an uneasy and relieving sense of lightness. Some minutes later a tour bus stops nearby and groups of elderly passengers emerge; some of the men wear yarmulkas, They stand along the edge of the memorial and begin taking pictures: they aim their cameras high, over the whole monument for wide-angle panorama shots, and some of them pose in small groups in front of one or two of the slabs. Only a few of them sit down on the slabs, and even fewer of them move into the memorial, toward the centre.

I learn later that the isolation chamber I imagined to be in the centre of the Holocaust Memorial is in fact on the first floor of the Jewish Museum, a kilometre or so away on Linden Strasse. Themany young Germans (I imagine Ilonka to be in her thirties) consider it to be yet another attempt by German state and corporate authority to generalize and slide Holocaust responsibilities away from their institutions, and from individual persons, and foist them on subsequent generations like a kind of original sin.

On a rainy day I went looking for Bebel Platz in front of the German Opera House, where on May 10, 1933, Nazi Party functionaries under orders from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels burned tens of thousands of books by Heinrich Heine, Erich Maria Re­marque, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Erich Kästner, Bertolt Brecht, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and many others, German and foreign, on the grounds that their writings were