The site sits one block south of the Brandenburg Gate in what was once the death strip of the Berlin Wall. Joseph Goebbels' urban villa stood near here. The Reich Chancellery and Hitler's Fuhrerbunker were a short walk south; the bunker itself remains beneath an unmarked car park about a hundred and fifty meters away. Foreign embassies surround the field. The sculptor Lea Rosh, a German journalist, founded the campaign for a memorial in 1989, the year the Wall came down. The Bundestag approved Eisenman's design in 1999. Construction began on April Fool's Day 2003 and finished on 15 December 2004. The memorial was dedicated on 10 May 2005, sixty years and two days after VE Day, in a tent set up at the edge of the field, only meters from where the bunker lies.

The Place of Information sits beneath the eastern edge of the field, reached by stairs that descend through the grid. The first room is the Room of Dimensions, a timeline that runs from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 through the Final Solution. Then come four chambers built around individuals rather than statistics. The Room of Families follows fifteen specific Jewish families across the years of persecution, with photographs, household letters, the small documents of ordinary life. The Room of Names is the recording. The Room of Sites tells what happened at particular places of murder. The Room of Sites of Memory locates the camps, ghettos, and execution sites across Europe. Each room repeats the proportions of the stelae overhead. You are walking among the dead and beneath the dead at the same time.

If Eisenman's stelae are the central, abstract gesture, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock's Places of Remembrance offers something different. Their work, installed in 1993 in the Bavarian Quarter of Schoneberg, scatters eighty enamel signs across the neighborhood lampposts. Each sign quotes a Nazi-era law restricting Jewish life. Jews are forbidden from buying milk. Jews must surrender their typewriters. Jews may no longer own pets. The quarter, which had been home to many Berlin Jews including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin, is now haunted at the level of street furniture. Eisenman's field shows the absence at scale. The Bavarian Quarter signs show how quickly the laws stripped away an ordinary life, item by mundane item, until nothing was left.

In October 2003 the Swiss paper Tages-Anzeiger reported that Degussa, the company supplying the anti-graffiti coating for the stelae, was the parent of Degesch, the firm that had produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers. Construction halted. Lea Rosh said Zyklon B was obviously the limit. Some Jewish organizations agreed; Eisenman argued for continuing. After three weeks of debate the foundation chose to keep using the coating, partly because Degussa's Woermann Bauchemie had already poured the foundation slab. By 2007 hairline cracks were spreading across some four hundred stelae; in 2012 German authorities began reinforcing them with hidden steel collars. The argument over how the field should be used has never stopped. The 1968 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit defended people taking selfies on the stelae as a sign that life continues. Foundation spokeswoman Sarah Friedrich has said the playful use is desecration. In 2009 swastikas appeared on twelve of the slabs. In 2017 the artist Shahak Shapira launched 'Yolocaust,' superimposing concentration camp photos behind grinning Instagram poses taken at the memorial. The site refuses to settle. That, perhaps, is its purpose.

Walk in from any side. The stelae start at ankle height and rise as the ground falls away beneath your feet, until you are surrounded by walls of grey concrete taller than yourself. Sound from the surrounding streets cuts off. Other visitors disappear and reappear at the perpendicular intersections. The grid is rigid; the experience of moving through it is anything but. Eisenman has said that disorientation is the point, that the sensation of losing track of where you are belongs to the meaning. The names being read in the room beneath your feet belong to people who lost everything, including the right to be remembered as themselves. Walk slowly. The recording will not finish today, or this year, or any year in our lifetimes.