ABSTRACT
While strolling amid the awesome beauty of the Obersalzberg, just above the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, it utterly chills to realize that the dank, mossy, overgrown ruins embedded in the landscape are remnants of the places where Hitler vacationed, entertained world dignitaries, and held meetings of strategic and military importance. Incongruously abutting this melancholy landscape, a huge, new, unbelievably shiny, glass and steel, horseshoe-shaped, fi ve-star InterContinental Hotel shimmers. A pleasure palace for well-heeled tourists now mingles with the former site of an important Nazi holiday spot, Hitler’s Berghof, which came to be widely understood as the Nazi spiritual home. But this complicated landscape, drenched with memory-catalyzing objects testifying to the huge complex that once dominated the mountain, shields a vast bunker system that lies below it. The moist and dewy tunnels where water dribbles down the walls offer a remarkable testament at once to the failure of the Nazi project and to the endurance of neo-Nazis who have stenciled the walls extensively. While the aboveground topography witnesses a battle between memory and forgetting, the bunker system stubbornly works toward remembrance-although often not of the victims but rather of the perpetrators. For below the beautiful mountain, swastikas, anti-Semitic, and anti-queer slogans still proliferate; on the walls, in English, one fi nds “No Commie Jew Fags.”
