Berlin: 'Ich bin ein Berliner'

Berlin has a strange liaison with History. At times History has showered it with great Kings and Kingdoms and at times inflicted it with the worst of dictators. It has been once bombed into the stone ages and at others it has rushed into the 21st century. For a time it was a city divided and now it is a city united. Berlin surely has got both the good and bad glances of history.

If there was one country and one city which defined 20th century History it has to be Germany and it has to be Berlin. At the turn of the 20th century Germany was a nation newly forged and as all newly formed nations, was brimming with energy and passion to reach the high table of world politics. When the world failed to acknowledge it as a genuine power and worst still tried to humiliate it, the world faced the wrath of German anger. Anger, that resulted in two world wars. After the wars the world saw a different aspect of Germany as it channelized its genius into producing technological innovations and finally attained the right to sit at the political high table, finally achieving its aim as the world acknowledged its true worth. The ultimate acknowledgment coming from President Kennedy as he famously said in his speech in Berlin “Ich bin ein Berliner” or “I am a Berliner” equating all the free men around the world to Berliners hence paying the city the ultimate complement of being an abode of freedom and liberty. Berlin had come a long way, from being the home of Nazi terror to being called the home of all free men.

These were some of my thoughts as I geared myself to visit Berlin. My first visit to a major European city. I was a bit nervous as to what to expect of Berlin. So with nervousness and expectations I boarded the bus from Gothenburg, Sweden. The bus journey was pretty uneventful except that we passed through a small Swedish town called Lund which gave an entirely new meaning to the word ‘sleepy little town’. This town was little alright but it looked like having gone to sleep by 8PM as the streets were totally deserted. Anyway, we passed through the town and took a connecting bus to the southernmost Swedish town of Malmo. From there we headed over the Oresund Bridge which is actually more than 10 miles long and bridges Sweden and Denmark. From Denmark to the German border we took a cruiser (with our bus parked in its ground floor!). Once in Germany we took the world famous autobahns which landed us in the German capital city by daybreak, albeit a little travel weary.

September 5, 2009, Saturday

The German city was just waking up to the morning drizzle that had come to welcome us. The central bus station where we landed looked a bit small for a big city but maybe that was due in part to the highly sophisticated train and underground metro facility of the city. As we walked a few yards from the bus station we encountered the first of Berlin’s U-Bahns – the famed underground metro. The station was called Kaiserdamm, probably a reference to the King I thought (Kaiser is King in German and a later day modification of the name Caesar).

From Kaiserdamm we took a metro to our hostel in West Berlin. The journey hit home the advantages of underground metros since we traversed the entire distance to our hostel in a matter of minutes. After we freshened up in the hostel, we embarked on our first destination – the Olympic Stadium.

The Olympic stadium was commissioned for the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself. It was built less for the Olympics and more as a propaganda tool for the Nazi administration. It apparently represented the superiority of the German race but nobody told that to the African-American sprinter Jesse Owens who made a mockery of Hitler’s race theory by bagging four Golds. Anyway, coming back to the stadium, like so many of Berlin’s other buildings was built in a neo-classical architecture resembling the ancient buildings of Ancient Greece. It is structured like a large circular citadel with a pair of gigantic twin pillars at the entrance which held the Olympic rings with thin but strong wires which gave it an appearance of being hung mid-air. The whole setting set my mind racing on a flashback, as I imagined how it must have felt marching into it in that summer of 1936. Also I remembered that this was the exact spot where three years ago Italy lifted the Football World Cup and a fortnight ago, Usain Bolt had broken the 100m World record. So this place was not just about the past but also very much of the present.

Next we headed to the centre of the city. To the Brandenburg Gate, at the Pariser Platz. As we exited the U-Bahn and arrived over ground, the magnificent Brandenburg gate rose in front of us. It looked every bit as magnificent as it looked on TV. The Gate was styled like an old Greek temple with huge columns and magnificent flanks which were adorned with sculptures depicting Greek mythology. But the crowning glory was really the statue of the Greek Goddess of Victory Nike riding atop a Quadriga (chariot drawn four horses). It looked as if the Goddess was for real and she was galloping into Berlin atop her chariot. The statue was first installed by the Prussians after a victory over the French and the square was named ‘Pariser Platz’ or Paris Square to commemorate the victory. Apparently the Goddess looked straight ahead towards the royal palace then. However the Goddess no longer looks straight, she instead gazes slightly towards her left and has her eyes fixed firmly on the French embassy there. The reason is very interesting. As everyone knows the Germans and French had never got along well and were always afoot to put each other down. In this vein Napoleon after his victory over the Prussians in his usual arrogant manner took the statue of the Goddess and had her placed in the Louvre museum. Now if you know the Germans, they do not like such an act. Hence when the Prussians

beat the French the next time around they got back their beloved statue and sat her atop the Brandenburg gate again, however with a slight modification. The head of the Goddess was lightly tilted to the left and made to face the French embassy as if mocking them in disgust. Who says the Germans lack a sense of humor!

