MikePadgett.com

Berlin

— Living without walls: the city of Berlin thrives on its differences.”

Berlin is a city of strong contrasts and illogical progressions. Graffiti-covered artist squats to cool, glassy government buildings. Triumphant neo-classical architecture to empty plots of weedy wasteland.

Enlightenment, growth, political extremism, the Wall, enlightenment and growth again. It all comes out in the wash.

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Berlin

Everywhere you go in the German capital, there's a reminder of the past and a vision of the future.

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The merits of grandeur

It was probably the restless Frederick II, ‘the Great’ to his friends, who really put Berlin on the map.

Rapidly expanding the patchwork kingdom of Prussia, Frederick’s mix of war and risky brinksmanship cemented Berlin as the capital of a grand European power. He also sealed the authority of the Hohenzollerns until 1918, when the aristocratic imperative vanished everywhere.

Frederick’s influence in Berlin is still clear today in the form of the Sankt-Hedwigs-Kathedrale, the art collection of the Gemäldegalerie and famously the Sanssouci Palace in nearby Potsdam.

Burning down the house

On the night of 27th February 1933,  the Reichstag – the parliament building of the German Empire – was attacked by arsonists, quickly judged to be Communist conspirators.

With the Communists expelled from government, the Nazis gained the parliamentary majority. Just five months later, they managed to make the Nazi party the only legal party in Germany.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The walls came crashing in, so they built a new one

The shattered German forces fought hard for Berlin in April 1945. Surrender to the Russians, by now pressing hard down upon them, was a terrifying prospect when the western Allies were mere miles away.

Stalin’s alliance with his western counterparts was uneasy and, already thinking of the future, he urged Zhukov to push rapidly into Berlin. He needn’t have worried: Eisenhower had decided to back off Berlin due to the risk of friendly fire.

The Soviets moved into the suburbs of Berlin during the third week of April, facing opposition from soldiers, many of them children and old men. By May 1st or thereabouts, they had captured the Reichstag. In July, at a conference between the Allies in Potsdam, the city and the nation as a whole were carved up into zones under the control of each Allied victor.

Though the fledgling East German state, under Soviet supervision, was tied to a democratic process by wartime Allied agreements, in practice democracy was nominal since all parties were members of a coalition controlled by the ruling SED.

The SED gradually cemented their political power, using mass organisations and the coalition to secure an absolute majority, but it faced growing social unrest. The population also steadily decreased as East Germans headed west.

By 1950, the SED leaders had decided to act upon their growing paranoia by creating the Ministry for State Security, better known as the ‘Stasi’. Later, borders were restricted and closed altogether when it became clear that as much as 20% of the population had left. The time of the Berlin Wall had arrived.

Museums and galleries

Berlin can be justly proud of its remarkably diverse array of museums, by no means all of which we managed to visit during our short trip. I have written separate articles on three of them:

• Gemäldegalerie – houses the city’s collection of older art works from the 13th to the 18th century;
• Pergamonmuseum – is a testament to the history not only of earlier civilisations but of German archaeology itself
• Stasimuseum – the headquarters of the former East German Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) is now a museum and a chilling reminder of the all too recent past

Modern memory

Berlin never seems to tire of memorials. It has, after all, a lot of recent history to chew over.

There was insufficient time to reflect on the rise and fall of Nazism, the genocide of Jews and minorities, the second total war to involve the nation. Insufficient time indeed before the ideological division between East and West became a daily reality that diverted the attention of Berliners and the world at large. Even now Berlin seems ever to be racing on ahead.

A relic of 1905, the Berliner Dom seems to me seems incredibly lonely, even embarassed by its neo-Renaissance silhouette. It has been set adrift on the Spree like an exotic, useless ark.

Lonely too are the crosses dedicated to Easterners who tried and failed to swim to freedom further downriver. The backdrop for these crosses is the massive and shining new government Bibliothek, a massive and shining irony that these lost souls cannot share.

And yet Berlin is always restless, youthful, uneasy. It suffers none of the constipation of other administrative capitals. In Berlin, even the past is memorialised by the future.

A case in point is the centre now being built over the site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. This innovative building itself will break new ground whilst marking the ground below it. In the same way, Berlin’s oldest art works are housed in the newest buildings. And a monument to Jewish suffering is abstract, postmodern and – in my opinion at least – rather unrepresentative.

What may be the enduring truth, the justification for all the monuments and plaques, is that somewhere in amongst all the glass and concrete of Berlin’s architectural future, there is the sad truth that the twentieth century has cut off the city from the rest of its past.