This chapter offers a personal response to some of Berlin’s silent Jewish memorial spaces. It is a self-consciously symbolic and reflexive contrast to the sense of joyful noise that dominates the rest of the book. Beyond an aural version of erasure, unspeakability, or the space for reflection upon it, the chapter argues that these silent spaces must always be heard as part of their surrounding
... [Show full abstract] urban environment, refracting wider spatial practices and dis/order. When conventions are reversed—when the present is silent—the past can resound in surprising and provocative ways, collapsing spatial and temporal borders and escaping the ritualized boundaries of formal commemoration. This is explored through two different memorial situations: the disturbing resonances and transgressive processes of a collective silent walk and Gleis 17 railway memorial’s opening up of heterotopic “gaps” in time. Each of these examples, in different ways, frames a slippage between urban sound and memorial silence, creating a parallel symbolic space that the past and the present can inhabit simultaneously. In its unpredictable fluidity, silence becomes a mobile and subversive force, producing an imaginative space that is ambiguous, affective, and deeply meaningful. The chapter argues that the contemporary urban soundscape that slips through these silent cracks problematizes the narrative hegemony of memorial itself.
