Paul Clemen’s nightmare suggested that the most imposing and “cre- ative” feature of Germany’s memory landscape in this period was the ruin. “Ruins are ideal: the perceiver’s attitudes count so heavily that one is tempted to say ruins are a way of seeing,” writes the architectural his- torian Robert Harbison. Ruins are physical artifacts, to be sure, but since the eighteenth century at least, they were much more. “Practically any human thing slipping into dereliction, the forecast of ruin,” contin- ues Harbison, “engages our feelings about where we see ourselves in his- tory, early or late, and (in poignant cases) our feelings about how the world will end.”