Look at the road, one Jew says to another, it links past to future and, the other way round, future to past-as if there were still a past after the future-- but look also at the hope tougher than life that one day there could reappear out of the black bottom of misery a corner, a bit of blue sky. (Jabes 69) I. The Bahnhof in the Space of Berlin's Present As the first major long-distance railway line to open in a German state, the Bahnhof has always had more than just an incidental connection to the city of Berlin and its liminal geography as a point of entry to eastern, western, and southern Europe. Walter Benjamin certainly recognized this when he immortalized the railway station's greatness, scale, and technological significance in recollecting his childhood in Berlin: Der Anhalter laut des Namens Mutterhohle der Eisenbahnen, wo die Lokomotiven zu Hause sein and die Zuge anhalten mussten. Keine Ferne war ferner, als wo im Nebel seine Gleise zusammenliefen. (Berliner Kindheit 94) To Benjamin, the was the material reality of a marvelous nineteenth-century dream and the historical possibility of connecting to a faraway place. It was where Kafka arrived from Prague when he visited Felice Bauer in Berlin; it is also where Celan arrived on his way to Paris from Cracow in 1938. For more than a century, the station became a transformative symbol of Berlin's modernity; and even in its present ruin, it is still a witness to both the volatility of the twentieth century and the hopes and fears of the nineteenth. On September 1, 1840, the first part of the railway line that would connect Berlin to the German state of Anhalt was opened between Dessau and Kothen by the directors of the Berlin-Anhaltische Eisenbahn Gesellschaft (Bley; Knothe). By September of the following year, the construction of Berlin's Bahnhof was completed and daily service began running to Kothen via Wittenberg, Coswig, and Dessau. The line, which connected Prussia and Anhalt, was the longest railway line in any German state at the time, stretching more than 150 kilometers. Shortly after German unification, the original station, designed and built between 1838 and 1841, was rebuilt on a colossal scale and reopened to the public in 1880. At the time, the new building was one of the largest terminal railway stations in the world, measuring 170 meters long, 60 meters wide, and nearly 35 meters high at its apex (Bley 51-53). The cost of rebuilding the entire station was unprecedented in railway history, totaling more than fourteen million marks (Bley 52). Adding to its mythological proportions, a gigantic underground passageway connecting the train station to the luxurious Hotel Excelsior across the street was opened in 1928. Guests arriving at the station could walk to a doorway at the end of the platform, take an elevator downstairs, stroll through the grosste[r] Hoteltunnel der Welt, shop around the clock in the underground retail stores, and emerge 80 meters away in the lobby of the largest hotel on the continent, the Excelsior. Analogous to the arcades of Paris in the 19th century, this 20th century passageway was a hub of capitalist culture, a dream place of modernity. But by the 1930s, the Bahnhof had turned into an Abschiedsbahnhof with a Tranengleis because more than 3,000 Jewish children were sent south out of Germany by their parents from this station (Roik-Bogner 63-65). After 1939, Jews still remaining in Berlin were thereafter unable to flee. Beginning on October 18,1941, a total of 180 Sonderzuge left Berlin, almost all from Bahnhof and Grunewald Bahnhof to gathering points in Germany and concentration camps in the East. Trains last serviced the station nearly five decades ago and it was permanently closed on May 17, 1952. After much debate, with the exception of part of the Anhalter's north portal, the station was finally razed in 1961. …