“Will you be me?”

She asked Ulf if he was ready to start, and he nodded, gathering himself. Then he stood up and looked around the room. His eyes paused on each of us in turn, as if tapping a tuning fork and assessing the pitch. When he’d gone the full round, he pointed at a tall, wiry man with a penetrating gaze. “Will you be me?” he said. He asked another man to be his uncle and a woman nearby, with a pixie cut and sharp, birdlike features, to be Fear.

What happened next is hard to categorize. It was part theatre, part therapy, part séance—a measure of just how far Germans will go to come to terms with their past. Ulf walked around behind each of his stand-ins and laid his hands on their shoulders. Then he closed his eyes and slowly pushed forward. “Just stop when you feel like they’re in the right spot,” Baring said. Soon the center of the room was filled with people, frozen in place like statues in a war memorial. For the next hour or so, they would try to channel the person or emotion they’d been asked to represent. To let their spirits speak.

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