The Landscape of Memory

What I've learned in Berlin

“A lot has changed since then,” my friend Stefi said when I told her I hadn’t been in Berlin since 1986. Good, I thought. I don’t want to go back to the 1980s.

Let’s just say I brought some emotional baggage with me to Berlin. Although I’ve had a considerable amount of nostalgia for my year in Germany as an exchange student, I’ve also had some pain, which I now see was triggered by some losses I experienced as a child. After my return from Germany, I also studied the language for many years and was quite fluent, but I gave it up after another painful loss in college. I wanted to come to Berlin to create a new relationship with the lost land of my youth and to step into Germany’s present.  

Berlin is definitely a new city, perhaps Europe’s most modern, considering the extent of damage from WWII. But in my first week here, I couldn’t help yearning for a little history, a glimpse of the European past that I love encountering on my travels. Many of us Americans come to Europe to see the layers of history in the architecture, or walk the same cobblestoned streets that centuries of people have trod. We search out the sites where major historical events occurred or someone famous once lived. It’s thrilling when history comes to life in front of you, leaping out of the pages of a book and into the very building you are standing in.

I’ve felt that way many times on my travels so far—like when I stood in Henry James’s study at Lamb House or looked up at the towering 5th-century columns of the former temple of Athena in what is now the cathedral of Siracusa. Or living in the house where Dora Maar, a brilliant surrealist photographer and Picasso’s mistress, lived for 50 years. In Berlin, however, it’s hard to relish your discoveries of the footprints of the past.

A Day of Dark Memories

During my first week, I was confronted with quite a rush of Berlin’s past. It was a lot! First, I was on my way to the German Resistance Memorial Center when I noticed the facade of a house from an earlier era, a striking sight after walking past so much construction and modern architecture on my way from Potsdamer Platz. The building had lots of charming architectural elements, including a frieze over the door, a Juliet balcony, and a many-dormered roofline.

I walked across the grassy median to get a closer look when I noticed that the facade was full of holes, as if the stone had once been stricken with chicken pox.

Then I saw a square of plexigas on the facade, near the front door. When I got closer, I could read the faint words etched into it: “Wunden der Erinnerung.” The scars of memory.

And then I realized, the holes were made by bullets. There were so many that machine guns must have sprayed the house. I envisioned allied soldiers coming around corners and firing at will, either out of caution or because there was gunfire coming from the towering, decoratively framed windows.

Here is Berlin’s history, I realized. I have found it. But I felt none of the wonder I’ve felt in France, Sicily, England, or Scotland.

I looked online and read about Villa Parey, as it was called, in a newspaper article from 2015 describing the reporter’s attempts to find sites in Berlin that still show the bullet holes that once covered the city’s buildings. I learned that there are still quite a few. You can take a tour of them, in fact.

When I finally arrived at my destination, the German Resistance Memorial Center, I headed downstairs for the special exhibit. In the large room, I could hear a speaker playing birdsong. A banner hung on the wall, depicting bright green grass and tall trees reflected in the water below. I felt a moment of peace.

But as I got closer to the picture, I started to make out something through the trees. There was a fence surrounding some buildings, and I realized it was Auschwitz. I was in an exhibit from the International Auschwitz Committee about the camp’s survivors.

Their photographs lined the walls. A few are still living, I noticed. Statements from them accompanied their photos. And poetry by Christoph Huebner:

Most of them were young and utterly alone after the times of hatred,

barbed wire and murder. Their relatives had been killed, gassed, burned.

And throughout life the relentless question: Why me? Why did I survive?

. . .

What would the new world look like? A world without anti-Semitism,

without racist hatred, without prejudices against minorities,

without contempt for other peoples, religions. This was

the only way the world could be, the new world.

This was the only world they could and wanted to imagine.

After the horrors of the war and the ashes, people would surely

be enlightened, bettered, wiser and more clear-sighted—

more human.

No, there would never be any more wars, not after these wars that

in such close succession had left the world in shatters.

