built environments shape our ethical experience of history. Through architectural form and experience, we can engage with the Holocaust in more robust ways, ways that go beyond observing its preserved materials traces or discussing the significance of events. Feelings, emotional and proprioceptive, shape the understanding of how we, like Nazis perpetrators, can behave inhumanly despite our best intentions.
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Chuan Hao (Alex) Chen was a 2024 FASPE Medical Fellow. He graduated from the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania in 2025 and is now a pathology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
29Ibid., p. 85.
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