January 2015

Day 1

I cannot imagine there is any city so emblematic to, and shaped by, the history of last century as Berlin.

As I leave my hotel I have only to turn a corner to happen upon the building where the faithful press conference took place that marked the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain. It’s 9 November 1989, and after weeks of protests the DDR regime has to ease restrictions on travel permits (mainly to other Soviet Block countries). Now they’re holding a meeting with western media to announce as much when the flustered person responsible gets a question about when the Wall is going to open. Unprepared and overwhelmed, he rereads his instructions before uttering the undying words “As far as I understand, immediately”, and history is made.

I was in high school when this happened, and remember vividly how our German teacher, a stately old matron called Frau Ekebjörns – a woman who could have out-ironed the iron chancellor Angela Merkel – came into the classroom teary-eyed the next day. Watching the documentaries, hearing about the plight of the people, both those who stayed and the hundreds who died trying to escape, it’s easy to understand why she did, and yet a couple of blocks further on, this suffering is dwarfed to insignificance by the memorial to the Jewish holocaust.

It’s deceptively simple, with 2,410 massive slabs of concrete resembling traditional Jewish graves, all uniform in size but varying in height from 0 to 4 metres, laid out in orderly rows (although some are deliberately slightly askew). Surrounded as they are by public buildings and pizza parlours, it’s not very impressive at first sight, but when you pass in between those rows, with the concrete weight of 6,000,000 murdered people crowding you, towering over you, it’s impossible not to feel grief and disgust at humanity’s incapacity to prevent such horrors and her capacity to organise them in cold blood.

Berlin is a marked city, forever associated with these events, and yet, ironically, World War 2 and the Cold War are the main reasons for why Berlin has changed more in the last sixty years than any normal city will ever do. The bombings of the former and the no man’s land of the latter have both meant that – once bombs stopped falling and the Wall was torn down – developers could run amok on an unprecedented scale, and so they did. 30% of all buildings in Berlin have been built after 1989. I would imagine that the percentage was even greater after the war.

Being a Berliner* of a certain age (and who wouldn’t want to be an old jelly donut?) must be akin to being a Londoner after the Great Fire or a Parisian after the not-so-great Hausmann came to town; It’s life, Jochen, but not as we knew it.

And all the better for it.

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*But then the typical Berliner isn’t. 100,000 people leave the city every year and 150,000 move in to take their place, so the population is mostly from somewhere else.

Day 2

I said yesterday that Berlin was emblematic, but just as we use capitals as shorthand for governments or regimes, so iconic buildings act as symbols for nations. Big Ben is the UK, the Eiffel Tower France, et cetera*.

Germany’s symbol has always been the Brandenburger Tor. It was established enough as such that Napoleon knew to enter the city through this gate – he was hailed as victor by the crowds**, and then promptly nicked the quadriga that adorns its apex.

The city gate got its statue back once Napoleon’s star waned, and ever since it has formed the backdrop to all important events in Berlin, from the operatic posturing of the Nazis to the tearing down of the Wall, hidden lights making sure that the peace goddess and her four horses were always in focus, day or night.

Last night it was dark, however. The city decided to shut down the lighting in order to avoid having the Pegida-movement*** use it for their purposes. In the end the counter-demonstration brought together a lot more people than the anti-Islamists, but I was still pleasantly surprised at this simple, yet symbolically potent move; you have the right to express your opinions, however baroque, it seemed to say, but don’t think that you can make it look as if this country stands behind you in your xenophobia.

Seems some people do learn from history, after all.
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*Sweden is symbolised by a rather less permanent erection, namely the garlanded phallus we impregnate Mother Earth with at Midsummer.

**I can imagine what it must have been like, having done the same two years ago in the Berlin marathon. I didn’t win, though.

***Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Nincompoops.

Berlin, day 3

Maybe it’s the weather, but I am starting to feel maudlin. It’s cold, damp and grey here, which doesn’t help, but on reflection I think it has less to do with the whims of the weather gods and more to do with the climate of oppression, which seems ever present; set in the pavement in the form of gilded cobble stones marking the names and horrific ends of individual Jews who lived there*, in the air – stories of how Stasi kept scent records of all those interrogated in case they would need to track them down with bloodhounds later – yes, even in the ground itself. Only last night we were told that today’s itinerary would have to be changed due to an unearthed WW2 air bomb that needed detonating.

None of these occurrences are normally associated with the everyday hustle and bustle of a western capital, and yet seem normal here. And when we finally reach the Reichstag, the writing is literally on the wall – in the shape of graffiti left by Russian soldiers on what little remained of the building when they were done with it.

100,000 Russians died conquering Berlin, while the allied forces shamefully hung back to let the Red Army slaughter and be slaughtered. There’s a large memorial down the road from the Reichstag to these fallen comrades, which must feel a bit odd to Germans who know their history, considering that Russian soldiers did a lot more than just write the Cyrillic equivalent of Kilroy Was Here on convenient walls – but then that too is the madness of war, I guess.

All in all, these dreary thoughts turn my mood from maudlin to ennui, and I’m reminded of the rather more contemporary graffiti that adorned the student lodgings I once inhabited in Göttingen: “Es ist Deutsch in Kaltland.”

But then I’m struck by a different thought: here we are, a group of people from all over Europe, invited by citizens of Berlin from all walks of life to learn about their work, hopes (and shortcomings) for a better world – from the chairman of the Special Senate Committee in charge of Berlin’s new airport Schönenfeld** to the German-Turkish woman volunteering to help integrate people like herself in society, working door to door to bring immigrant Muslim women out of isolation – and suddenly there is a metaphorical (if not a real) ray of light in the skies above Berlin. To (mis)quote Goethe’s undying dying words:

“Licht… Mehr Licht!”
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*A laudable initiative by an artist who has done the same in many cities both in Germany and abroad. He was turned down by Munich, however: ostensibly because they felt that it would be to dishonour the dead to tread on their names, but for once the well-to-do burgers were probably more interested in avoiding having their streets being quite literally paved with gold.

**A spectacular failure of almost comical proportions.
Day 5

The last two days here in Berlin have seen us tossed from one extreme to another, from the Stasi-untersuchungsgefängnis (investigation prison), where one of the former inmates* described the various interrogation (read: torture) methods in use and their respective merits, to Die Komische Oper two kilometres down the road, where the same regime offered subsidised culture to the masses; from the Holocaust Museum (an experience so overwhelmingly terrifying that I will not even try to put words to it) to the mixed sauna in the hotel where a stark naked woman offered to teach me Tantric massage within an hour of meeting me (All the elderly gentlemen eves-dropping on our conversation seemed very disappointed in my decision to decline the proposition. I wonder if they thought the class would take place there and then – and for all I know that might have been the case!).

Everywhere you go in Berlin there is this paradoxical juxtaposition of a lovely people and the hideousness of their past. If you ask me, that’s the thing about the Germans: there is an immense capacity for Verlustigung (the word means entertainment, but it’s literally “lusty behaviour”) which – paired with the incredibly efficient manner in which they go about everything – somehow enables them to move effortlessly from a real appreciation of both highbrow culture and hedonistic sex to societal bloodlust. To paraphrase Faust**:

Das ist der Kern des Pudels.

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* He was 84, of which he had spent 10 in prison, first at the hands of the Soviets and then the East Germans. With a twinkle in his eyes he explained that his interrogators still lived in the area, but that none of “die Kollegen” had volunteered to work as guides there.

**An operatic German intellectual who unknowingly strikes a deal with the devil and then finally realises who he’s dealing with.