The hateful killings in Orlando hang heavily on me. A man next to us at breakfast is reading a sports newspaper with headlines of the German soccer win. Peter says, look, no mention of the murders. Overhearing us the man turns to a page in the middle of that paper and there in vivid color and huge black print is the article. He shows us his three other Berlin papers with headlines of Orlando. "Germans feel very close to the United States," he says. We talk about life that morning, there in our hotel dining room with a stranger, and how it is filled with the horrible, the sublime.
Our friend Gunda drives us to lake Wanssee. Max Liebermann built a summer villa there for his family with gardens and lawn stretching down to the lake. We walk the kitchen garden, the rose garden, then sit overlooking the flower terrace sipping coffee eating marzipan cake. We climb the stairs to see Herr Liebermann's paintings, the room where he worked. I cannot leave before walking down to the lake past mature birch trees to photograph a pair of swans.
We walk a few blocks away to visit another villa. There are photos of all that attended the documented conference held in its dining room on January 20, 1942. Participants including representatives of the SS, the Nazi party, and various Reich ministers meet for approximately ninety minutes to discuss the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Hitler in a prior authorization calls for the deportation of all European Jews to Eastern Europe which was to begin immediately. From the conference protocol one can conclude that a prior decision had been made at the highest level of state leadership to extend the process of mass murder, started in June 1941, to the systematic genocide of all European Jews.
Two villas on the banks of Lake Wannsee: the sublime, the horrible.