Berlin Impressions

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The second of several posts tonight, posted in order; the most recent appear at the top of the page.

Shout out to Lisa and Ami for commenting; it's great to know you are reading.



so...


Ezra asked me how Berlin compared to my expectations. It takes a while to consolidate impressions, but I’ll try.

If I had gone to Berlin without knowing any of its history (and how would that be possible?), I think I would have seen a cosmopolitan city with lots of construction going on, a smattering of historic—gothic and neo-classical—buildings and monuments, lots of people on the streets, walking or biking (thousands of bikes), and a certain shabbiness (graffiti everywhere).

Since I do know some of Berlin’s history, I can’t help but impose my own ideas on the city. So, what I have to say may be purely my own fantasy and not at all based on what a Berliner might think.

Berlin is not a tourist city like, say, Paris. Paris would hardly exist without tourists, these days, I think, but people who come to Berlin—few in number compared to Paris—stay for a day or two, see the sites they’ve heard of, and leave for, oh I dunno, the Rhineland or Bavaria, or maybe other eastern European capitals. I heard American English only twice, once at the Pergamon, a highly-rated museum, and then again at Checkpoint Charlie, which was fairly crawling with Americans, since it is THEIR site, after all. I heard snippets of British English in the Schoneberg neighbourhood, where E & K live, but I think they were ex-pats now living in Berlin, since Schoneberg is residential, without sites to particularly attract tourists.

Berlin, to me, is like a butterfly emerging from its chysalis. The old is being peeled away, transformed in the process, to reveal an entirely new entity underneath. Between the thorough smashing it got at the hands of the Allies at the end of WWII and the pre-fab boxlike construction of the Soviet era, the city has a lot to recover from.

The story of Katharina’s parents helps to shed some light. Her father, Jochim, came to West Berlin as a student, studying medicine at the University in the 60’s, not long after the building of the Berlin Wall. K’s mom, Agnes, joined him shortly thereafter. Both considered it a temporary move, but they had work and they began a family, so they stayed. Katharina tells me that the government offered families 10,000 Deutsche Marks for each child they had, if they would commit to staying in Berlin for ten years; the Scholmanns did not take the offer. They, along with many others, expected the Soviets to overtake West Berlin at any time. They never did feel safe. Katharina, who was ten years old when the wall came down, tells me about taking family holidays as a little kid and being told to be serious and quiet when passing through the borders, that her mom seemed very nervous about it. They were, after all, surrounded by “enemy” territory.

Jochim’s own father, incidently, had gone off to war when Jochim was two years old, and had never returned—this is a family whose lives have been immersed in what the rest of us view as history, from a distance. Jochim and Agnes took us to several places where remnants of the wall still stand (the most famous is the East Gallery, given over to artists’ works, but it is not, in my experience, the most affecting part). Agnes told me about friends who were separated from their family when the wall went up, because they were married to someone from the other sector. It was clear they have not forgotten, nor will ever forget, the horror of those times. John asked Jochim about young people and their responses. Jochim said that it’s just history to them. As it is to us.

The full length of the wall is marked with a double line of bricks in the pavement now. Some of the parts that still stand, such as the pieces at Potsdamer Platz, are tourist traps, complete with young men dressed in Soviet uniforms, stamping passports for a fee. People line up to take each others’ pictures. It’s all a bit of a circus.

It’s hard to tell East Berlin from West Berlin these days. A careful look at apartment buildings might reveal the prefab panels of the Soviets. Although we stayed in the western part, we did most of our touring about in the eastern part, because that is where the most interesting monuments and museums are, along with a very cool riverfront and its “beach” cafes for hanging out. Where the East merges with the West, such as at Potsdamer Platz, tall glass buildings now gleam. The East seems young, vibrant, happening. The shops are shiny, and the people are spiffy.

I was expecting an edgier Berlin than the one I found. Edgy Berlin is there, I’m sure, but it doesn’t emerge much before 2 a.m., and we just weren’t up to that. Katharina says there are neighbourhoods that used to be very cool, occupied by poor artists, but “cool” attracts the rich, and those neighbourhoods, once shabby and down-to-earth, have become prettified, gentrified. That’s the case in every city, I suppose.

On a day John and I decided to walk from home to the “Topography of Terror”, we found plenty of shabby, and abandonned buildings, broken glass, overgrown parks. Not cool, not yet. There is still a lot of room for development in Berlin.

I had the notion, before I visited Berlin, that the German nation carried a shame about its past, in particular about the Nazi era. (I’ve read books that state that, so I wasn’t just making it up.) I think that whatever shame there might have been has passed now, no doubt in part because most of the people who participated as adults in that era will have died by now. The evidence is in the monuments that are continuing to spring up around Berlin. The memorials we visited—the Jewish Memorial, the Topography of Terror, the Jewish Museum, the memorials to others murdered by the Nazis—are all less than ten years old. The memorials are major monuments, predominately located: they can’t be missed, not by tourists, not by the commuter riding the bus to work. Berlin is fairly shouting: this is the atrocity that happened here, we will not forget. The Topography of Terror, in particular, is relentlessly honest, chronicling Nazi activity in excruciating detail, including newspaper articles and masses of photographs, all displayed in a brand new glass building on the site where the Gestapo headquarters once stood. It gives me chills still, just thinking about it.

Berlin is also currywurst (basically a good quality weiner roasted, then sliced up and drowned in curry powder and ketchup) on the street corners, famous donair stands, sidewalk cafe after sidewalk cafe, excellent salads for very cheap, tall glasses of yeasty beer, and wonderful ethnic restaurants where you can fill up with healthy food for less than ten bucks.

Berlin is a low-skyline city, with little exception. The buildings are six-storeys, generally, with commercial space on the ground floor and apartments above. Behind nondescript doorways are courtyards, walled in by apartments. There are virtually no elevators. Even Katharina’s parents, successful professionals living in Berlin for more than forty years, live in a third-floor walk-up, a huge, beautiful apartment, but an apartment nevertheless. People don’t own housing in Berlin, they rent (other than, I suppose, the very wealthy).

Many people also do not own cars. No need. The transit system is a three-way marriage of buses, the U-Bahn (the underground urban trains) and the S-Bahn (the mostly above-ground urban trains). Connections between them are smooth—one ticket works on all systems—and which one to take is a matter of convenience or taste: how far is the station, how fast do you want to get there, and do you care if you see anything along the way? The other main mode of transportation is the bicycle. Berlin is flat. People ride to work, school, the grocery store. There are marked bike lanes on virtually every street, often on the sidewalk, where a pedestrian takes her life in her hands to walk on the red-brick bike path.

Maybe because they walk all the time to transit stops, or ride bikes to where they are going, but I found that Berliners are generally very attractive, slim and healthy-looking (ignore the fact that many, many of them smoke!). The women are gorgeous, though I suppose it helps that it has been little-cotton-dress weather.

I am sure I will have a lot more to say about Berlin when the dust settles. This is all I can muster for tonight.



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