Berlin Diary, March 2008

There's a quote from the artist Anselm Kiefer on a gallery wall inside the Hamburger Banhoff Museum in Berlin, where I vacationed last week. It begins, "The future is rubble." Kiefer goes on to quote verse from Isaiah about grass growing on housetops while pondering the inevitability of destruction and possibility of renewal. That a German painter and sculptor born in early 1945 should think way, and create darkly moving art to match, is unsurprising, given that the history of nearly every museum, cathedral, and building to speak of in Germany's capital city contains some variation on the phrase, "Until it was bombed into rubble during World War II."

All places have their scars--the operative phrase in Ireland is "until it was razed by Oliver Cromwell in 1649"--but Berlin's are fresher and deeper than most, a consequence of destruction followed by partition. I'd seen pictures of the Wall, of course, heard Kennedy and Reagan's famous speeches and watched the '89 celebration. But I never really understood how wrong it was until I stood where it used to be. Great cities have structures, centers, axes, spines. A prime meridian in Berlin runs north on the Ebertstrasse from the renewed Potsdamer Platz, past the site of the new Holocaust Memorial on the right and the vast greenery of the Tiergarten on the left, between the east-facing Brandenburg Gate opening up to the wide Under Den Linden boulevard lined with hotels, universities, and museums, then a few steps farther to the historic, west-facing Reichstag.

The idea that less than 20 years ago this same path was a 100-yard wide no-man's land of machine guns, barbed wire, and block towers staffed by soldiers ordered to shoot on sight is hard to fathom. Imagine the same thing running through the middle of Times Square, jogging north to Columbus Circle and then east along 59th street to the river, and you'll get a sense of what I mean.

This still-ongoing return to normalcy makes Berlin a really interesting place to visit. There are lots of other reasons too: the museum systesm is terrific, probably the best and most extensive I've seen outside of Paris. The former eastern section has the restaurants, shops, streetlife, and energy you get when money and people start flowing back into an urban space they once left. Street vendors sell postcards of complete with (alleged) chunks of the Wall, which is apparently becoming a kind of Cold War True Cross. And it's always interesting to notice examples of Things That Are Better in Europe:

- You can bring your dog on the extensive, efficient metro system, where trains arrive every few minutes. You can also eat and drink beer, which is sold in kiosks located right on the platforms. This seems to work perfectly well, with no mess or bad behavior, even when the cars fill up with inebriated, singing football fans heading to a weekend afternoon match at Olympic Stadium.

- The coinage.

- The erudition of museum audioguides.

- The big department stores (KaDeWe, located in the downtown of former West Berlin, out-Harrods' Harrods).

Things That Are Better in America: Not having to root around in your pocket for 30 cents to give to a dour, unhelpful middle-aged lady every time you want to use a public restroom. Also, people smoke everywhere in Berlin--the Marlboro Man, banished from his home country, is alive and well on billboards. There's also a surprising amount of graffiti, not the fun kind, even in the nice places.

It was interesting to learn about Germanic history, of which I confess I knew little pre-World War I. All the Fredericks and electors and coalitions of kingdoms and states are confusing. Did you know there was a failed revolution in Berlin in 1848? I didn't, or I had forgotten. Another effect of the 20th century's monumental destruction, I suppose--it's hard to see past it to what came before.


The whole city evokes a sense of trying to come to grips with history while also transcending it. Kiefer says he was told virtually nothing of the crimes of Nazism while growing up after the war, and his art is an obvious repudiation of that kind of willful amnesia. The conspicuous new memorials and planned museums of Nazi and Cold War atrocities reflect a similar mindset.

And the simple fact that Berlin has reverted back to a peaceful, open society is having a powerful effect. Our hotel was located about a half-mile from Potsdamer Platz, an intersection of boulevards that was, at the beginning of the 20th century, one of Europe's busiest centers of transit, society, culture, and commerce. Then came the two world wars, and the fires and bombs that tore the graceful hotels, clubs, and buildings to the ground. Then the Wall cut it in two, and the space lay empty and fallow.

Now it's coming back to what it was. Something like $25 billion has been invested in Potzdamer Platz over the past two decades, resulting in huge glass-roofed courtyards, shopping malls, a new train station, offices, film festivals and theaters. When wars and ideologies don't get in the way, people do what people do -- walk, shop, eat, drink, talk and converse, come together in a common space. To a Berliner trasported forward from a hundred years ago, Potsdamer Platz would probably seem, in many ways, familiar. But he would probably wonder what on earth could have happened to wipe away the old structures so thoroughly, and why people kept stopping to look at that small, ugly piece of concrete wall.