When In London...

…picture Berlin.

We arrived in Berlin at the end of a long day of travel and made it to our hostel just as the sun was starting to think about setting. We were staying in the north-eastern part of the city, not very far from Alexanderplatz, in what turned out to be a pretty genial and residential area of the city. It really surprised me, actually, to see a residential area like this so close to the city’s center; while in some respects Berlin felt like London (clean, coherent, and effective public transit, fluidly cosmopolitan atmosphere, full of culture and history) in this respect it was totally different. The only places in London that feel like this are far beyond where the average tourist strays. But I’m not complaining at all. I really loved the area where we stayed — there were lots of neat restaurants nearby, and trees everywhere.

We were only in Berlin for two nights, so after eating dinner we made our way into the center of tourist Berlin, intent upon seeing the city at night…and from a height! (There should be no surprises there.) The Reichstag building, which houses the German Parliament, was originally built in the late 1800s but before being put back into use after German reunification, it went through an architectural overhaul. In the process, it gained a giant glass-and-steel dome. You can take an elevator to the roof and climb the dome from there for a view of the whole city.

Frankly, I’ve seen better views, but the message of the dome’s construction really struck me. Directly beneath it lies the chamber in which the representatives of the German people actually meet to discuss policy; the ceiling of that room is transparent, so that at any moment a German citizen can look down upon the workings of his government and a German parliamentarian can look up and be reminded of exactly who he serves (and what their power relation ought to be). 

The next day was our only full day in Berlin so we got up and got out of our hostel to see the sights, starting with Brandenburg Gate and Pariser Platz. It’s strange to see something that looks so historical in the middle of what is really a modern city — but what I found even more strange was how empty the city felt. I learned later that Berlin as a city was built to house 6 million people; the most it ever held was about 5 million, directly before the Second World War, and its current population is around 3.5 million. There are buildings in Berlin that were damaged during WWII that are still boarded up and haven’t been reopened, and even more from the communist era. The more I think about it, the more I realize that some of my confusion at not being able to “figure out” Berlin comes from the fact that there at least two Berlins: the modern, cosmopolitan, London-esque major national capital, and the city of has-beens, never-weres, traces, and ghosts. 

Like London, Berlin is aware of its ghosts — but it memorializes them in very different ways. This image is of Berlin’s controversial Holocaust memorial. It’s entirely non-symbolic and generally non-representational, just a number of concrete “stelae” (as the English translations at the site helpfully inform me they are called) arranged in an orderly grid at even distances from one another. From this angle the stelae look to be of relatively equal heights, but the truth is that the further you go into the center of the space, the lower the ground dips (though not following any predictable sloping pattern) and soon you’re lost amidst concrete slabs almost twice your height. Sounds travel differently, when they travel at all; the noise of outside is almost blocked out. I found it to be one of the most effective and affecting memorials I have ever visited.

Speaking of effective memorials, this one’s also near the top of the list. This bronze plaque in Bebelplatz is set into the ground a few meters away from a glass window through which viewers can see rows upon rows of empty bookshelves — enough to hold all of the books the Nazis burned in this square. The quote on the plaque reads, “Those who begin by burning books will end by burning men” — a powerful and apt sentiment, especially for a man who did not even live to see the twentieth century.

To finish, some pictures from the East Side Gallery, the longest portion of the Berlin Wall still standing. As its name may suggest, it’s been turned into an art venue. The German government recently invited back those artists they could find who had (in)famously decorated the wall with their images in the days and weeks surrounding its collapse as a symbol of communist authority. The Wall is also a memorial now, but it doesn’t just look backwards to the injustices of the past.

This may just look like awesome art — and it is — but in the banner, the word “frieden” means “peace.”

“You have learnt what freedom is, and you will never forget.” The words combine the figurative “cracks” in the wall through which the Earth from space is seen to suggest both the specific freedom felt by the East Berliners after the fall of the Wall and a more global sense of what it really means to be free. For me, the image of the Earth, just hanging like that in space, equates freedom with responsibility: this is a view only visible when “freed” from Earth itself, but what is the point of experiencing it if you don’t take that experience back down to the ground?