Big Berlin

I have come to Berlin because I have been unable to imagine it. Whenever I have tried, in my mind, confused images from Cabaret the musical, scenes from World War 2 movies, largely of huge stadiums, and one-armed salutes, Hitler youth, the swastika sign, atrocities against the Jewish people and, a sense of cruelty, swirl around impressions of gigantic architecture, clipped accents, notions of efficiency, lederhosen and Oktoberfest. My grandfather was called Otto Ubergang and my German ancestry is not far removed. None of this has however added up to any sensible concept of Germany`s capital.

Additionally, almost everyone I have asked to name their favourite city in Europe, has cited Berlin. Disconcertingly they have not been able to describe why. Obviously, my wonderings can only be resolved by seeing the city for myself.      

From the moment the train pulls into the modern and spotlessly clean Berlin Hauptbahnhof railway station, I am struck by the sense of space and the quiet moving of people around it. Later I am to learn that this and other train stations, are significant places in the life of Berliners. The Berlin Hauptbahnhof features as an attraction on the Hop On Hop Off bus tour of the city. It also contains a small supermarket where we have been advised to stock up with goods for the apartment, we have rented close to the Brandenberg Gate.

We arrive on a bank holiday when most shops are closed. On Sundays too, most shops are closed and the absence of the twenty-four-hour, seven day a week, shopping experience feels like a relief. Restaurants however appear to be open all the time and I gain the impression of Berliners as a sociable people. This is somehow unexpected. It is however reinforced when a German friend, now living in London, spends the day with us and as we share a drink in the Café am Neuen See in the Tiergartens, (once the king`s private hunting park, now the largest public park in Berlin), advises that the individuals, pairs, and groups, sharing beer and pizza on the banks of a small lake are probably finishing work. Sitting outdoors and drinking is, she reflects, what Berliners do when the weather warms. Walking around, bottles of beer in hand, also seems to be commonplace although it is hard to tell if this is just the practice of all male groups of football fans, all male tourist groups or all male groups of Berliners. Perhaps all three!   

Statuary in the Tiergartens graphically depict its former use, however there are monuments and sculpture, ancient and modern all over Berlin. The Ancient works strike me, at the least as beautifully rendered if at times epically savage, the modern, subtle, sensitive and thought provoking.

I am not sure if the Holocaust memorial is considered a sculpture but this “4.7-acre site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or stelae arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field.” (Wikipedia) is an intense experience. Our apartment is situated very close to the memorial and as I explore on the first day in Berlin, it is a haunting, skin tingling, sobering discovery sited as it is on “the death strip” of the old Berlin Wall. Two reminders of two periods which have indelibly marked this city.

 It is also a haunting, skin tingling, and sobering reminder of what is currently happening to the Palestinian people. Two wrongs, just don`t. 

Where the wall once stood, is now represented by a simple steel grey fence, easy to miss until gradually sculptures and explanatory hoardings point toward the darker tale of this now seemingly innocuous barrier. My impression of how Berlin approaches its complex history is summarised in this explanation of photographic plaques which are attached to the wall.   

I find it impossible as the days pass in Berlin, with the Linden and chestnut trees in bloom and the Spring season bringing a warmth and energy to the city, not to be affected by what has happened to and in this place. Its omnipresent but perhaps what most characterizes the city for me is how it does not seem to be defined by its past. Those frank discussions noted in the explanatory plaque seem to have enabled this city to move forward and to be all that it has been, as well as well as all that it is and can be.   

The reality of Berlin owes much to what seems to me, to be gigantic architecture. Everywhere there are enormous buildings, the very old and the very new, interposed. There are of course, very good reasons for this. The events which have impacted it have also been enormous. The devastation wrecked by Hitler on his own people, the Jewish Race and any group who did not meet an Aryan ideal, from his base in the city , the one third of the inner city wrecked by 363 Allied bombing raids on the capital between November 1943 and March 1944, the post war splitting of Berlin into the Russian controlled eastern sector and the allied controlled west symbolised by the erection of the wall in 1961, and the process of reunification begun in 1989 with the fall of the wall. These have not been small events. 

On a wander through a creative street filled with Vintage clothing shops and artist ateliers, my German friend points out the old buildings spared the allied bombs, and the post war rebuilds, subtly different. The blend is difficult to discern with the uneducated eye. 

The rebuild has also resulted in the creation of gigantic shopping malls, elite shopping strips and hotels running to 900 plus rooms which we discovered on not initially being able to access our apartment on the first night we arrived.

This hotel, an historic 1920`s building in the Mitte district of the previous east Berlin was the much cheaper alternative to the Hotel Aldon Kempinski situated across the road from our apartment. This hotel, an icon of the city, was rebuilt and reopened in 1997 after being destroyed in World War11 and we would have appreciated the individual concierge service included in the eye wateringly expensive room rate, to resolve our accommodation glitch. It is also the hotel where infamously Michael Jackson dangled his young son over a balcony. 

There are other icons of the city which are more eye catching however than the hotel of the Rich and Famous. The Brandenberg Gate, on the apartment doorstep makes me feel that monumental music is required from the heavens every time I look at it. It stands epically outlined against the sky and was a critical site as crowds gathered to bring down the wall. Numerous protests seem to occur ongoingly beneath its vast pediment, most notably, as an Australian, a passionate plea for the freeing of Julian Assange.

The East Side Gallery is a three kilometre stretch of the Berlin Wall given over to artists’ and graffitists’ who painted more than one hundred murals directly onto the Wall the year after it fell.

It seems that no originals survive but that the representations which do are due to restoration in 2009. It also appears that there are ongoing issues with restoration and owner ship of the multiple images which were conceived in the hope and euphoria emanating from the end of the cold war and the bringing down of the wall.

Whatever the issues, walking the wall and seeing the images at this time in world history, again sobers and saddens me. We seem unable as a species to contain our desires to repress and subjugate. Berlin does not let me forget this.

Conversely, I also feel celebratory here. Perhaps it has something to do with the ability of people to overcome and to thrive because whilst Berlin is a serious place with important things to say, inhabited by people who also seem serious, industrious and rarely smile, it is also got the gigantic, gilt monumentalism going on with impeccable cleanliness, wonderful trains, and small, quirky, considered touches which appear unexpectedly. We should all visit Berlin.