Berlin plans to replace the city's memorial to the Nazi-organised book-burning in 1933 with a car-park.
The Silent Library commemorates the night in Berlin exactly 68 years ago when university students ransacked city libraries and burned over 20,000 books by authors deemed decadent and "un-German" by the Nazis.
At the centre of Bebelplatz, a broad plaza in the city centre and the site of the book-burning, is a window set in the ground that reveals an underground room with four walls of floor-to-ceiling white bookshelves, all empty.
The memorial is only seven years old, but Berlin city engineers want the site for a twostorey underground car park to relocate the cars that are currently allowed to park in the middle of Unter den Linden, one of the city's main thoroughfares.
"I want to scream. It's a terrible trivialisation and devaluation of this memorial," said architect Prof Micha Ullman. However, his view is not shared by the Berlin senate.
"In the end, the site is not a graveyard or a sacrosanct altar but a normal plaza in the middle of everyday life," said senate spokeswoman Ms Petra Reetz. She said the city had proposed building the car-park around the underground memorial, an idea rejected by the memorial's architect.
"If the underground car-park is built the plaza will lose its emptiness and stillness and my memorial will be lost," said Prof Ullman.
His design won international praise in 1994 for commemorating one of the most shameful episodes in Berlin history in an understated and minimalist way.
In contrast, the Holocaust memorial, a field of concrete pillars being built on a site adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, has been criticised as bombastic and overblown.
The decision to go ahead with the car-park reflects a frustration among Berlin city planners, who have spent a decade trying to rebuild the capital city while showing respect for its troubled past.
Last year they rejected an application for a memorial to Roma murdered under Nazi rule near the Brandenburg Gate after the mayor complained that the area had become a "memorial mile".
"Cars here, cars there, the memorial should be left alone, it's really extraordinary," said one visitor to Bebelplatz yesterday.
Building work on the car-park will begin in July, so unless there is a last-minute intervention, it looks as if the city planners have won their first battle against the ghosts of Berlin.
