Berlin

When buying a ticket to leave Europe, it turned out that the cheapest option was actually to have a one-day layover in Berlin. I certainly didn't mind this, as I had never been to Germany before. In fact, for as much as I have gone around Eastern and Southern (and South-Eastern) Europe, I haven't really spent any time in Western Europe aside from a long afternoon in Helsinki and a few days in Scotland. In a weird way, West Berlin was more exotic to me than Bulgaria, which was familiar.

The most striking thing about Berlin is the difference between East and West, even years after the fall of the wall. Odder still is that the transition between East and West is not at the wall itself, but rather in the Alexanderplatz, under the tallest building in Germany about a mile east of the Brandenburg Gate. This is actually a pretty stark contrast, with buildings on the west end of the plaza looking western, and those on the east end looking like Nowa Huta, the Communist Epcot district of Krakow. These differences extended not only to the buildings, but also to the people walking the streets. I typically wear jeans and a t-shirt or turtleneck and sweater depending on the temperature. In West Berlin I felt too informally dressed, and in the East, I felt formally dressed. In East Berlin it seems like everybody has a tattoo or three, but not in the West. East Berlin looks an awful lot like Poznan or Warsaw. West Berlin looks vaguely like parts of Chicago and parts of Wichita, Kansas. I knew I had been in Poland for a long time when East Berlin felt more like home than West Berlin.

If you'll pardon the expression, I had a "blitzkrieg" tour of the city itself, seeing a lot of the more touristy stuff and dropping in on the fantastic German History Museum, which had some beautiful old manuscripts, armor, the hat Napoleon wore at Waterloo, money from the Weimar era, and some of the grimmest electoral posters I've ever seen: "Vote Catholic Center and maybe the Nazis won't cause a World War" is the tone of some of them. Unlike our current heated political rhetoric, I can't say that those posters were too wide of the mark. For one thing, calling your opponents a bunch of racist Nazi fascists wasn't a slur, it was descriptive. The Tiergarten was a very nice, leafy park, and I was tempted to board a rowboat and paddle around one of the ponds. I didn't, not knowing if it was allowed or if the boat was sound.

The most offensive thing I saw in Berlin was the city's Holocaust Memorial, across the street from the U.S. Embassy. It is comprised of a bunch of black blocks of varying heights, but there is no clear label telling you what, exactly, you're looking at. It is one of those terribly avant-garde installations that could commemorate anything from genocide to the founding of the Lego company. And unfortunately, it is treated as something frivolous, a sculpture of ambiguous meaning that can be used as a playground. I saw couples making out while seated on some of the blocks, high schoolers giggling and taking photos of themselves straddling the blocks, people jumping from block-to-block, all the things that would be outrageous at any Holocaust memorial, but are especially repugnant when taking place in the capital of the nation that made such memorials necessary.

However beautiful the city was, and however much I enjoyed my tour, I could not help but feel uneasy in Berlin. It is a city built on conquest. Prussia was a backwater of the Holy Roman Empire until Frederick the Great made it relevant militarily. It became a capital of world stature after the German Confederation was put together In that city, some of the ghastliest crimes in history were planned and implemented. Reminders of that abound: you can still visit the stadium Hitler built for the 1936 Olympics, and it's still called the Olympic Stadium. The Reichstag is the same one that was burned in 1933, leading to the Enabling Act that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. The Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Monument are both celebrations of Prussian militarism, and the tree-lined boulevard between them (Strasse 17. Juni) was to be the centerpiece of Albert Speer's re-imagined, monumental Berlin. You can get to Wannsee on the U-bahn (subway) and see where they put together the Final Solution. Much as I respect Ronald Reagan, I think it was an exaggeration on his part during his speech at the Berlin Wall to call that city a place of freedom. 

I also realized that, had the Germans not blown up, burned down and looted Warsaw in 1944-45, not to mention not started the war in the first place, Warsaw could have been just like Berlin, a hip place to go for American cosmopolitans. In fact, before the war, Warsaw was called the Paris of the West. After the war the Allies dumped all kinds of money into the reconstruction of Berlin, and the Soviets spent lavishly on East Berlin too, in order to keep up. All Warsaw got was a Palace of Culture from the Soviets and Socialist architecture from the same, after having 80% of its buildings destroyed and 60% of its population killed during the war. Of course, Berlin was destroyed by the war too, and the Soviets were unbelievably nasty when taking the city. Berlin is also a tribute to Communism, and all the suffering that brought on everything east of the Elbe. Had World War II never happened, perhaps that catastrophe could have been avoided.