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Lynn and I had been looking forward to our first
visit to Berlin for some time. Crossing international borders in
Europe is only a little more significant than crossing state borders
in the U.S. We’ve entered The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and
Luxembourg by train and each was a non-event. But crossing the
German border, and again several hundred miles later arriving in
Berlin, I felt a little bit uneasy. When we had visited the
Anne Frank House in
Amsterdam, I couldn’t help but try to imagine what it might have
been like to look out those very windows and know that Nazis were on
that very street looking for people like me, a Jewish guy. It was
chilling. Bad things have happened in Europe and there are reminders
of them everywhere, but until this point, we had been in the land of
the victims. Now we were in the land of the perps.
I got over it pretty quickly though. While we
were sitting in a bier garden, I looked at an old man, maybe 75,
the guy at the bottom on the
left, and
thought that during the reign of the Nazis, he was about 10. I
wondered momentarily about his parents and grandparents. Were they
sympathetic to, or appalled by Hitler? And then I thought it doesn’t
matter anymore. The Germans of today are not the same people of
then. While there is not a celebration of a glorious past in Berlin,
neither is there an attempt to whitewash anything and pretend it
didn’t happen. It occurred to me that the atrocities of the 30s and
40s are not the only atrocities of mankind. I know of a country that
once sanctioned the kidnapping of people from another continent,
bringing them back as property, and actually buying and selling
these people as one might do with cattle they owned. Little regard
was given to family structures or cultural institutions that these
people had developed. And this activity was allowed to go on for
hundreds of years in a land where it was declared that all men are
created equal and other stuff about their inalienable rights. The
descendants of these victims today are free people yet most have
stayed in the land of their kidnappers and claimed that land as
their own. I suspect that most of these descendants, with black
faces, don’t look everyday at people with white faces and wonder if
the white person’s great great grandfather owned his own great great
grandfather. It makes me wonder why some people, Jewish like me,
cling to bad feelings about today’s Germany when it is so far removed
from its ugly past.
Berlin is a beautiful place. There’s a long
boulevard called Kurfürstendamm. We walked a long way down this
street to our hotel and I thought about how much it looked like
Paris. Later we discovered that it was modeled after the
Champs-Elysees in Paris. However, it’s different from the Benjamin
Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia which comes from the same model.
Kurfürstendamm is like the part of Champs-Elysees with all the
high-end shopping while the Parkway, as all you Philadelphians and
former Philadelphians know, is like the tree-lined boulevard
section.
The thing in Berlin that most drew me in was
The
Wall. Not much of the
wall is actually left but its
remnants are
everywhere. In many places there is a path of bricks or brass
showing where the wall went. It cuts at an angle across major streets
and runs into buildings. Some of these buildings look like they
pre-date the wall so it’s unclear to me how they were patrolled. One
conceivably could go in the back door of a building and out the
front so I suspect my perception is wrong. But there were trolley
tracks that crossed the path of the wall and pictures show that
those routes had to stop running. There are about ten metro lines in
Berlin and two of those, I think, both started and ended in West
Berlin but made several stops in East Berlin. During the 29 years of
the wall’s existence, those became phantom stops, unused, and
visible only as the train passed by.
The Wall was a total of about 96 miles
surrounding West Berlin. The piece bisecting the city was about 27
miles and about 13 feet high. There were different "generations" of
wall. It started out as a fence and was added on to. In places there
were two walls and the space between was bulldozed so that people
trying to escape were very visible. That area was called "no man’s
land" and today is used by runners and cyclers. On the side of West
Berlin that borders East Germany, the wall, from what I can tell,
was not as physically pervasive but was still a great presence. It
appears mostly to have been barbed wire and chain link. For the
whole length there were watch towers every thousand feet with guards
prepared to kill, and who did kill, people for the crime of "flight
from the country." Many hundreds, and by some estimates more than a
thousand, people were killed for this "crime." The Berlin Wall,
along with the Great Wall of China, are the two largest structures
ever built to keep people apart. There has been talk of doing it
again in the Middle East which is really a swell idea given how well
it’s worked before.
