Behind the memorial, the Reichstag’s new dome, the chariot atop the Brandenburg Gate, and a crane helping rebuild Berlin. A bit laden with symbolism, true.

The Holocaust Memorial is Berlin’s newest landmark — a month and a half old — and it is still finding its place in the city. The concept itself is simple: 2,711 stone slabs of varying heights and irregular tilts are arranged in a rectangular pattern a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate. Between them runs a grid of narrow paths, and if you venture into the middle of this field of slabs, they easily swallow you up. On a bright sunny day, as on my visit, the slabs offer you shade. On a rainy day there is little shelter from the rain.

The monument is not overbearing, nor does it bait for solemnity or histrionics, and schoolchildren readily take to playing hide and seek amid it. Walk along the gridded paths, and you are sometimes surprised by another visitor suddenly appearing from the left or right. There is a lot of random bumping into people — you think you might be alone, but suddenly you are not. And no matter how deep you venture amid the tallest of the slabs, every intersection has four clear straight ways out — 2,711 is a prime number, and also the number of pages in the Babylonian Talmud. A coincidence? Apparenty, yes. symbolic, perhaps, of the moral compass that the Nazis never managed to extinguish, even as they murdered millions of Jews.

The slabs on the edges of the terrain are lower, and you can sit on them, and people do. But when I was there, a few people — teenagers mostly — were standing on them, hopping from slab to slab towards the middle, which is easy enough to do (though you risk a nasty injury if you misstep). I happen to know what the concrete slabs represent — Jewish burial tombs — and so I felt it would not be appropriate for me to join them, even if the vantage point looked like it might be excellent for taking pictures. Some of the slabs already have small stones placed on their edges, which is a sign of respect for the dead in Jewish cemeteries.

It turns out that the debate around what is appropriate behaviour towards this memorial is something the architect, Peter Eisenman, would like to foster. A lack of stated rules means that people themselves need to decide individually how (or if) they show respect. And that is a good thing, I think, as it turns the memorial into something that forces an individual response.