History
After the demolition of the ruins, the area was used for 15 years as a bumper car site and as talus for the Kreuzberger area renovation. The first exhibition with the focus on the Topography of Terror emerged for the 750th anniversary of Berlin in 1987 and was afterwards continued. The investigatory work for the directions of the exhibition disembogued in a documentation centre that collected some more evidence for the terror of the National Socialists in Germany.
Since 1992 a foundation for the construction and maintenance of a documentation centre with an associated permanent exhibition exists. The managing director is Rabbi Andreas Nachama. The plans to found a memorial site on the former site of the Gestapo goes back to 1978, when Berlin architecture critic Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm was one of the first to note, in essays and surveys, the significance of the former site of the Gestapo, SD und RSHA headquarters.
Read more about this topic: Topography Of Terror
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)