The first time I saw Berlin, it was pure Isherwood. The second time, it was Günter Grass. Until we know a place very well, we experience it though filters that direct and interpret what we see; history and literature shaped my Berlin.
I was born in 1942. My understanding of Berlin was formed by two world wars and the Holocaust...almost not-history; there was an immediacy, for my generation, that took it out of history, made it personal. The literature was Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Bertolt Brecht. I took two years of German as an undergraduate because I wanted to read Grass in German. At the end of two years, I could read Brecht with a dictionary but I never managed to read Grass or Mann. When I finally went to Berlin, I could ask questions in German but understood none of the answers.
I went to Berlin for the first time in 1996, to give a paper. I spent three days in Berlin and the last was free. I bought a day card for all forms of public transportation. I got off at different stations and wandered on foot wherever the U-Bahn took me.
I went into a park and at the back of the park, concealed by trees, saw a public toilet. I opened the door to the WC and saw a man kneeling on the floor. At first, I thought he was a workman. Then I noticed he knelt in front of a young woman sitting on a toilet with a rubber tube tied around her arm. The man was holding a hypodermic needle.
I apologized and said I didn't want to interrupt them.
He said, "No, no, come in."
There were two toilet stalls. It seemed rude to refuse.
So I went in, sat on the toilet and put my credit card and passport in my shoe.
The girl said, "It's very nice that you come in. Most people run away from us and are afraid."
I flushed the toilet and went out. I stopped at the door and looked at them. She looked about eighteen, long brown hair, thin. She spoke beautiful English.
I said, "You be careful, now."
She smiled and said, "You be careful, too."
There's a very good production of Cabaret playing in London these days - 2008. The play, like the movie and the short stories they are based on, depends on what lies outside the frame; what the audience brings into the theatre. Performers in the Kit Kat Club, with its S-M, its experiments in sexual diversity and gender-bending, seem like willful children playing, enjoying shocking the petit bourgeoisie. But we know the Grown-Ups are outside with their crooked-cross armbands.
When I saw the London production of Cabaret, I remembered the girl in the park with the needle in her arm. I suppose she thought me naive. I thought her very young, very innocent.
The second time I went to Berlin was to visit a friend, a Hungarian linguist. She lives in East Berlin and combines an Eastern European sense of humour (black) with a moral compass developed growing up in a Communist state. She was anti-Russian - you do not like people who occupy your country - but is also a good atheist, an antiracist, and sees public service as an obligation. She believes that satisfactory work is necessary for a happy life and is willing to pay high taxes to support those too feckless to work as well as those unfortunates unable to work. She would fit very well in a Rhode Island Unitarian Church if she could be lured anywhere near a place called "Church".
These days, she lives in Berlin and does not need to look for like-minded people.
We spent the evenings wandering around her neighborhood. It's full of art galleries that rent out for a day. Someone, or small group of someones, comes in at midnight, places the work on exhibition, opens in the morning and clears off before midnight so another someone can show their work the next day. There are theatres, cinemas, puppet shows - some are free. The shop windows are full of 4"x6" index cards, advertising things for sale, events, meetings - the Sex Workers' Collective, the Green Party, an anti-racist march, a parents' play group.
Berlin in 2007 must have been very like Berlin in 1929 in its tolerance and delight in creativity. The Berlin of Brecht and Isherwood seemed like a palimpsest under the rich, powerful stable Germany of 2007. There are darker echoes from the past as well. Turkish workers are attacked; a hostel for asylum seekers is burnt down. A Jewish cemetery has gravestones overturned and painted with swastikas.
My friend worked during the day so I bought a 72-hour public transportation pass and went out alone. The first day, I went to Friedrichstrasse and walked down Unter den Linden; Imperial Berlin before the First World War, with museums and universities. I went to Checkpoint Charlie, a major tourist attraction, with all sorts of tat for sale. The Brandenburg Gate is very triumphal and the Reichstag is almost as beautiful as the British Houses of Parliament. Stone recreated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The next day I went to Alexanderplatz and saw cinema rather than literature or history. I left the subway. Grey corridor after grey corridor, occasionally divided by construction screens, up stairs sending you to some place that is not there. I blundered around a grey warren full of life - people knowing where they were going and why. Occasionally, people like me, strangers, bewildered, would ask me where something was. Sometimes I even knew - could point in a direction because I had been lost there. I'm not sure how many levels Alexanderplatz-the-train-station has. At least three. But probably more. It was like falling into a computer game or a Grimm fairy tale.
