Overabove on the Road: Berlin, Germany

Past, Present and the Power of Art

Our Berlin story begins where it will end, at the Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden.

Every step along the broad boulevard that stretches through the heart of Berlin calls up another image, another memory, another era. Unter den Linden, the Prussian version of Paris’ Champs-Elysees, was created modestly enough as an equestrian path in the early 16th century. The path was turned into a grand thoroughfare in the mid-17th century by Frederick William, the Great Elector, who ordered a thousand linden trees planted to provide him shade on his journey from city gate to palace—and ultimately gave the street its name.

There are so many echoes of history under the lindens. Of the anything-goes decadence of Berlin in the early 1930s, chronicled so vividly in Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 Berlin Stories (and Cabaret, the musical it inspired). Of Nazi-incited burning of 20,000 “subversive” books in the courtyard of the State Opera House after Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when the trees were replaced by 45-foot swastika banners. Of palaces and embassies along Unter den Linden reduced to rubble in World War II, and the scant remaining lindens turned into firewood to help heat a decimated Berlin.

For our group, which has traveled to Berlin for the 30th anniversary of the opening of the border between East and West Berlin, two historical images of the Brandenburg Gate are particularly evocative. One is of the magnificent gate isolated and inaccessible behind concrete block and barbed wire during the Berlin Wall era, when East Berlin was separated from West Berlin, and East Germany from the rest of the world. The other is the memory of jubilant Berliners, both East and West, celebrating together atop the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate on November 9, 1989, the night the border was opened and the era was over.

What’s past is prologue, Shakespeare reminds us; but in today’s Berlin, What’s past is present may be an even more apt characterization.

Reminders of the city’s history, both glorious and painful, are everywhere. This intersection between past and present is evident in Berlin architecture that embraces what came before. Over eighty percent of Berlin was destroyed by five years of bombing during World War II, and in the city’s rebuilding, history was made present in a variety of ways. The Hotel Esplanade on Potsdamer Platz is one example. Before being largely destroyed by Allied bombing, the ornate Belle Epoque hotel was visited by Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo during the 1920s and became the residence of William Dodd, Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Germany, in the tumultuous years before the U.S. entered the war. The hotel’s lobby was also the meeting place for conspirators prior to the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. Today, remains of the hotel, encased in glass, have become part of the strikingly modern Sony Center—testament, perhaps, to the resiliency of this city and its people.

At the Topography of Terror, both what was planned and what happened is chronicled.

The museum and documentation center stand on the site of the headquarters of the Secret State Police, the SS and the Reich Security Main Office between 1933 and 1945. Some 15,000 dissidents and political prisoners were brought here to the Gestapo’s “house prison” and subjected to brutal interrogation and torture before being sent, if they survived, to other prisons and concentration camps. A deeply disturbing place, it unflinchingly traces the trajectory of Hitler’s rise to power and describes in excruciating detail the planning and execution of atrocities committed during the Third Reich.

The Reichstag building, completed in 1894 on a site along the River Spree, is now a stunning blend of old and new. After the Italian High Renaissance-style building was severely damaged by fire in 1933—arson was suspected but never proven—Hitler stoked public fear to help propel his rise to power. World War II bombing inflicted more damages on the Reichstag, as did the Red Army when they entered Berlin in 1945 (they mistakenly thought the government building was “Hitler’s lair”). After active debate about its historical significance, the graffiti the Soviet soldiers scrawled on the Reichstag’s bullet-pocked walls has been preserved, carefully framed by new plaster.

Architect Norman Foster headed the rebuilding of the ruined Reichstag after German reunification and the move of the Federal capital from Bonn to Berlin in 1990. Foster also designed the building’s stunning glass dome to replace the original dome destroyed in the catastrophic 1933 fire. Opened in 1999, the dome offers a breathtaking 360-degree view of Berlin and floods light into the Bundestag chamber below to signal transparency and celebrate reunification.

We are particularly intent on visiting the Berlin Wall Memorial, which stretches for a mile along the former border strip between East and West in the center of Berlin. In the early 1960s photographs of Bernauer Strasse were burned into my memory. People who correctly calculated that the border would remain closed and their situation become more dire began leaping out of windows of apartment buildings before, floor by floor, the windows and exit to the West were boarded up. One iconic photograph of a young East German border guard shows his spontaneous “leap to freedom” over barbed wire on Bernauer Strasse August 15, 1961, two days after the border was closed.

The brutality of the Wall is starkly evident at the Wall Memorial, where we see clearly the Socialist response to the exodus of an estimated 3.5 million East Germans out of the repressive Soviet German Democratic Republic.

The vicious apparatus to staunch the flow from East to West includes an inner wall, an outer wall, electric fences and watchtowers. Between the two walls is the barren “death strip” riddled with trip wires and patrolled by guards with dogs. An estimated 140 people died at the Wall trying to flee between 1961 and 1989. The grimly gray Wall surface remaining along Bernauer Strasse, with bare concrete chipped away to show the iron bars beneath, is in sharp contrast to the kaleidoscope of colors that marked the side of the Wall that faced the West.

The Kreuzberg section of West Berlin, along the River Spree, was one of the city’s poorest sections during the Cold War. Hard hit by Allied bombing and penned in on three sides by the Wall, it had blocks of abandoned “squat” housing inhabited by immigrants, anarchists, dissidents and artists.

