I felt similarly when I visited Auschwitz years ago and enjoyed a very good steak dinner at the restaurant outside the main gates. All of us at the table felt the same way. Should we be enjoying it?
I also felt the same thing just a few weeks ago when I saw a photo of Hitler touring the Opera Garnier in Paris. I attended a performance there and realized I had stood on many of the same spots he did.
Ultimately, it's up to the individual visitor to demonstrate respect and be familiar with what happ…
This is a lovely piece of writing - thought-provoking with the sudden dramatic shift of scale right at the very end.
Could your response to the bombed-out Berghof also, though, be that culturally ingrained reaction to ruins made most explicit through Romanticism - but also present, inter alia, in the Old English poem 'The Ruin' (8th century?) - in which contemplating the wreckage of a once-monumental structure becomes a point of embarkation for reflecting on the limitations of all earthly power…
I’m maybe going to be controversial here. Please feel free to bollock me later! I just think some people don’t really know what to think.. “ohhh Hitler stood here” “This is where Hitler gassed Jews”. I’ve heard it. I believe it’s a lack of education. You know how to feel Guy as do most of us here who subscribe. We ARE aware of the enormity of these things. And providing we conduct ourselves accordingly and are happy with our reason/motivation/conscience for being there, then that’s all we can d…
Despite all the research I had done, and the period photos I had looked at, I found it virtually impossible to feel any sense of history at the Kehlsteinhaus. It's in effect nothing more than a mountain-top restaurant. Nice view, average if somewhat over-priced food. If the authorities wanted to instill a real sense of what happened there, they'd kick the restaurant out and install an appropriate exhibition. But that wouldn't make as much money. So, no chance.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/sW3VbDSPNUzUajrW8
👏 must confess that the commercial trappings of tourism would trouble me. And wondering about the motives of some visitors. Almost wish the Americans had blown up the lot. Can however fully understand in many ways feeling closer to a sense of history at the Berghof. You don't always need the physical man made objects to feel what has gone before.