“From the Tremor a River Rises” – Remembering Breitscheidplatz

On December 19, 2016, Berlin was shaken by a devastating terrorist attack. A perpetrator drove a truck into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz, killing twelve people and injuring many more. This brutal act of violence struck the very heart of the city – right in front of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, itself already a symbol of destruction and remembrance.

A few days after the attack, I visited this place of mourning. What I found was a field of hundreds of candles, flowers, handwritten messages, and silent solidarity. People stood still, paused, sought comfort, and tried to grasp the incomprehensible. This documentary photograph was taken during that time.

What struck me most in the moment of this image was the child running out of frame – as if the weight of the moment was not theirs to carry or comprehend. It stands in stark contrast to the surrounding grief: a symbol of life moving forward, of innocence not yet wounded – and of our responsibility to protect it as long as we can. Amidst the silence, this running child may be the loudest expression of hope.
And yet, the image can also be read differently: as an escape. A movement away from pain, away from collective memory, away from a world where such acts are possible. Perhaps this childlike impulse mirrors something familiar to us as adults – the desire to turn away from pain, to escape it, to not have to look.

Together with author Susanne Schmidt, we sought to contribute to the collective remembrance and to create a space for reflection through our artistic project *Poetry and Everyday Life*. Our idea was to merge the expressive power of poetry with the documentary nature of photography. The result was a joint artwork exhibited as a text-image combination at the church.

At the heart of it stood Susanne Schmidt’s poem, written specifically for this occasion:

From a shock a river rises.
Let its name be
The Woe
Twelve stones guard the source.
Every evening we pour silence between the waves.
Every morning salamanders bathe in the light along the shore.

This poem is more than a poetic response – it is an attempt to shape pain into form, to give language to the unspeakable. It remembers the twelve lives lost, whose absence remains like stones in the current of our memory. And it speaks of hope: that movement can arise from shock. That silence and light can return to a place darkened by violence.