NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE L ast week I wrote about two places in Berlin — the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, or Memorial Church, and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum — that record and memorialize aspects of the German experience during the Second World War.

Both do well enough in making historically accurate points. Berlin was indeed schmatzed in air raid after air raid during the war, and escaping East Germany after the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961 was a harrowing affair. I dispute the relevance of both the memorial and the museum, given their mixed messages. Today I’ll write about memorials I visited that seem more effective, either through poignancy or blunt admonition.

I spent lots of time outdoors in Berlin because the weather was nice — for Berlin in February — and after some 20 hours at Wagner operas in Dresden and as many in museums there, I wanted fresh air. Berlin is mostly post-war and, architecturally, cold and modern. Still, I wanted sun and wanted to move.

After visiting the beautiful new church and the remains of the old one, I walked to the Brandenburg Gate. It’s a Prussian memorial gate built in 1788 and Berlin’s architectural calling card. In the early ’90s, the last time I was in Berlin, I was still a runner. Running through the gate each morning was a thrill since so many among the good, the bad, and the ugly had preceded me, though at a more stately pace and less sweaty. Napoleon marched through it in 1806, as did kaisers, margraves, electors, and dukes. Countless Nazis went back and forth. Just inside the post-war Soviet zone, the Berlin Wall ran next to it. President Reagan delivered his 1987 speech with the gate as a backdrop.

Steps from the Brandenburg Gate is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, completed in 2005 and the main German outdoor monument to the Holocaust. It’s not far from Hitler’s bunker and on the edge of Potsdamer Platz. The space the memorial occupies was once a series of formal gardens surrounding imperial government buildings. During the Nazi era, both Goebbels, the propaganda minister, and Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, had villas there.

From 1945 to 1990, Potsdamer Platz and the site of the memorial were another no-man’s land, or, as the memorial calls it, a death strip and, over time, a scrub forest. It had just been cleared in 1990. What was once Berlin’s Piccadilly was a hundred acres of mud. It’s been developed now with fancy corporate towers.

The memorial is 2,710 mock table tombs, or flat slabs of concrete, each the same width and length but of varying heights, arranged in rows set at right angels, with 54 on a north-south axis, and 87 facing east or west. There are no inscriptions. The site is 200,000 square feet, or about 4.5 acres. Heights range from a few inches to 15 feet and are arbitrarily distributed. The ground slopes toward the middle, so I felt I was sinking. No one gets any deeper understanding of why the Holocaust happened, because there’s no understanding.

How to evoke mass slaughter when so many of the dead — millions — are unknown? Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and history center, can identify 3 million, but millions more died. Like the sea of blank stones, there’s so much anonymity. That’s one reason the Holocaust was so brutal. The slabs suggest an ancient cemetery. One lesson in walking through an old New England cemetery is always bracing to me: No one’s alive who knew these poor, dead people. The afterlife is a disappearing act.

Given the open space, the mass is claustrophobic. I visited on a sunny day, but it was a weekday and almost entirely empty. On weekends, it’s much visited. The Tiergarten, Berlin’s main park, is next to the memorial. When the weather’s nice, there’s some spillover from the park. Children climb the stones and jump from stone to stone. I walked in stunned silence, a rare state for me. I felt caught in a maze.

The monument was designed by Peter Eisenman, the American architect. Richard Serra was involved, too, though he left the design team in the middle of the project. The concrete’s not high-production. It looks industrial, much as the Holocaust was industrial-scale, and concrete is why East Berlin, where the stuff was commissar, looked so grim.

The thing took nearly 20 years from start to finish, not surprising, but it’s worth saying that the Nazi era lasted only twelve. The project became immensely political, with two chancellors — Kohl and Schröder — very involved in the design, as were politicians in Bonn and in Berlin. A botched first competition led to a redo. I’m surprised, given the number of chefs, that the monument is so dramatic, so moving, and so jarring. It must make Germans swallow hard, every day.

There’s a very good history center underground.

Sobering in a more tangible, explicit way is the Places in Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter. Berlin artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock created it in 1993. It’s a dispersed work of art — 80 signs, each fixed to a lamppost in what was, before the Nazis, an upscale Jewish neighborhood. It’s in Berlin’s Schönberg district, the city’s version of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Each sign has a one-line, condensed version, in German, of an anti-Jewish rule imposed by the Nazi government. The other side of the sign has a bright, bold image visualizing the text. The signs are about the size of Manhattan signs telling car owners when and where they can park.

Eisenman’s memorial is a stark, big-picture affair. What I saw in the Bavarian Quarter made my blood boil. It’s death by 80 humiliating cuts. Bit by bit, Jews were dehumanized.

