A Weekend in Berlin

(Written on January 29, 2009, after a weekend trip to Berlin, January 21 – 23, 2009. We were living in Munich at the time.)

Last weekend, we caught the Deutsche Bahn high-speed rail service for the 500 kilometer hike north to Berlin. As on a plane, the train’s speed is periodically displayed. Marian marveled at the lack of seatbelts. It took us a second to recognize that, aboard a train travelling 228 km/hour, a fast stop was just about the last thing we might experience.

Berlin reflects its history. Quartered post-WWII and halved in 1961, the two Berlins grew independently for almost thirty years before being rejoined with the fall of the wall in 1989. It’s a massive city, encompassing the erstwhile eastern and western city centres. We chose a centrally located hotel, ironically the “Best Western,” which put us in walking distance of the city’s historic attractions.

In contrast to Munich, Berlin architecture is predominantly modern, a tribute to the accuracy of allied war-time bombers. A notable exception, Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, sits a few blocks from our hotel and was the first stop on our walking tour.

Built in the 1890s, a relative newbie by European standards, the church was all but destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid. Post-war, the temptation to raze the site to make way for traffic was resisted. Instead, the towering ruin was stabilized and “book-ended” by a modern, free-standing chapel on one side and a stand-alone bell tower on the other. Sitting on a median in the middle of two very busy downtown streets, the once-great skirche is now maintained as a highly visible memorial  to the destruction of war.

Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands as a memorial to the destruction of war.

We moved on to Siegessäule, Berlin’s famous Victory Column, serving as a roundabout at the convergence of five major roadways in the beautiful Tiergarten Park. Proving that there’s merit in the sometimes glacial pace of government action, the monument was designed in 1864 to celebrate the victory of Prussia in the Danish-Prusssian War, but, by its inauguration in 1873, it also bore the celebratory burdens of victory in the Austro- and Franco-Prussian wars.

We climbed to the top of the column and after catching our breath – and admiring the ability of the young guys ahead of us to do the same with a cigarette – we took in the somewhat drizzly and misty bird’s-eye view of the city. Looking a few kilometers due east up Strasse Des 17, Juni, named in remembrance of the violently quashed 1953 workers’ uprising against the Stalinist East German government, we could see Brandenburger Tor, the Brandenburg Gate.

With the Berlin Walled all but flush against its eastern side, the Tor was the very symbol of the Cold War. Crossing through it onto the historic Pariser Platz – for a time a military zone but now re-established as a beautiful public meeting space – the first thing we saw was a Starbucks, and, right next to it, Museum The Kennedys. So moved were we by the history-come-alive, we stood between the two loudly declaring “Ich bin ein Tim Horton’s Berliner!”

Over a couple of lattes, we noticed that the only visible vestige of the paucity we associate with the Soviet rule of East Berlin were the large gas mains that inexplicably sweep up out of the ground like enormous exposed veins, circle about overhead, cross the street, run down the block, make a few connections, and disappear back into the ground. Those, and hucksters offering rides in the questionable remains of “classic” East German Trabants, the car, it is said, that gave communism a bad name.

A short distance from the Gate, we stopped at Gendarmen­markt  to visit the private museum in the domed French (Huguenot) Chuch. The displays were in German and French, but Marian was satisfied to spot a reference to Rachelle, France, ancestral home on her mother’s side.

Opernplatz, for which we have developed a certain regard from our Pimsleur German lessons (“See Hans run. See Gretel run. See Hans and Gretel run to Opernplatz.” You get the idea.) has been renamed Bebelplatz, in an effort to live down the square’s reputation as the main fire pit in the Hitler youth book burning spree of May 1933.

A work crew was putting the final touches on a temporary building erected on the square that will house this week’s Berlin Fashion Week. In its foyer, we found the book-burning memorial. A section of plate-glass embedded in the surface of the square allows you to look down into a sealed subterranean room. The room is bare, but lined with empty book shelves – enough shelf space to accommodate the estimated 25,000 books that were burned.

As we neared “Checkpoint Charlie,” possibly the highest-profile Cold War access point to the American sector of the city, we hit the start of what turned out to be four city blocks of museum-like wallboard displays running along the sidewalk and detailing the history of the wall.

A wall is a wall is a wall, or so we thought. Neither of us was prepared for the horror documented in the display.

