Hello from Berlin!
In case you’re new here, let me briefly introduce myself. I’m the author or editor of seven books on women writers and a former English professor from New Orleans, now on the journey of my life! After giving up tenure, selling my house, and parting with nearly all of my belongings, I set out with a one-way ticket to Paris, a small suitcase, and backpack. That was last September. I’m still on the road, traveling around Europe in search of new experiences as well the elements that will help me create my best life as a writer. In essence, I’m starting my life over from scratch. It’s quite a ride!
Hello from Berlin!
After spending two weeks in Inverness, Scotland, and making day trips into the Highlands, I now find myself in Berlin. The first week I was here, I wasn’t quite sure where I was, a familiar feeling by now. After repeated moves in the past 7 months, it seems to take about a week for my mind and soul to catch up to my body after a big shift. And coming to Berlin has certainly been that.
I came to Berlin because I kept hearing good things about it, and I wanted to somehow reconnect with my past in Germany. Although I lived for a year as an exchange student on the other side of the country, I had read about how welcoming Berlin is to writers and artists, making it easier to get a residence visa here than in other parts of the country. A good friend from high school lives here as well, so she could advise me on where to find an apartment, etc. Plus, I hadn’t seen her in 23 years! I can also still speak German reasonably well, so in my search for a new place to call home, Berlin was was a must-see.
Stefi (r.) and I with the Brandenburger Tor, symbol of Germany’s reunification, in the background.
I spent my first week here doing the things that tourists do, which in Berlin gernerally means things related to the story of WWII and the Cold War. It was a lot for me at first, after being surrounded by so much natural beauty in Scotland. Berlin is a relentlessly modern city that nonetheless memorializes its past, no matter how painful. Around every corner, it sometimes seems, there is a plaque or a statue commemorating someone who was murdered, or a building, exhibit, or installation that reminds the passerby of the terrible things that occurred there.
In my last in-depth letter, I wrote about haunting, the ghosts of memory, and undoing forgetting. I concluded by saying that Berlin was as haunted a city as I’ve ever been in. But I also explored how haunting seems to be about something or someone that has been repressed and wants to be remembered. And in the case of Berlin’s past, I’m not sure there is anything that continues to be pushed into the unconscious and forgotten.
Rediscovering East Berlin and the Wall
The last time I was in Berlin was in 1986, and I went through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. I came with a group of American students who were, like me, living in German families and going to German high schools for the year. I don’t remember a lot about Berlin then, but I remember how gray everything seemed on the other side of the wall, even the food we ate for lunch.
Of course, East Berlin has changed a lot. I’m now staying in Pankow, which was in the East. It is full of restaurants, cafes, parks, and yoga studios. As one American I met here said, you can tell when a neighborhood is gentrified by the number of yoga studios it has. I think there are five within a short walking distance of where I’m staying. I’ve found one that I like and have been going there for yoga and Pilates classes—in German, which I’ve found I can understand for the most part.
My apartment is pre-war, as evidenced by its high ceilings and decorative trim around the ceiling. The historical façade of the building was probably not repaired for decades, like most in East Berlin, and was replaced with a plain front post-reunification. Two buildings down is a badly crumbling façade that has still not been repaired, and next door is a new building under construction, as I hear every morning before I’m ready to get out of bed. Berlin is a construction zone, someone said to me. It’s been that way since the reunification in 1990.
I’ve wondered more than once what life was like for the people who lived in my apartment over the years during the war and its aftermath. They probably went hungry in Berlin’s darkest days, and I wonder what they might have experienced when Russia’s 3rd Shock Army marched through this part of the city on its way to the Reichstag. During the four decades of Communist rule, whoever lived here probably endured surveillance by neighbors and colleagues. I wonder if they had dreams of fleeing or perhaps even tried to escape.
One of the first places I went to see after arriving in Berlin was Checkpoint Charlie. Parts of it are still standing, with a McDonalds in close proximity.