“What have I achieved?” At the end of his life, this is what Justin Sonder asked me.

He was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz from Chemnitz. “What have I achieved?”

The survivors have been telling the stories for decades. They have been living witnesses to make sure the world never forgets. Yet, at the end of their lives, I read, so many have felt hopeless, watching history replay itself over and over again. As I read their words, the bird song kept playing in a loop. There is perhaps no eerier sound to accompany memories of such horror.

In my last letter, I described my visit to the permanent exhibits in the German Resistance Memorial Center, including the moment I discovered that I was standing in the very room where Hitler had given a speech shortly after being appointed as chancellor. I was quite disturbed by the fact that I was standing in a room where one of the most evil human beings ever had spewed his hatred and announced his plans to wage the deadliest war this planet has ever seen. There are not adequate words to describe the feeling that crept over me.

What is it about being in the same spot where history happened? The place itself becomes a conduit, a site where the past and present meet, and you stand in the presence of whatever had once happened there. But I felt none of the awe of the past rising to meet me that I have felt in other places. Instead, I felt like running away.

After such experiences, I didn’t have a lot of interest in going out and exploring the city anymore. I turned inwards, reading and writing, staying close to my apartment in Pankow, a gentrified part of the former East Berlin. I told Jessie Harrold, whom I’ve been working with lately as I process my transition, about how dark Berlin seemed to me. And how I felt myself wilting, after blooming in Scotland. Spring was on its way, and Easter was around the corner, but I didn’t feel like rebirth was in the air. It felt like death and darkness, and I started to wonder if I should get a ticket out of here.

Meanwhile, my computer had broken down, I was waiting to hear about some opportunities that would impact my future abroad, I had had a disagreement with a close friend, and I was missing Scotland. Then Jessie asked me, what meaning do you make of all this darkness and these feelings of disconnection in your life? She’s good at asking questions that, like when she later asked me, what would it mean to sit with the darkness?

I didn’t want to go there, I said. I’ve spent long enough in the dark Underworld over the past couple of years. The whole point of my trip has been to escape that, into the light. I wanted to surround myself with beauty and feel pleasure again. I wanted to embrace the future, not be dragged back into the past. But that is what Berlin had in store for me.

Living Remembrance

I didn’t count on Berlin still being such a broken, traumatized city 33 years after the reunification of Germany. But gradually I began to appreciate how much it is also still in the process of rebirth. Perhaps Berlin is a representation of how much Germany is still “under construction,” a country still trying to figure itself out after a long period of darkness. I suppose I identify with that. I was eager to leave my own long period of darkness behind me in America. But, at 53, I’m still very much under construction. Whenever we dig new ground, we can’t help bringing up parts of the past that we’d like to leave buried.

I met someone on my travels who, like me, is starting his life over from scratch. He says that we have to move forward; we can’t dwell on the past. Maybe Berlin is doing both—bringing its past with it into its future. It is certainly moving forward, although that is a fraught, painful process at times. What I’ve realized is that Berlin is not only a traumatized city with a dark past, but a city of living remembrance.

As I’ve headed back out into the city, exploring its present without intentionally seeking out its past, I still can’t help stumbling on reminders of the war and the painful separation of the city during the Cold War.

For instance, one day, a new friend showed me a cool water tower in Prenzlauer Berg that has apartments in it. She would love to live there, but getting one is very difficult.

[That is Susan Stone, producer of the Dead Ladies Show, one of my favorite podcasts. Check it out!]

As we walked around the grounds, she pointed out a memorial, so we went up to it and read it. It explained that a machine house next to the water tower had housed one of the Nazis’ first concentration camps, from May 1933 to June 1933. It’s central location, in the middle of a vibrant residential community, “helped to stir up fears of imprisonment in the population.”

Another day, while strolling in the park near my apartment, taking in the sunshine and spotting crocuses and daffodils starting to bloom, I came across a peaceful little cemetery. At one group of the graves, I noticed a stone sign near the ground that read, “These pastors were leaders in the resistance to the Nazi regime.”