After a part of the Wall was rebuilt in the 1980s and rose to 14 feet, it became a huge blank canvas where artists both famous and anonymous began to paint bold designs, provocative messages and political opinions.

The surface was ever-changing, with artists painting over one another’s work again and again, sometimes within hours. When the Wall came down, brightly painted pieces from the West Berlin side became prized mementoes. Larger portions are on display in Berlin and around the world (including outside the United Nations in New York City, on Seoul’s “Berlin Square” and, improbably, in the men’s room of a Las Vegas casino).

There’s newer Wall art, too. In 1990 over 100 artists worldwide were invited to paint the 4300 feet of the Wall’s longest remnant on the former East Belin side in Freidrichshain-Kreuzberg. Their massive murals celebrate hope for the future after decades of a city divided, families and families torn apart, and lives lost. The East Side Gallery is now the longest open-air gallery in the world, attracting some three million visitors a year. One of the most photographed murals is Birgit Kinder’s image of a Trabant, the cheaply made and famously underperforming East German car, crashing through the Wall. (Sample “Trabi” joke: Q. When does a Trabi reach top speed? A. When it’s being towed.)

History is both very present and very personal in Berlin. During our trip, guide after guide shares family stories with the group: a grandfather who resisted the Stasi and was tortured; a mother who was a Nazi; a childhood spent in East Berlin.

One guide tells of being asked often how he feels about his country’s troubled history. “I was born after the War,” he says. “I do not feel guilty. . .but I do feel responsible.

Responsible for knowing our history and for telling others about it.” He takes us to Track 17 at the train station in Grunewald, a quiet and prosperous Berlin neighborhood. Here is a simple but emotionally powerful memorial to the 50,000 Jews who were deported by train from Berlin—after paying their own passage–to ghettoes and extermination camps. We visit in the twilight hours of November 8, which marks both the night before the Wall fell and the night before Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”), when Nazi leaders launched violent vandalism that destroyed Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues.

For some 45 years after the deportation of Jews from Berlin began in 1941, Track 17 and its significance went unmarked. Then in 1987, several local women created a modest memorial in front of the station, and four years later a monument about the deportees’ journey to the platform was erected by the Federal Land of Berlin. On a quiet evening, in the drizzling rain, we see a striking wall sculpture with human silhouettes hollowed out, gashes in the pale stone.

Past the monument, up a small hill, is a memorial underwritten in 1998 by the Deutsche Bahn railway to acknowledge the role its predecessor Deutsche Reichsbahn played in the deportations. The old track, with its nearly overgrown foliage, looks abandoned until you focus on the ground. There, one after another, lining the edges of the abandoned railroad bed, 186 inscriptions on iron grates record information about each of the trains that left from Track 17: date of departure, number of Jews aboard and the train’s dreadful destination. The names are chillingly familiar. Lodz. Theresienstadt. Riga. And Auschwitz. Thirty-nine trains carried their human cargo directly from Grunewald to Auschwitz. “Notice the December dates closely,” says our history-must-be-remembered guide. “We Germans took time off for Christmas. And then the deportations continued in the New Year. It was insanity.” One of our group’s members—we are old friends—looks closely at the iron grates. His grandfather, he says quietly, was probably on one of those trains. Though we have been friends for many years, I did not know this about his family.

There is more to come. The next day we take the S-Bahn together to Charlottenburg and stroll down lovely, leafy streets to the apartment building where his grandparents lived until August 1942. Two small brass squares engraved with his grandparents’ names are embedded in the sidewalk in front of the entrance. I am startled to see his grandfather’s name is the same as his, both first and last. Someone unknown to my friend has had the squares laid; perhaps the same person has polished the brass and laid down flowers and candles on this anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The squares are Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” each one marking the last place a victim of Nazi terror freely lived or worked. The inscription on each stone is simple and direct. Most start Hier wohnte. . . (“Here lived. . .”), followed by the victim’s name, date of birth and fate: suicide, imprisonment, exile to another country, deportation and death. German artist Gunter Demnig began the Stolpersteine project in 1992. The research for each stone is typically conducted by a victim’s relative, schoolchildren, an organization or, as one of our guides has done, the person who now lives at a victim’s address. “I can’t think of a better form of remembrance,” says Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, the craftsman who engraves each Stolperstein by hand. “If you want to read the stone, you must bow before the victim.” There are now more than 70,000 Stolpersteine in towns and cities all over Europe and Russia.

That same night, we return to Unter den Linden, joining rivers of people who are heading toward the Brandenburg Gate. There are seven city sites where events of the Peaceful Revolution that led to the border opening are being celebrated, but Brandenburg is the biggest. It’s like New Year’s Eve, with fireworks of course. But there are also open-air exhibitions, video projections of historical pictures, a technology dance performance, 120,000 fluttering fabric ribbons in an open-air art installation, and live music from national and international artists.

In Germany’s political and cultural capital city (now so trendy, hip, progressive, open-minded, diverse and techno-savvy that it’s been called The Capital of Cool), the night buzzes with celebration, singing, laughing and spirited toasts.

But amid the joy are somber memories, too, echoes of darker times that should never be forgotten. Here in Berlin, they will not be forgotten.

Editor’s Note: Jane Hudson, PhD is the founder of Moving Words and a marketing strategist focused on consumer insights and behavior. For more of Jane’s perspectives on travel, check out our most recent podcast with her, “The Lovely Discomfort of Not Belonging.”