As you may know – but we didn’t – the east/west barrier was thrown up early one August morning in 1961. Berliners awoke to find themselves separated from families, friends, neighbours and neighbourhoods by army and citizen militia units. And while the initial “line in the sand” was somewhat porous, work began that dawn on construction of the wall “system” that would snake its way along a 150 kilometre path through the city. That system included inner and outer walls separated by the Todesstreifen, or “death zone,” so-named for the guards’ standing orders to shoot-to-kill.

We watched helicopter video footage of a trip along the perimeter, captured from western air space. It confirmed my sense that, from conception through execution, the wall was so over-the-top, Monty Pythonesque, outrageously absurd, that it’d be hilarious, if it weren’t for its inherent horror. If fact, I think it’s the absurdity that makes it particularly horrific.

In many instances, buildings were annexed to form part of the barrier, their windows and doors bricked in to prevent passage through. In some instances, historic residential buildings were forcefully emptied and then dynamited to further secure the perimeter. Western subway routes that passed under the eastern sector rolled past “ghost” subway stations, inhabited only by armed guards who ensured the train didn’t stop.

It’s difficult to believe that this year – November 9th to be exact – will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall. While Cold War relations were warming, there is some poetic justice in the absurdity that’s credited for its final demise. On that particular morning, erroneous news reports announced that a change in regulations would permit East Berlins to cross over to the west and return. By that evening, the crossing points were overrun to such an extent, they became meaningless. Not missing the significance of it all, people were out the next morning with hammers and chisels demolishing the abomination.

Clearly, the relationship of Berlins to the wall has evolved over the interim years. It’s easy to understand the first instinct to erase all traces of it as quickly as possible. This was fostered by a government-backed buy-a-piece-of-the-wall campaign. More recently, there’s been recognition of the importance of preserving its history.

Where possible, a double row of cobblestone is being laid to mark the path of the wall. A memorial has been constructed at the longest remaining stretch of the wall – about a half-block long. Polished steel walls have been construct perpendicularly, book-ending the inner and outer walls and sealing off the death zone in between. In the reflected surfaces of the steel, one sees the wall continuing on in both directions. An observation deck on the opposite side of the street provides a view of the memorial and the neighbouring Church of the Reconciliation.

Where possible, a double row of cobblestone is being laid to mark the path of the wall. In this picture, the actual cobblestone leads into a musuem-board display of the memorial pathway's construction.

We ended our day at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. This is an extraordinary site that covers a large city block in the heart of the city, and defies description. It consists of 2,711 blocks, looking like large grave markers. From the street, the blocks look roughly the same height, but as you wander through the memorial, you realize that the perfect grid of pathways between the blocks descends, and that some of the blocks are 10’ = 12’ in height. In the aerial photo on the web, you also noticed the tops of the block undulate like a flag in the breeze (http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/history/assets/berlin_holocaust_memorial_4.jpg).

The Berlin Holocaust Memorial is an extraordinary site that covers a large city block, and consists of 2,711 blocks,

A staircase in the middle of the blocks takes you down to subterranean memorial centre. The history of the Holocaust is presented in graphic detail. You’re then led into the “Room of Dimensions.” Illuminated rectangles on the floor (recalling the rectangular blocks above) present brief excerpts of 15 personal accounts of the Holocaust, each panel containing a copy of the original source document and then a translation in German and English.

One of the panels contains a seven year-old boy’s goodbye, written from the concentration camp in which he and his mother are being held, to his father, being held in another concentration camp. With resignation, the boy expresses his sadness that he and his mother will soon be killed – as they were – and he will not see his father again.

In the “Room of Names,” the names and short biographies of Jews murdered or presumed murdered in the Holocaust are projected on the empty walls and read aloud, one at a time. It’s estimated that to run this cycle for each victim takes six years, seven months, and 27 days.

I came away from the weekend feeling as I did after our visit to Dachau, perhaps better able to get my head around the evil that was perpetuated here – the Holocaust and the Wall – than I am the notion of a society allowing it to happen. There’s an old axiom that says evil walks in the door when good people do nothing. There’s an Ethiopian proverb that says evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.

There’s a clear and disturbing link between what we’ve seen here and the American population’s enthusiastic rallying behind a president as he flouted civil liberties, human rights, and international conventions and treaties in the name of protecting the motherland. I see exactly the same link in the Canadian population’s silence as our values around citizenship and children rot with Omar Kahdr in a universally condemned concentration camp.

Who says it can’t happen here?