Just yesterday, as I walked along Oranienburger Strasse under the scaffolding of a major construction project, I spied a building across the street that was crumbling, one of the many facades around the city that has yet to be repaired since the war.

As I stopped to take a picture of it, a woman who had been walking behind me stopped and looked over at the building, too. “There are still bullet holes in it,” she said to me, in German. I wanted to respond, but I couldn’t begin to find the words for even half of the things I wanted to say about this this city and her country. So I just said, “Ja.”

The Work of Remembrance

As I’ve been processing the layers of history and development in Berlin, I found an interesting article that explains how potent the landscape of memory is in Germany. It was written by Jenny Wüstenberg, a professor of 20^th-century history and a founding Co-President of the Memory Studies Association. She writes about the important (if contested) decisions to make Holocaust memorials a central feature of Germany’s terrain, beginning with the massive one in Berlin next to the Brandenburg Gate, on the opposite side from the Reichstag.

I walked through it yesterday and felt the eeriness of the concrete slabs growing in height around me as the ground sank below my feet.

What is more important than this one memorial, though, are the “thousands of markers, plaques, small exhibitions, and large memorial museums” all over Germany that point to a “topography of terror” that is vast and undeniable. But this didn’t happen overnight in Germany. She writes,

“For decades, German society and its leaders were as unwilling to face up to their crimes as the powerful in the U.S. What brought change and had made the German approach to commemoration into one that is seen by many as a model to be emulated, was not a sudden epiphany, but the tireless work of activists – Holocaust survivors, initiatives for reconciliation, and citizens’ groups.”

The work of remembrance, on a national scale or in our own lives, is tireless. Germans call this Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means the work of coping with the past or coming to terms with it. Wikipedia quotes the German Duden lexicon defining it as "public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history . . . where ‘problematic’ refers to traumatic events that raise sensitive questions of collective culpability.’”

Key are the public discussions that Germans have had about their troubled past. They have kept it in their minds, rather than letting it sink back into the subconscious. There is no true forgetting, really. The body remembers the trauma that the brain represses. The pain of the past lives on in the present. Some memories we can process (or metabolize as Jessie Harrold likes to say), and we can let them go. But other memories don’t want to be let go of. We must acknowledge them, sit with them, and accept that are a part of us.

During this month, by sitting with my own past, I’ve been able to let go of the emotional whirlpool of my earlier experiences in Germany. But I’ve also come to accept that at least part of the deeper wound from my childhood will always be with me. I once heard Christine Hassler (another wonderful coach) say that the hurts we experience at such a young age get implanted in our amygdala, the most primitive part of our brain, where our hard wiring is. You can’t get rid of them completely, but you can change how you react when they are activated, she said.

In the case of Germany, any attempt to let go of the memories of the Holocaust would be futile. The wounds are too deep. As the survivors pass away, there is a great danger of their first-hand memories being lost. Not only Germany, but the rest of the world that stood by while the horror happened, must work to keep them alive. (Just as the U.S. and much of the rest of the world should be reckoning with the legacies of slavery and indigenous genocide that remain largely unacknowledged.)

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I’m heading back to Scotland this weekend, ready for the promise of spring and the coming summer. I’ll be staying in Edinburgh for the next two months. I found a nice apartment there with a lovely view (I hope) of a park and the old city skyline. I’m looking forward to settling down there for a bit, doing some more research on my ancestors, and getting back to a regular writing schedule. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I always love hearing from you. Feel free to drop me a line anytime with your news, questions you have that I may be able to help answer, or anything you’d like to share. I know that many of you are also going through transitions (as so many of us are post-pandemic), changing careers, starting new initiatives, or looking for a better way to live, so I’m always happy to hear about how those things are going for you.

Sending you all plenty of light and hope as the world tilts toward the sun again!

All the best,

Anne