Berlin is a city that remembers.
You feel it under your shoes.
Little brass plates with names.
You don’t even have to look for them—
you just stumble over memory on your way to buy bread.
It mourns out loud, this place.
Walls whisper names.
Museums stay quiet in a way that says more than words ever could.
They leave rooms empty—on purpose—
because absence says more than any exhibit.
Here, they don’t hide the past.
They carve it into stone.
Bake it into the buildings.
Kids don’t just learn facts and dates—they learn what it felt like.
What it meant. What it cost.
They say:
Never Again.
Firm.
Like a vow they’ve practiced until it became muscle memory.
But lately… it just sounds like an echo.
Because something’s happening again.
Right now.
And no one wants to name it.
Not in galleries.
Not in schools.
Not even out on the streets—
the same streets that built their identity on remembering.
Something’s burning.
Far, but not far enough.
Homes are flattening.
Children are dying.
Mothers are screaming into clouds of dust.
And most of the world walks past
with their headphones in.
Berlin remembers.
But what’s the point of memory
if it doesn’t make you do something?
We’re good at grief once it’s over.
We light candles for the past.
We make speeches about ghosts.
But we go quiet when it’s the living.
When the horror feels too now.
We say Never Again—
until the victims don’t look like us.
Until it’s messy.
Until the grief feels like a political risk.
Until saying something might cost us followers, or friends, or funding.
But here’s the thing:
History isn’t over.
You’re standing inside it.
If you stay quiet now,
you won’t be remembered for your good intentions.
You’ll be remembered for your silence.
Berlin taught me that.
Berlin showed me
what happens when you don’t say anything
until it’s too late to matter.
So I’m not looking away.
Not this time.
Not again.
Let the city remember.
Let us respond.
Because memory means nothing
if it doesn’t light something up inside you
right now.
