My mom once told me buildings have meaning, that they can speak to people. It’s like when you enter a building and you have this hunch about its history, about the people who might have walked around in the same hallways as you’re doing now, looking out of the same windows, seeing the same views just slightly altered through time. It seems like a building can store all the emotions, the excitement, the suffering, the boredom, the brutality of whatever happened there. This has nothing to do with ghosts. My mom doesn’t believe in dead people haunting the living. It’s more like every person entering a building is leaving a kind of echo there, no matter how small. I think I get what she means. It’s that feeling you get as if you’re stepping into someone else’s story. We all remember what a ruin of a castle made us feel when we were little. We would enter these half-broken walls covered with dust and rubble but all we could see were the knights, the feasts, the adventure. You could call that fantasy and fiction but maybe it’s simply that echo of long-gone stories you can still hear in the distance. As we grow older, we become more realistic, or should I say more ignorant? Ignorant enough to not trust those feelings anymore that come creeping in when we first see or enter a house, a ruin, a building.
When I was about 10 or 11 my mom took me to see the place where Hitler held his annual Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg, the “Reichsparteitagsgelände”. I think everyone knows that arena from some kind of historical black and white footage. But not everyone knows that big congress hall on the same grounds. It is a ruin; it always has been. It was never finished and stands until this day without a roof. They never held any rallies in there.
But when I stepped into its inner courtyard for the first time, it felt like its red brick walls, climbing high into the sky, started to close in on me. I immediately got this overwhelming feeling of being pushed down, feeling small and of so many stories that have been wiped out and silenced. It was a bright day and the blue sky seemed to push against the sharp edges of these unfinished walls. The grey concrete floor was showing cracks where little pieces of green grass and even small white and yellow daisies broke through the massive foundation. But I couldn’t see the colors. I couldn’t see nature taking over. I could only feel an unease rising up in me. Until this day every building that even slightly reminds me of this experience in my childhood evokes this kind of emotion in me, no matter if they have any factual historical connection to any of this. It is about my personal experiences, my emotions, my connections. These buildings give me a feeling that mirrors not only my personal story but also stories around, before and after me. The stories and echoes of people that are surrounding all of us all the time. We’re trying so hard to distinguish between fact and fiction between objectivity and emotions. But your own story changes how you see buildings, what they tell you and how they make you feel.
The thing about everyday history, about personal stories is that some are simply forgotten over time and some are willingly covered up. It’s like putting a veil over things so you can’t really see them anymore. You can see parts of it, but somehow not enough to really grasp what’s happening. Things get blurry. But maybe we can lift that veil if we would just be willing to feel instead of trying so hard to just see.
Anna Laura Müller