A side of one sign shows black musical notes set against an orange field. The other side reads “Jews are barred from all choral groups,” a law from August 16, 1933. “Postal workers married to Jews are required to retire” reads another sign, dated June 8, 1937. The graphic is a blank postcard.

Streets named after Jews — even the developers of the Bavarian Quarter – had to be renamed. Jews could shop only between 4 and 5 in the afternoon. Jews were not allowed to buy soap. Or shaving cream. Or razor blades. Jews were no longer allowed to keep pets. Jewish and Aryan children couldn’t play together — the image for that is a hopscotch game. “Jewish emigration is forbidden” became the law on October 23, 1941. The sign’s opposite side is a field of black.

The locals in the still-posh Bavarian Quarter opposed the memorial project. They didn’t want their children to feel guilty. They lost. Until recently it was probably impossible to oppose a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. During my walk through the neighborhood, I found Christopher Isherwood’s house. His apartment was the location of the story that became Cabaret.

Stih and Schnock are very good artists indeed. I just missed an exhibition of their new work at the NYU museum. The art treats Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter illustration, iconic the minute it appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1943. What would Rosie the Riveter look like today, the artists ask. Rockwell lived in Vermont’s little Ye Olde Arlington, where I live. I knew Mary Burke, the model for Rosie. Her mother was the telephone operator and knew the news before anyone else did.

The Empty Library is a subterranean room with empty white bookshelves, set beneath the cobblestones in Bebelplatz, one of Berlin’s main squares. It was designed by Micha Ullman (b. 1939), an Israeli artist specializing in empty voids created in spaces we assume to be either solid or bustling. The Empty Library, completed in 1995, memorializes the massive book burning that occurred in the square on May 10, 1933, only a few months after Hitler’s election as Germany’s chancellor.

Organizing and shepherding the bonfire were students and professors at what is now Humboldt University. They happily burned 20,000 books on pyres, just steps from St. Hedwig’s Cathedral and the Berlin State Opera. The books were written by Jews or had political or economic themes at variance with the Nazis’ National Socialism.

Ullman’s void is a space meant for books, but empty. The space is about 23 feet square and 18 feet deep. It’s covered with glass, so visitors need to look down. I saw it during the day and thought it a ho-hum, one-shot thing, but I’m told that at night the void is lit from within and glows as if beseeching us from a grave.

A plaque near the lost-library monument quotes the German playwright, poet, and critic Heinrich Heine: “Those who burn books are bound soon enough to burn people.” It’s from Almansor, a play by Heine first performed in 1820, chronicling a love story about a Muslim man and a Christian woman. Early in the play, the Muslim lover utters the line upon hearing that a Catholic cardinal burned copies of the Koran in Granada in 1492, after the Moors were expelled. It is a famous line and goes without saying.

That law students at Stanford, a place where everyone’s supposed to be smart, would scorch a federal judge’s speech a few weeks ago is a sign that the academic Brownshirt is back in vogue. Masked and big on a finger-snapping shtick to show approval of whatever crackpot lefty idea is on the table, these students are creeps. So are the Stanford deans and faculty who abet and goad them. All they need is a basic brown shirt.

My rant for the day.

Most impressive is the Soviet World War II memorial in Treptower Park in East Berlin, dedicated in 1949 when memories of the war were fresh and raw. The park was the site of the 1896 Great Industrial Exposition, that year’s world’s fair.

It’s the most traditional and the grandest of the memorials I saw. The monument begins with a pair of massive red-granite, stylized Soviet flags bookending a sweeping view that leads to a 30-foot-tall bronze sculpture of a Soviet soldier stomping a broken swastika. On each side of the allée leading to the bronze sculpture are eight sculptures of a Soviet soldier kneeling on top of a sarcophagus. The 16 figures represent each of the 16 fake republics in the USSR.

It’s a somber, stately memorial without bombast. The two flags, one a left-leaning triangle, the other right-leaning, are a bow to Suprematism, an early-20th-century art movement in Russia, and, of all people, Kazimir Malevich, whose rigorous geometric forms Stalin viewed as denials of social realities. Suprematists used them to assail trite emotion and access pure feeling.

The memorial at Treptower Park is also a mass grave containing the remains of some of the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the siege of Berlin, making the flags an abstract, powerful reference to old cemetery gates. They’re also a way to frame the sculpture of the single Soviet soldier at the other end of the allée. That soldier, a giant figure, emphatically crushes the swastika. He embodies Soviet might as well as Commie hegemony.

I’ll write in a couple of weeks about my two visits to Berlin art museums, which helped me catch up with old favorites such as Nefertiti and one of Caravaggio’s bad boys.