At first, you retain glimpses of the city. The rows of pillars frame a distant view of the Reichstag's skeletal glass dome. To the west, you can glimpse the canopy of trees in the Tiergarten. Then as you descend further, the views begin to disappear. The sound of gravel crunching under your feet gets more perceptible; the gray pillars, their towering forms tilting unsteadily, become more menacing and oppressive. The effect is intentionally disorienting. You are left alone with memories of life outside - the cheerful child, for example, balanced on the concrete platform.

This is a chilling moment. For me, it evoked Primo Levi's description of the death camps. "To sink is the easiest of matters," he wrote in "Survival in Auschwitz." "It is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp." Only through constant struggle and arbitrary luck was survival possible.

cgod, this article perfectly captures what I felt when I visited the memorial. It's particularly eerie to visit at night, slowly descending into the darkness.

Interestingly, it's said that the designer wanted people to keep on living in and around the memorial. The best way to honor the dead, he thought, was to realize how precious life is and to live it to the fullest. For example, he wanted people to be able to draw on it:

Despite Mr. Eisenman's objections, for example, the pillars are protected by a graffiti-resistant coating because the government worried that neo-Nazis would try to spray paint them with swastikas. For Mr. Eisenman, graffiti would simply have testified to the memorial's impact.

this is why we can't have nice things