No visit to Berlin is complete without seeing the
Brandenburg Gate and what remains of
Checkpoint Charlie (and
another).
The Brandenburg Gate was commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm II
to represent peace. It subsequently came to represent division. The
Nazis used it to symbolize their power. The design of the gate
hasn’t changed since it was first constructed in 1791. This is the
place where President Reagan gave his speech in ‘87 telling
Gorbachev to "open this gate… tear down this wall." In ‘89, it came
to represent reunification when the riots happened preceding the
opening of the gate, the Berlin Wall, and finally, the whole border.
These were people who desperately wanted their freedom and there
were no insurgents. The word is unfortunately so overused and
therefore undervalued, but it was an awesome experience being in
that place.
West Berliners and foreigners were permitted,
with lots of hassle, to cross the border. It was the East Berliners
who were being confined. There were several places in the wall where
crossings could occur but only one for foreigners: Checkpoint
Charlie.
The checkpoints were named from the phonetic
alphabet, alpha, bravo, etc. Today there is a replica of the U.S.
Army Guard station and the
sign that says "You are leaving the
American sector." The location of the wall was about 200 feet behind
the station and clearly marked by a brass trail of markers. There
are sandwich shops and clothing stores at the station now which
probably are new since ‘89 but the Checkpoint Charlie Museum has
been there since ‘63.
It was out of the way, not a major tourist
attraction, but we also visited Rathaus (city hall) Schöneberg.
Schöneberg is now a neighborhood in southwest Berlin. It was once a
separate city. When Berlin was divided, the Rote Rathaus (red city
hall), traditional seat of the Berlin government, was no longer
accessible to westerners so Rathaus Schöneberg became the temporary
seat. This is the place where
President Kennedy gave his "Ich
bin ein Berliner" speech on June 26, 1963.
All this walking around and learning about world
history that happened locally made us pretty hungry. Fortunately,
Berlin is a terrific place to be hungry. Before we left home, Lynn
looked at the expatriate website and found a couple restaurants for
us to try for dinner. The first one, Oderquelle, was in a less than
wonderful neighborhood in the old East Berlin. With so many people
around we didn’t feel unsafe but the area looked run down. We walked
into a very small but very full place. It was billed as a place that
was cozy and "the clientele is agreeably mixed, with Prenzlauer Berg
trendies rubbing shoulders with elderly locals." That seemed fine
with us. It was terrific and pretty cheap. But wait! The next night
we went to Zur Letzten Instanz which, having been there since 1621
(or 1541, I saw both dates), claims to be the oldest pub in Berlin.
I believe it. Part of the website blurb said "Its illustrious
patrons over the years have included Napoleon… Despite its secluded
location, it’s popular with tourists and visiting heads of state;
this is where Schroeder brought Chirac when he visited in 2003."
This seemed like it could be fun. Go to this
website and search for "Zur Letzten Instanz" You’ll see a small
picture with a table in the center. Just to the right of the table
is something that may resemble a reddish couch. That’s actually a
chair, a very wide chair, and it could be called a throne. Not that
kind of throne. Lynn sat there in the very spot that Napoleon
himself once parked his carcass. We had a dinner from out of this
world. I’m not the world’s biggest food connoisseur but this was
maybe the best meal I’ve ever had. It was the first time I was ever
actually sorry that the meal was coming to an end. And the price was
amazing, a mere €33 for a superb dinner and atmosphere so thick you
could cut it with a knife.
This piece wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t
mention the waitress from the bier garden that I referred to in the
second paragraph above. She brought us menus and said hello. We said
hello, she recognized us as foreigners and asked if we wanted
English menus. Absolutely. She picked up the menus she had given us
and turned to the back section where she showed us that everything
was written in English. "Drinks," she said, "are not written in
English, but beer is beer and Coke is Coke." She walked away while
we laughed and attempted to choose among seven different kinds of
Lowenbrau. She will be my memory of a Berliner.
See all my pictures of Berlin. |
