Another brick in the Berlin Wall

The subject of national surgery has always interested me. Places like Korea, which can be arbitrarily divided up by leaders and surveyors into two neat portions. The American South, which was sliced into lucrative pieces of slave pie in antebellum times before the Civil War threatened a permanent carving.

Then there is Germany, and the garish line drawn through its capital, Berlin, in 1961: the infamous Wall. Instantly, people were no longer Germans, they were East Germans and West Germans. I remember doing a map project on these two countries for history class back in fifth grade; it was ridiculously easy to gather data on West Germany, because my atlas had plenty of it: gross national product, exports, population, demographics. Not so with East Germany; so little data of interest existed that my charts looked lopsided.

Walk through downtown Berlin today, and you’ll be reminded of its historical surgery because the scar still remains: running through the center of town, markers with arrows pointing east and west, like a Valentine heart shot through by Cupid’s errant shaft. But Berlin is modern, well to do, hip and arty; the Berlin Wall is just something they’ve absorbed into their history lessons. Something they don’t forget, but never dwell on too much.

I was attending a press conference there, and the German representative of a car company gamely pointed out that even the room we were sitting in had been divided right down the middle, some 50 years back. He then said something so curious that I had to ask other Germans about it later: he said, in way of introduction to his comments, “I’m not proud to be German, but...” And then he allowed that he was proud of his company’s engineering record, etc.

What was the deal with German pride? Were they still feeling constrained, by a previous half century of errant behavior, from expressing self-satisfaction? “I hate it when Germans do that,” one of our German guides muttered under her breath afterward. “Just make your remarks. Don’t apologize.” Apologizing seems to be wired into some Germans’ engineering to this day. But it struck me somehow as false modesty, like saying: “Look, we are great, we know it, our economy’s doing much better than the rest of the EU, we no longer have to crow about it. So here’s a few crumbs of humble pie for you.” This was all subtext, of course. But in Berlin, you have to look closely to see the hidden lines.

I had a few markers in mind myself, one of which was the famous Hansa recording studio, said to be on my tourist bus route. This is the place where Bowie, Iggy and Eno recorded classic albums like “Heroes” and “The Idiot” and “Achtung Baby.” Unfortunately, I didn’t get to visit Hansa, because I couldn’t find the correct stop and my bus driver was more intent on the premarked tourist destinations and didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. So I could only visualize the place where Bowie wrote such lines as “I can remember standing by the Wall...” Bowie and Eno were reportedly within eyeball distance of the East German patrol guards while recording stuff like Joe the Lion and Warszawa back in 1977.

I ended up, as most tourists do, at the Berlin Wall East Gallery, a kilometer of salvaged concrete and steel given new life by scores of graffiti artists after most of the wall was torn down in 1989. (If you’re wondering what happened to the rest of the Berlin Wall, pieces of it have been donated to a hundred or so countries around the world. That stuff they sell in tourist shops? Probably not bona fide Wall chunks.) The street side of the East Wall is a stunning journey, with its colorful and heartfelt messages of freedom; but few tourists venture along the back wall, with its more modest artistic contributions, or check out the riverside restaurants and bars that come alive after the tour buses stop running for the day.

I found myself earlier at Checkpoint Charlie, where facsimile guards let you pose near the remaining guard shack at the division between east and west; they’ll take a picture and put a fake stamp on your visa for a few euros. More moving is a nearby museum devoted to the place where thousands of East Germans tried — and mostly failed — to cross over to the Western side. Initially dividing the city, the wall spread to 140 kilometers, effectively cleaving the country in two. Parts of it were as high as 12 feet, laced with barbed wire. Some 5,000 people managed to cross over from East Germany to the West; approximately 200 people died trying.

Our group had earlier passed by the remains of an old railway station downtown, the Anhalter Bahnhof. Someone in the group remarked that it was “pretty,” before our guide informed us that it had been used as a central departure point for railroading Jews out of Berlin during the Holocaust. Not so pretty.

The Holocaust came up again as we wandered downtown, where a large field of arbitrary granite monoliths were set vertically in a public space. At first resembling a graveyard, we quickly discovered it was Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial (or its more explicit title, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), designed by Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005. It’s a vast 4.7-acre field of 2,711 concrete slabs set at unequal depths below street level at slightly different angles, inscribed with the names of victims. What looks like a monotonous field of concrete soon reveals itself in slight differences, the individual angles of each slab or stelae. You descend down an incline when entering this memorial and soon are overwhelmed by monoliths. It’s unexpectedly moving, though not without its controversy: some complain that it only memorializes Jews, not the thousands of homosexuals who were murdered during the Holocaust (a smaller memorial to them exists at Tiergarten park across the street).

With such weighty history, you could easily forget that Berlin is lots of fun, very hip and young: Kreuzberg is the boho area of the city, a system of concentric neighborhoods overflowing with bars, galleries and clubs. Art museums are everywhere, and at each turn, stunning pre-war architecture commands your attention. My favorite respites are the beer gardens — just acres of outdoor tented tables where you can eat, drink and listen to bad Cat Stevens covers. Or there’s the old dancehall, Clärchens Ballhaus, near Hackershermarkt, which is popular for movie shoots and features gypsy musicians. Near the East Wall is the bridge over the Spree that Franka Potente ran across in Run Lola Run. Pulsing beneath it all is an arty vibe, a desire to awaken the urban senses to something new.

Of course, you will no doubt check out the Brandenberg Gate and Reichstag, and you will no doubt order a doener kabab (lamb sandwich) and currywurst before leaving the city. The beer is also fabulous in Berlin (try a malty, heady Berliner).

Still, there are things that disturb. I was in an open plaza (Potsdamer Platz) one afternoon, watching some strapping German youths harass a homeless guy. I didn’t understand German, but the context of the exchange went something like this: “Why are you hanging out in this public place, old man, smelling bad and looking unsightly? Why are you not young and worthwhile to society, as we are?” They were surrounding him and clearly questioning his value to the planet. It was an ugly moment.  

Yet Berlin is a well-functioning, multicultural place. It actually hums, it’s so well functioning. And yet, when you gaze between the lines, there are still traces of that old divide: between young and old, between man and machinery, between proud Germans and less-proud Germans. Some scars are hard to erase; some walls are not so easy to tear down.