Berlin and its History
I'm in Berlin for the weekend, staying in a funky hotel in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the former East Berlin. The "Prenzy," as it is known, is an up-and-coming place, full of new construction and restoration and a vibrant arts scene. You see homes that are practically falling down from neglect during the Communist era, even some with unrepaired war damage. But other places, like the Ackselhaus Hotel where I'm staying, are as modern as you could want. I took the U2 subway line to get here from Zoo Station (if you wonder where the Irish band got its name and an album title, well...). I was last in Berlin in 1990, a year after the wall fell, and the changes are immense. Vast open tracts of land where the Berlin Wall ran have been filled in with modern construction, especially around Potsdamer Platz. A new U.S. Embassy is rising next to the Brandenburg Gate, which once divided East and West Berlin. The open land where Pink Floyd performed "The Wall" in 1990 is no more.
Berlin has tackled the worst aspects of its history head-on. There is no attempt to whitewash what happened during the Hitler era, or ignore the deportation and murder of Jews that occurred. I attended the 4th Berlin Biennale art show on Friday. It was held in several buildings along August Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg. These were mostly workaday buildings, some very rundown, not art galleries. The catalog for the exhibition told the history of each building in the exhibition, and much of that history stemmed from the Nazi era.
The Jewish School for Girls, the last major construction project of the Jewish community in Berlin, was one of the venues. The school shut down in 1942 when the Nazis closed all Jewish schools. Large paint flakes dangled from the ceiling in some of the rooms. An apartment building, covered in graffiti (a major social problem in Germany) and falling apart, was unexceptional except for a tiny brass plaque in the sidewalk near the entrance. It said that a Jewish woman who lived there had been deported to Riga, Lithuania, in 1942 and murdered there. I didn't understand the reference until I went to the Jewish Museum today and learned that 16,000 Berlin Jews were deported to Riga.
I learned much at the Jewish Museum, which seeks to tell the story of all Jews but focuses, understandably, on the German Jewish community. Germany had about 560,000 Jews prior to World War II, far fewer than I expected. About half of them escaped to other countries before the deportations and mass exterminations began. The rest were murdered. That is compared to 2 million Jews who perished in Poland, more than a million in the Soviet Union, and 100,000 in the Netherlands, although some of the latter were German Jews, like Anne Frank's family, who had fled there from Nazi Germany.
After the Jewish Museum, I walked to nearby Checkpoint Charlie, the famous former crossing point for the Berlin Wall. My wife and I collected our Wall fragments here in 1990. The Wall is nearly all gone, and you almost need a guide to know where it was. I followed the path for a few blocks and came upon the remaining section. The Berlin government fenced it off so souvenir hunters could not cart away this section, too. It fronts "Topography of Terror," an outdoor museum on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Here you learn what happened to people who opposed Hitler.
I walked on to Brandenburg Gate, far spiffier than it was in 1990. Walking through, I noticed that an organ grinder still entertains the public, just as one did in 1990. But today he has a stuffed toy monkey, not the live one back then. Under den Linden, the street that begins on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, is fashionable and lined with Linden trees once again. It was jarring to see a Starbucks and Ben and Jerry's in the former East, but it was better than the bullet-scarred walls (from the Battle of Berlin) still evident the last time I was here.