Berlin: Please Mention The War
“Yeah, Paris is nice, but I can bring you around the corner and show you where Hitler blew his brains out. You can’t say that standing outside the Louvre”.
It was hard to argue with our sprightly tour guide, even if I was in a particularly argumentative mood. Standing outside the Brandenburg Gate on a brisk January morning I was freezing and numb to the wonders around me. That would soon change. The ensuing week would imbue me with a fascination for history, a reverence for Berliners (and a disaffection with EDM) which has sustained to this day.
Perhaps no city on earth has facilitated as much horror as Berlin since the dawn of the 20th century. Thus it’s a touch ironic that recent global events, from Damascus to Downing Street and Capitol Hill to Crimea, have conspired to entrust Germany with a more pressing political responsibility than ever before. Mark Twain famously quipped that history doesn’t repeat itself, ‘but it does rhyme’, although a walk around Berlin’s streets would suggest that it is a city sufficiently accustomed with the past to make a more positive impact on the future.
I wouldn’t call Berlin a pretty city, but it’s certainly engaging. The streets are rugged, chiseled and largely products of the asinine architectural fetishes of the despots to have had jurisdiction there. In a city that had been entirely engulfed by Nazi Germany, partly shrouded behind the Iron Curtain and completely divided by the Berlin Wall, bigger always meant better as buildings were designed not just to house but to harass. However, Berlin’s cityscape is ever-changing as its contemporary citizens seek to both condemn and commemorate their city’s past.
Found around the corner from the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial is perhaps the city’s most renowned memorial. Comprised of an expanse of concrete slabs, it’s remarkably understated when viewed from its periphery but you are quickly engulfed as you walk towards the centre. The slabs’ size and consistency combine to provide a chastening and personal experience which no level of linguistics can hope to capture in print. Of equal merit is the ‘Neueu Wache’, found at the opposite end of the Unter Den Linden. It’s a moving war memorial and houses a sculpture of a mother clutching her dying son, ‘To the Victims of War and Tyranny’ engraved at her feet. Again, its simplicity is its most potent quality as it challenges and broadens our understanding of who the victims of war are.
Just as powerful is the Bebelplatz which directly faces Humboldt University (Karl Marx and Albert Einstein numbering among its alumni). The site witnessed the infamous Nazi book burning of 1933 and is now adorned with a quote of the German, and Jewish, journalist Heinrich Heine (another Humboldt graduate) who proclaimed that, ‘Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings’. Admittedly the quote itself did not specifically relate to the Nazis having been penned over 100 years before Hitler’s ascent, but that doesn’t make it any less hauntingly prophetic.
Berliners have sought to strike a balance between remembering the past and looking to the future, which they have achieved with remarkable panache. The litany of poignant but astutely executed exhibitions borders on bewildering such that those I chose to dwell on above are primus inter pares rather than a particularly pre-eminent selection. However, such intense retrospection demands a strong counterpoint. Berlin’s anarchic nightlife provides it.
Recent years have seen Berlin nightclubs assume the status of a collective institution. Each weekend Berliners sup from their own Cocktail of Chaos, a potent morass of EDM and debauchery, which is a home-brew of sorts in the city’s nightclubs. Such depravity is a nod to Berlin’s post Great War era known as the ‘Golden 20’s, a period which saw the country’s vanquished moral authority replaced by a fascination with the arts and a decidedly sultry form of cabaret. This is hardly my style given I’m a sycophant of Neil Young and Van Morrison but to paraphrase the latter, in Berlin I would let my soul and spirit fly into the mystic.
Many Berlin clubs enforce absurd entry policies (the infamous Berghain being the most egregious offender) although Tresor, where my night crescendoed, is shorn of such pretension. Berghain insist that you wear all black but I’m living proof that your custom is welcome in Tresor should you don jeans from Dunnes Stores and ‘Homer Simpson’ themed aftershave. The word ‘Tresor’ actually means ‘safe’ as the building was a Jewish bank before succumbing to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. The club is comprised of a maze of underground tunnels which had been the bank’s safes but are now exclusively lit by strobe lighting and populated by people with a penchant for drugs harder than the staff are sanctioned to sell. Each room is sweaty and intense as hoards of people vigorously nod their heads in unison as if enthusiastically agreeing to a subliminal message encoded in the music. 30 minutes of this disorientation was enough to convince me that I numbered among the dissenting minority and wouldn’t be pushing the limits of the club’s opening hours, which stretched to noon the following day. Given its prior purpose, it is remarkable how Berliners have converted what is ostensibly an austere concrete block into such a hedonist hot-spot.
As is now widely known, Hitler embarked on a career as an artist in his early life, ambitions he abandoned after twice being rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. What’s remarkable when you look at his paintings is how much emphasis he put on buildings and architecture rather than people. His cityscapes were always assiduously detailed, while the people in the forecourt were seldom more intricate than a collection of blobs. He never seemed to consider the individual worthy of serious contemplation, merely a footnote to his grand designs. The parallels between this attitude and his political beliefs are too obvious to require further deliberation here.
How fitting so that it is the people, their vibrancy and creativity, reverence for the past and penchant to party, that make Berlin the city it is today. Not the concrete.
