No escape from the shadows?

Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis' walk from the German Finance Ministry to Commerzbank (one of Germany’s two giant private banks) was "punctuated by officially sanctioned memories." The new Holocaust Memorial (twice as big as the U.S. Embassy); the new street beside it, called Hannah Arendt Street; and the signs pointing to Berlin’s new Jewish Museum. Lewis writes: "The streets of Berlin can feel like an elaborate shrine to German guilt. It’s as if the Germans have been required to accept that they will always play the villain. Hardly anyone still alive is responsible for what happened: now everyone is. But when everyone is guilty, no one is. At any rate, if some Martian landed on the streets of Berlin knowing nothing of its history, he might wonder: who are these people called 'the Jews' and how did they come to run this place? But there are no Jews in Germany, or not many." Haunting. Or as Catholic Univ. founder John Lancaster Spalding said long before WWII, memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

(Photo: "Berlin" by John Sakura)