On her Internet site Melissa Gould presents a map of New York City. But this is no ordinary map: After the first recognition of the general shape of the city from a distance, one can enter sectors of the map and look at them in detail. One then sees that the letters, which seemed to be English, are in fact German. With painstaking work [literally: "the labor of ants"], all the streets, squares, avenues, gardens, train stations, have been transformed, and in short — they are all in German parallels, or to be more exact, parallels from Berlin.

This psycho-geographic exercise is what the Situationists have termed a "dètournement." Guy Debord and Gil Wollman, in the article entitled "Methods of Dètournement" (1956) suggest that "it would not be such a bad idea to perform a final correction to the title of the 'Eroica' Symphony, by changing, it, for example, to the 'Lenin Symphony.' "The change in the title of Beethoven's third symphony turns it immediately into a militaristic, communist, popular symphony, and emphasizes its martial element. This is not the place to go into the details of Situationist thought (for this I recommend Guy Debord's book, The Society of the Spectacle, Babel Publishing, as well as the Internet site). But it is clear that the "simple" change of New York to a German context creates a similar effect. It forces us to think anew about a known space in a totally new way, as about history, as it occurred, in a totally new way. For it is clear to all that the Nazis could have won the war, just as they lost.

Even without reading the words of explanation in the site, its intention is entirely clear: This is New York after its conquest by the Nazis in the forties. The idea of the speculation, "what would have happened if the Nazis had won World War II" is not new. Philip K. Dick, for example, wrote a book based on this thought. But there is a special power to the translation of the speculation into a concrete object like a city map, precisely because of the descent into the smallest details. Everything changes as a totality, but in addition, "every thing" changes. From the train station to the little garden in the corner. Brandenburg Gate stands at the corner of Central Park.

The power of the map flows, too, from the distance that it forces upon the observer. Unlike with real maps, it is impossible to walk along the streets of the city following this map. The map does not signify a real city, but a possible one. One who looks at the map is destined to be forever confused: Where are the concentration camps of New York, or "Neu-York" in the German pronunciation? Wither lead the railroad tracks that cross the length of the city? What is happening in "Central Park," whose name has been transformed into the Berliner "Tiergarten?" What is floating in the light boats in the Wannsee lake within the park? We cannot make out the details, and our inability to see changes our historical knowledge of what happened in Germany itself. But the gap between the historical horror and the silence of this map is huge. The map turns into a sealed screen, that reveals to us a great deal only superficially. The silence of the map is far greater than its speech.

An understanding of this gap can lead to the way maps speak at all. In practice, every map almost contains within itself the basis for a rewriting, i.e. of erasing the existing and its writing anew. The map of Israel, too (my hummus restaurant in Yafo is on Magid of Dubnow Street, next to Baal Shem Tov Street). It is almost always true, because almost every area on the globe changed hands violently. In general, the conquerors do not succeed in totally erasing the old place names, and so, in the United States there are many Spanish or Indian names, despite the English-speaking regime. It is impossible not to remember that even New York, transformed here to "Neu-York," was once "Niew Amsterdam" (until 1664), and before that an Indian region. Thus, it suddenly becomes clear that even the "true" New York map we have at home is doing the same thing as Melissa Gould's imaginary map. But that no one remembers it anymore. And then you think that if this map, the German one, were to be realized, then, too, no one would remember the previous map, and therefore also not the millions of missing inhabitants. It would be transformed into a banal map of the city, sold for half a dollar at kiosks. No one would remember that Adolf Hitler Strasse was once 35th Street in Manhattan, New York, the same city that went from the hands of the Indians to those of the Dutch to those of the English to those of the Germans.