Substantive Caption:As an urban humanist interested in the intellectual history of the Nazi period, I am grappling with a unique remnant of this time: Albert Speer’s so called heavy load-bearing cylinder; a massive concrete structure outweighing the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro combined. Originally planned as an engineering measure to prepare Berlin’s unpredictable soil for the erection of a gigantic triumphal arch, this fragment of an unfinished project still haunts the collective consciousness. Ill-reputed as “fungus” in the public narrative, voices that demand its erasure summon, while others call for its preservation. During my field- and archival research in Berlin, I collected thousands of visuals spanning from historical photographs and construction plans to post-war art projects. I am interested in exploring ways to structure my visual archive and critically analyze the “toxicity” or “intoxication” of this mute object in the urban memory. The questions is: shall it be erased, as it attracts neo-Nazis who are on the rise in Germany, or, does it have to be preserved for public memory? Can an object be toxic for our memory? How can we express that visually?
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