Berlin. Grey. - an effect of weather & time. Silt of years. The old haunts. A cobbled band running through the city which marks The Wall. It is / it isn't there. Is it?

The holocaust memorial - mute concrete. Coffins? Buildings? A city scape? Unlettered printer's leads? The absolute refusal to signify or be explicit. No names here. Simply volume, surface, and expanse. A place where the gravity of events is so heavy that the desire is simply to be. Or let be. Once and for all.

And here we are at a conference all about reading in a city you sense yearns to return to a blank page. Yet must remember.

Or to walk - simply walk - through the Brandenburg Gate. Which - not so long ago - would have been unthinkable. Triumph of Empire: The Dead Man's Zone.

Or a car park under which was the bunker (its concrete walls meters thick). Only a fragment of Hitler's jaw remains. And even this is uncertain. Rumour and conjecture live on. Was it really here?

The excruciating debates about meaning in this city. Should they use the protective chemical for the concrete blocks if the firm that supplied it was implicated in the crimes? Should there be a plaque to indicate the site of the dismantled bunker? When not to record suggests irresponsibility, callousness, an effort to repress. Yet to record runs the risk of commemorating, perpetuating - shrine building.

Is it possible to simply record without connotation or resonance? To dampen language down and exorcise the ghosts? To build anew without discovering a bomb below your feet? Grim anagram: denotation or detonation?

To live knowing I didn't do it yet remember & carry the shame.

(Berlin notebook, 17-20 March)