There is a small museum nearby called simply the Black Box, which offers a good overview of Berlin’s experience as ground zero for the Cold War. Outside are many displays about the wall and a portion of it that shows how it was constructed for maximum flee-resistance.
No trip to Berlin is complete without seeing at least one exhibit on the Wall (die Mauer), and I found this one to be the most informative without being overwhelming. If you want a more in-depth experience, there is the Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie just up the street.
Further out, there is the Mauerweg, which is a lovely greenspace perfect for a morning walk that also happens to be right where the Wall ran through. In most of Berlin, it is impossible to see where the Wall was, but here you get a real sense of the wide expanse that surrounded it, which has been filled in with new buildings elsewhere in the city. Today the path is lined with cherry trees, donated by the Japanese to commemorate the countries’ post-war friendship. Unfortunately, they weren’t in bloom quite yet.
The security strip along the Wall would have included electric fences and barbed wire, patrol paths, trenches, watchtowers, anti-tank barricades, and large buffer zones, all designed to make escape nearly impossible. As my friend Stefi and I walked along on a very chilly but sunny morning, we noticed a small memorial and stopped. It was the site where a young man was shot attempting to cross the wall.
Taking in the Past
There are numerous museums throughout Berlin documenting Germany’s and Berlin’s dark history, focusing on things such as: the horrors of the two world wars, the rise of the Nazis and their demise, the Nazi’s Final Solution, forced labor under the Nazis, resistance to the Nazis, Jewish history, the Cold War, spies in Berlin, East German history, life behind the Wall, escape attempts across the Wall, how the Wall was built, the presence of the Allies in Berlin after the war, the Stasi (East Germany’s equivalent of the KGB), and so on. There is no way to see all of these museums. The names of some of the most popular give you an idea of the emotional impact of these places: the Topography of Terror, on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, and the Palace of Tears, on the site of the former emigration center from East to West Germany.
I must confess that I’ve found my capacity for exploring these sites to be rather low at the moment. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and will have more to say about why in my next in-depth letter. For now, I’ll just say that I applaud Germany for taking on the difficult subjects in a way that virtually no other country on the planet seems to do, not just in museums that people may or may not choose to visit but in plaques and memorials on the streets.
There are, of course, the famous stumbling stones, Stopplesteine, which are small bronze plaques on the sidewalks marking the last residence of one or more persons who were victims of the Holocaust. You can find these all over Europe, and Berlin is no exception.
You also can’t walk far in Berlin without coming across a more visible plaque or marker. Yesterday, I was walking along the canal by the Tiergarten and learned that Rosa Luxembourg had been murdered and dumped into the canal on that very spot in 1919. It’s an eerie feeling to have something gruesome from the past rise up in front of you like that, not at a distance, as in a film or a book, but right where you are standing.
I had a similar but even more disconcerting experience during my visit to the German Resistance Memorial. The museum is devoted to the religious, political, and military opponents of the Nazis, its mission “to show how individual persons and groups took action against the National Socialist dictatorship from 1933 to 1945 and made use of what freedom of action they had.” Nearly all of those profiled died as a result of their resistance.
In a room near the end of the exhibits is a discussion of those who chose to leave Germany rather than stay and face death for their resistance. I remember that Kay Boyle once despaired of finding what she thought of as “good” Germans (i.e., anti-fascist) in the years right after the war when she and her husband were living and working in the American Occupied Zone. The “good Germans” had all either left or been killed, she believed, although she did eventually find a few to feature in her fiction.
But back to my experience in the German Resistance Memorial. It is housed in the building where the 1944 Valkyrie assassination and coup attempt was planned and the conspirators were executed. (They managed to blow up a bomb under an oak table that Hitler was standing over. Unfortunately, the table was so thick that he survived.) In one somewhat larger room, I read on a sign that this was the office in the Army High Command headquarters where the Valkyrie plan was executed.
