Bebelplatz was once the infamous location where the Nazis burned more than 20,000 books in 1933—and is home to one of the most impressive and artistic memorials in Berlin. Designed by Micha Ullman in 1995, the empty subterranean bookshelves pay homage to the piles of books burned by the Nazis here in 1933, an event eerily eerily touched upon by Heinrich Heine’s famous 1820 quotation: “Wherever they burn books, eventually they will burn people too.”

Among the books burned in the large pyre were titles by Marx, Freud, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Kästner and Heine.