Topographie des Terrors / Topography of Terror: Gestaltung eines Erinnerungsortes / The Design of a Memorial

Bilingual edition (English/German) / Zweisprachige Ausgabe (deutsch/englisch)

The Topography of Terror, a place of learning and remembrance, evolved in central Berlin on the ruined site where the headquarters of Gestapo, SS, and Reich Security Main Office once stood in the Nazi era. It now has over a million visitors every year. In this volume, the historian Andreas Nachama, who was director of the Topography of Terror Foundation from 1994 to 2019, recalls his youthful impressions of the place and traces the evolution and establishment of the Topography of Terror, with which he was closely associated from the 1980s onwards. The architect and exhibition designer Ursula Wilms and the landscape architect Heinz W. Hallmann present the basic concept that guided their overall design plan for the Topography of Terror, combining architecture, landscape, and exhibition design. The original photographs in the volume by the photographer Friederike von Rauch convey the atmosphere of the site shortly before its completion in 2010.