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Paul frames this image as a "toxic subject for Germany's cultural memory," and he uses this image to argue against the simple distinction between Germaness and Nazism. He supports this refusal by arguing that the image depicts "a monument for Nazi barbarity as [much as it depicts] a monument for German technological expertise." Is this meant to suggest that there are "survivals" or perhaps a "specter" of Nazism that still haunts the contemporary, embedded in the infrastructures that rely upon technologies developed under the Nazi regime?

This image conveys the duality of innovation, where the ambitions of modernism sour into fascism and back again. 

Visceral. The context of the image has a lot of dark connotations which I experience immediately before properly taking it in.

It's emblematic of the complicated arguments around innovation through barbarous regimes. 

The caption pulls me into major scholarly debates about troubling binaries, like German-ness/Nazism, tradition/modernity, etc. That said, I cannot immediately recognize this imagery as evoking those debates without resorting to the caption. Adding words to the image would cue me that this massive pit is German (unrecognizable from the imagery alone) and when it was taken. A major theme communicated via the image is scale. The hole is enormous, yet I'd expect it to be even bigger knowing already the weight of concrete involved in the finished project.

The ethnography situated in this staged image, Paul's curation, and my viewing of it has to do with the intentionality gap between figures shaping these acts. No participant in the making of Speer's arch seemed all that aware that their work would have the legacy it has. Sometimes I wonder in memory studies about scholars assuming their subjects to have been aware folks in the distant future would remember them. The Nazis aspired to be remembered for millennia, this I do know, but did their workers?

Any time I encounter a story about massive unfinished boondoggles like this, I think about parallel moments of what could be called "edging." One example is the construction of Disney Hall in Los Angeles, which went on for about ten years before running out of money. All they got done was the underground parking lot, a $100m endeavor. By this point in time, two of the project's original three sponsors had died, Disney's widow and one of his daughters. As far as they are concerned, seeing as they no longer exist, all the money they gave the L.A. Phil went toward a parking lot.

Those small metal rods are remarkably disorienting. That is likely a good thing when you are making imagery/meaning out of the National Socialist past.

 A map like this, which posits "risk" by predetermined structural parameters, can be very powerful for conjuring an applied approach to mitigating toxic exposure. However, as you state in your text, images are geared and constructed for specific audiences, and when looking at this map I am left to wonder who is motivated to action? Color-coded displays on maps that denote differences tend to make the viewer immediately look for their home, their risk. I am struck also by the lack of presence of the exposed here. It could serve to reify the disembodiment of the marginal in data.

This image communicates the 'potential' of lead poisoning. I appreciated this image as an ethnographic object because, as the author points out, it represents the gap between reality and public discourse on lead poisoning. This object delivers the importance of imagining what is yet unknown.