We exited the classical elegance of the Brandenburg gate and began the trail of Nazi Germany. The Nazi’s victimized a lot of people during their time but none more so than the Jewish people. To remember their suffering a memorial has been constructed. And its not any ordinary memorial, it is different and controversial too. It is made of a seemingly random set of stones arranged next to each other. In the architect’s words, these stones are not random and they represent the Anti-Semitic mentality of the German people. Hence at the beginning the stones are hidden from view with only a trace visible over ground, this representing the deep seated but invisible Anti-Semitic mentality at the beginning of the 20th century. Gradually the stones start to emerge from the ground and grow taller and taller; this represents Germany between the wars when the Anti-Semitic feeling was at its peak. Further the stones begin to shorten again

and finally get buried in the ground, this representing the removal of Anti-Semitism from German minds post the war. Also, the ground is uneven giving the visitor a sense of imbalance and claustrophobia to give us a sense of idea as to how the Jews must have felt when hey were persecuted. I found the concept of the memorial very moving; maybe we should have similar ones in India too.

Close by we reached an empty parking lot covered with grass. Looked pretty calm on the outside but in fact underneath it hid Hitler’s infamous bunker. The last Nazi lair. Just standing in that place sent a chill through my bones. Right next to it is a recycle bin which experts say was the place where Hitler and his partner Eva Braun were burnt in after they had committed suicide. It was a study in contrast, the Jewish victims had a memorial erected and next to it the chief perpetrator did not have even a trace of memorial, in fact his memorial was a recycle bin which was perfectly appropriate. Moving on we found some of the former Nazi offices which now hold departments of the German government like the Luftwaffe head quarters which now houses the German Finance ministry. Also in view was the office of the notorious Gestapo. One look at the grim old building was enough to imagine the dread it wrought on its victims. Simply chilling.

Then we entered the Berlin of the cold war era. Again history came back racing into the mind and I imagined what it might have been to live in a divided city. This part of Berlin contains remnants of the Berlin wall and also some checkpoints which were hot beds of activity during that era. Talking about Check points we came across an important one called ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. As you can guess by the name it was a check point manned by the Americans and was witnessed to numerous border skirmishes, escapes, stories and what not. Either side of the checkpoint we had tall buildings which believe it or not housed the spies of West and East Germany. Imagine what a West Berliner might have felt 25 years ago to walk at this checkpoint and being spied on by the notorious East German Stasi. Strange times they were!

After a quick lunch at a nearby eat out we entered another Berlin. This was Royal Berlin. I almost felt a sense of surrealism. We were entering and exiting different eras of the same city, each one looking completely distinct from the other but still right next to each other. Truly amazing.


I have to admit, I was not expecting Berlin to have a royal side to it. But I was pleasantly surprised. After all Berlin was the capital of the mighty Prussian Empire and before that of the Holy Roman Empire. Any way we first headed to the Gendarmenmarkt which was a beautiful square bordered on three sides by beautiful churches. It looked so elegant with beautiful Baroque statues in the middle. The architecture of two of the churches – one German and the other French with the German one slightly taller! - looked post renaissance whereas the third had a classical style to it.


From one beautiful square we went to another one. This square was called the Bebelplatz. It had a church at one corner which looked to have been modeled on the Pantheon in Rome with circular exterior and a dome. Adjacent to it was the famous German Opera which apparently Herr Hitler had a liking to; so much so that he ordered it to be rebuilt as the war was still raging on! As pleasant as the square looks it has an infamous history, so infamous that it is named after that infamous incident. It is the shameful ‘Book burning’ incident. This incident happened during the peak of Nazi domination when students Humboldt University across the road were so incited by the talk of Joseph Goebbels – the chief Nazi propagandist – that they came out of the university onto the square and burned 20,000 books written by Jewish authors. This is a testament to the almost hypnotic power the Nazi’s held over the German people, even the brightest of minds could not resist their brain washing. A plaque on the square quotes a German scholar of the time prophesying “Once you start setting books on fire it does not take long to start setting people on fire”. How tragically true he was. Strangely however this story has a happy ending and shows an important facet of the German psyche. Later Students at the university felt so ashamed by what their predecessors had done that they vowed to set right their mistake by selling books outside their university foot paths to make up for the insult caused to books and knowledge. Till date they have sold close to half a million copies. This shows the true repentance the German people have for the deeds of past. They did not shut their eyes on the past as some of us would have done; instead they recognized their mistakes and gave their all to set it right. That takes a lot of courage and we have something to learn from it.