Then I went out onto the Platz. A great grey slab with a grey sky, both going on and on if I turned to the right angle. There were, on the edges, the usual multi-nationals. But one can turn one's back on them.
Saturday, I turned my back on the Platz and went down again to the working Alexanderplatz, its transportation links, and went to Kurfurstendamm, the opposite of Alexanderplatz.
When I left the underground, I saw a plaque. Something in German, then, under it, a list of all the concentration camps. Just names.
The surrounding area was full of expensive stores, including the KaDeWe Department Store. My friend told me I must visit this store. Before the Wall fell, this was unique, the finest department store in West Berlin. Now, it's like Harrod's in London, or Fenwick's in Canterbury, or Nordstrom's in San Francisco: the same upmarket labels were arranged in little boutique-like sections of a floor; globalization in action.
Sunday, I went back to Alexanderplatz to leave the train station for the area around. I walked down Rathaus Strasse and cut across the park. I sat on a park bench on a grey day in the middle of a lawn of soft green grass and the last of the roses and listened to a hurdy gurdy.
Then to the DDR Museum Berlin. It's a very good folk museum, showing life as it was in East Berlin before re-unification. It was a mix of good and bad. Like everything. Do people from the old East Germany have any regrets, I wonder? Getting rid of an occupying force, the Soviets, of course, rejoice, rejoice ... but giving up East Germany?
The appeal of Communism, Socialism and Liberal Democracy is essentially moral and ethical. One might argue that capitalism is more efficient, more effective, but there is no moral or ethical argument to be made. How can you seriously argue that it is more important for rich people to have lots of money than poor people to have lots of food? Capitalism essentially makes political economy a moral free zone. Morality becomes an attribute of the private, personal sphere and has no role in public life.
Germany fascinates me because it demonstrates so many of the moral choices of my era, my twentieth century, my twenty-first century. The central event of the 20th century, I think, was the Holocaust. It is central because it shows what we can do. It is not important that it occurred in Germany — it is important that it happened in a major European country, a civilized place, one that we can't dismiss. Technological progress does not involve ethical progress. The Holocaust is an example of what we can do - any of us.
I went to Georgetown, Guyana, in the early nineties. It seemed a shattered place, one that had been through so much, so many struggles between fairly well-balanced ethnic groups, that no one could win. An uneasy peace was the result. But people seemed to retire within themselves, shell-shocked. I imagine Germany in the early thirties, or Baghdad today, has some of the same feel - survive and don't see things.
In Germany in 1930, a small minority, I suspect, wanted actively to get rid of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists. Another small minority risked themselves to protest or defend... Most people were willing to accept anything for personal security. Isherwood described it. Grass wrote about the result; what happened after...
History: the lesson of the twentieth century is that people in a group are capable of great evil - sometimes because they're afraid, sometimes because they're greedy, sometimes, I fear, because killing can become trivial and the dead are faceless.
If we don't understand, we can't prevent...I think the Germany of my generation turned and faced their dead. Very few Americans of my generation faced their own dead in Vietnam.
Our grandchildren (German and American), are impatient with the Holocaust and Vietnam. It happened a long time ago and has nothing to do with them. Perhaps literature and art can teach them differently.
Wenonah Lyon was born in Atlanta, Georgia and lives in Canterbury, Kent. Her spelling and jokes frequently sink mid-Atlantic. She is a retired anthropologist. A list of her professional publications, her online published fiction and poetry, and her blog can be found at www.WenonahLyon.com.
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JPenton
2009-10-30 22:30:24
This essay has been reprinted in a literary travel guide, BERLIN, by Oxygen Books. It is at http://www.oxygenbooks.co.uk/index.html and looks rad! yay!