April 2015

Berlin has lured me back. My last visit left me frustrated, with a sense of having left important tasks undone, and so I’ve returned with a mind to fulfilling an obligation. The practicalities of my stay couldn’t be more different from last time – then I lodged in a swanky expensive hotel, now – thanks to the wonder of airbnb – I am sleeping on someone’s couch for the price of box of Belgian pralines. The posh breakfast room of the Hilton is replaced by a rickety chair in the kitchen of my host, but the fair is just as good, and the conversation much better.

My host* is an avid traveller and has friends in Syria, and as I have just read of Ibn Battutah’s travels there we compare notes – her facts vs my fiction, admittedly – but as she moves on to Korea I am left behind.

I do learn a few surprising things about this people, though; their written language is an amalgamation of pictograms and letters, and the South Koreans are the world’s greatest consumers of plastic surgery, with eyes and noses being primary targets for improvement. Alas, only one type of nose job seems to be available, so all recipients end up looking the same, she says. I suppress the impulse to observe that they already did to my untrained eye, and instead bring up the similarities of Korea and Germany, and so on it goes until my host has to leave for a seminar (the topic of which she mysteriously declines to divulge).

I set out to see the memorial to the holocaust victims, which eluded me last time. It’s located underneath the cenotaphs I visited last time, and as the texts and photographs calmly leads me on a path of slowly evolving, deliberate and cold repression, persecution and extermination, the walls crowd me and claustrophobia sets in, as if I was entombed with all these victims of nazism.

Worst of all is the room with scraps of letters written by parents separated from their children, knowing that they are going to their death, without hope of ever seeing their families again. I read until I can no longer see for tears, stay down there until I can no longer breathe, until the horror is racking my body.

I leave with the words of Primo Levi echoing in my head: “it could happen here, and so it can happen again”. It’s not a happy thought.

I continue my pilgrimage by visiting another memorial to those who have died here, this time under the other totalitarian regime to curse Berlin with its presence. The Wall museum at Checkpoint Charlie tells the story of the Cold War in the same unrelentingly factual manner, the story of a failed state resorting to killing and imprisoning its own citizens rather than accept its shortcomings. Personal tragedies aside, it’s hard to comprehend how this absurd situation could continue for decades, with the world in the balance, and the realisation that we may be returning to that state of play (for what is Syria if not a new Vietnam, with the US and Russia facing off by proxy?) is even harder to fathom.

I leave feeling gloomier than the Berlin sky, and head straight across the road into the former US sector and that most American of bastions, McDonalds. Rarely has a Big Mac tasted better.
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*A lady of a certain age who asked to remain anonymous, as couch-surfing – like most good things – isn’t strictly legal in Germany.

Day 2

Heading into town on a Sunday morning you get the feeling Berlin has been deserted. Walking through the largely empty streets it reminds me of a carcass, the many building sites bringing to mind open wounds, the prolific and brightly coloured pipelines thence emerging viscera slithering out of the gashes in the cityscape.

In fact the latter are a necessity in the building industry in order to pump ground water away from the construction sites*. Berlin takes it’s name from the Slavic word “brl”, meaning marsh or swamp, and – like a very slow but persistently vengeful god of the Old Testament – nature is continuously trying to reclaim its own.

In fact I find myself thinking of the city in terms of deadly sins. The pride and hochmut of the German Reich under the Kaisers, expressed in the many classical temple facades and pantheons still dominating the city centre, the greed and wroth of the Nazis, striking out from here for Lebensraum and murderous hearts with their efficient war machine – the bones of which is still visible in autobahns and the Tempelhof airport – and the sloth (and implicit envy) that was the East German reality after the war, in glaring contrast with the lustful, gluttonously hedonistic lifestyle of the inhabitants in West Berlin.

A city, in short, where fascism and fetishism are facing off, and sado-masochists spar with Stalinist-Marxists. What’s not to like?
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*And not for piping beer to the builders, as the jokers would have it.