But it was something else that happened in that room that sticks in my mind. On the next sign, I learned something I never would have expected, namely that Hitler himself had given a famous speech in this very room, a stone’s throw from where I was standing. Just four days after he was appointed chancellor of Germany in essentially a bloodless coup, he spoke in this room to the highest-ranking army officers and announced his plans to remove democracy, “eradicate Marxism root and branch,” “conquer new living space in the East,” and ruthlessly Germanize it.
As I recounted this experience to a man I met who grew up in East Berlin, he told me he didn’t think he would have felt anything if he found himself in a room where Hitler had been. For me, it was one of the creepiest moments of my life. Then he said his cousin lived in Goebbels’s former house. I could never live there, I told him. He didn’t think it would bother him.
I don’t think this guy is a closet Nazi, only that he seemed to have an inability to feel anything about it. His parents, who had lived through the war and been teenagers at its end, weren’t affected by it, he didn’t think. But they must have been, in ways that simply weren’t visible to him. He later said, apropos of something I can’t recall, “The German mind is a melancholy mind.” And indeed, I noticed that his smile was always a half-smile at most. And why do you think that is, I should have asked, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
Exploring the Berlin of Today
The past is visible everywhere you go in Berlin—including on the faces of the historical buildings that have been left to stand . . .
A plaque on this pockmarked building says “Wunden der Erinnerung,” the scars of memory.
. . . but there is also a vibrant contemporary culture, driven by young people, who have flocked to Berlin since the Wall came down.
The only walking tour I could find that wasn’t about WWII or the Cold War gave me a nice overview of the variety of alternative ways of living in Berlin from the Weimer years onward. The tour was called “Poor, but Sexy,” a quote from the city’s first openly gay mayor describing Berlin. It’s a fascinating tour of cabaret and gay life in the Twenties, the Nazi “clean up,” the resurgence of gay life since the war, the lively street art scene, the “non-corporate spaces” where Berliners fight gentrification, the “squat movement” in Berlin’s abandoned buildings, and the alternative communities that have thrived in some of the city’s less-visited quarters.
I also was thrilled to catch up with a former student of mine, who had come to the University of New Orleans for a year of graduate work as a Fulbright Student a couple of years before the Pandemic. I was eager to hear all her news and find out why she loves Berlin so much. It has every subculture you could imagine, she said. You can be completely yourself here and find a community. There is a place for everyone. I definitely had that impression on the tour. It’s not so much about coming to Berlin to remake yourself, she corrected me, but to arrive in a place that welcomes you as you are and feels like home. How lovely is that?
After we had a wonderful meal in the “Bikini Berlin” hotel (don’t let the name fool you—this is no tacky tourist-trap), she took me to Kurfurstendam, where the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stands. That is the other place I remember from my 1986 visit. It was badly damaged in the war, and the tower was left in ruins as a memorial. But it has undergone preservation since I last saw it, and the lavish mosaics have been restored. (I swear those weren’t there before, but I can find nothing online about their state after the war and how they were preserved.)
Right outside the church is the site of a famous Christmas market. In 2016, a terrorist drove a tractor-trailer into the crowd and killed 11 people and injured 55. The memorial takes the form of a golden crack marking the trajectory of the deadly attack and, on the stairs, pictures matched with the names of those who died that day. The pictures look so recent, the flowers so fresh, that it seems it could have happened yesterday, the past and the present colliding again on the steps to the memorial church.
I have a week and a half left in Berlin. Spring is finally arriving. The bees were buzzing all around the boughs of dancing white flowers outside my apartment building. The dark days are coming to an end, and the bright ones are here again.
I hope spring is coming wherever you are. What are you most looking forward to this summer? Some of you have already told me of your travel plans to Scotland. I’ll be heading back there, too. I’m excited to see what Edinburgh looks like as spring turns into summer. I’d love to hear about your summer plans, so feel free to drop me a note or comment on Substack. I always love hearing from you!!
All the best, until next time,
Anne
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