Adjacent to the Humboldt University stands the memorial for the German soldiers who died in the great wars. As with the Jewish memorial even this ran into controversy with some people seeing it as a way of condoning German war crimes. However that argument was refuted by the German government most notably the current chancellor who has argued for the memorial on grounds of humanity and that it in no way tries to endorse German war crimes but remembers the innocent Germans killed in the war – both armed and civilian. The memorial is not very extensive; it just contains a compelling statue of a mother holding onto her dying son. A truly remarkable way to remember the people deceased in the war with the message being - whatever the politics of the war the man killed by the war was somebody’s son after all.

Across the war memorial we step onto a small bridge which takes us to the Museumsinsel which is a small island formed by the Spree river which houses the best of Berlin’s museum. In addition to the museums it also houses a magnificent Church. Across the Museum Island there is the famous Alexanderplatz TV tower, the tallest structure in Berlin, just near the TV tower there was a beautiful fountain which was a tribute to the Greek God Poseidon or Neptune as the Romans would have called. Greek God of Sea, who better to have a fountain dedicated to I thought. Water gushed from Poseidon as beautiful carved Sirens enjoyed the ambiance taking up the gushing water. Some how, I felt the fountain more compelling than the gigantic TV tower. Maybe my fascination for all things classical I guess!

By the time the Sun started to end his day, we seemed to complete the Circle we started in the morning. We were back at the Pariser Platz. This time however we headed to the last spot of the day. The German Reichstag. A building no wonder everybody saw on TV everyday. Now that it’s got the glass dome atop it has become a prime tourist attraction here in Berlin. We marched along the trail of the Reichstag which had been trodden by countless Kings and Queens and diplomats and sooner than we realized the supreme edifice of the Reichstag came into view.

Bathed in the golden light of the setting sun, the Reichstag looked almost floating in another world. It welcomed the visitors with the slogan ‘Dem Deutschen Volke’ – To the German People – etched on its entrance. Our high spirits were dampened by the long queues that lined up the entrance. Any way we waited patiently for about an hour until we were permitted inside the building. The air inside felt heavy with history. Numerous diplomatic battles and power struggles have been fought in these corridors, many a borders have been drawn and redrawn, fates of Kings and Kingdoms decided in these premises. No wonder the atmosphere looks solemn and serious. We were then cramped into a huge elevator and taken to the terrace to view and indeed walk the famous glass dome.

The dome was a huge glass structure resembling a circular ramp with people jostling along its way. As one went higher and higher one got the best view of Berlin. All the places we had travelled in the morning were clearly visible now. But the dome was not constructed for looking out; it was meant for looking in. Yes, the dome gave a good view of the German parliament beneath. As I looked below I saw rows and rows of empty seats with an image of a huge eagle – the German Emblem - hanging in the background. As the architect Norman Foster explained his master piece, when ever the members of the Reichstag forget the reason they are inside, they just have to look up and see the people on the dome. What a beautiful thought.

The tiresome day ended there and we all got a well deserved sleep. We were off early the next morning to cover the last and arguably the single most famous tourist spot in Berlin. The Berlin Wall.

September 6, 2009, Sunday

Walls are not pleasant things. They create physical barriers and more damagingly mental barriers. For almost three decades the Berlin wall did just that. It was a ploy devised by Stalin to usurp West Berlin into East Germany but it failed and became the prime flash point of the cold war. It was not very popular as can be judged from the numerous graffiti illustrations painted along its length which decries it and calls for it to be broken. However as the cold war raged on, the foundations of the wall strengthened and no amount of deaths and protests could shake it. However with the cooling of the cold war towards the end of the 80s the wall showed cracks for the first time. These cracks were then broken open by Berliners from both sides as the wall came crashing down. Now that the wall is finally broken, one can see the absolute absurdity of it and can only wonder at the human talent for self-deceit and self-destruction. As one of the graffiti’s of the wall flashed ‘The world is too small for walls’.

After the wall it was time to trace our steps back and bid Berlin adieu. As I sat in the bus to head home, a multitude of thoughts and images engulfed me. The deriding glance of Goddess Nike at Pariser Platz, the claustrophobic stones of the Jewish memorial, the chilling air over Hitler’s bunker, the beautiful royal squares, the pose of Poseidon, the majesty of the Reichstag, the solemnness of the Berlin wall. In response all I was able to do was look back and say Auf Wiedersehen.