This January, after a break of 28 years I revisited Berlin. Much was as I remember it from past trips with students, though instead of the construction sites which we visited back then, particularly in the Potsdamer Platz, now stand towering glass buildings; a brave new world built out of the rubble of the largest 'urban wasteland' anywhere in the world, and home once to a key section of the Berlin Wall. Freed of the students, and the need to control their demands for beer and pornography, I could concentrate on the city and its 20th century history.
My wife and I were much helped in this by a splendid walking tour, conducted by a young Canadian woman who has made her home in the city. Through her we learned of Germany’s political history, including its financial ups and downs, which led in part to the rise and success of Hitler. We visited the Holocaust memorial. This is not the flat grid of low concrete slabs, which it appears to be from some postcards and as you perceive it from a passing bus tour. In fact, the 2711 slabs are set on deliberately contoured ground, so that the passageways between them might sometimes place their top surfaces at waist height, sometimes at head height and sometimes far above. So, for those wandering amongst them, the stones present a barrier and a companion might suddenly disappear from view and become, in effect, lost … as were the original millions of victims, lost to the world.
We learnt that the Russians, who finally besieged and overran the city, saw this as the final conquest of Fascism, and themselves as the greatest players in it all. Consequently, at the large memorial built to celebrate their victory, they hold a ceremony every year.
The locals? Well, I suppose they just have to grin and bear it. Happily perhaps, we do not go in for this form of triumphalism. The Allies did much to subdue the city through their dropping of 45,517 tons of bombs, destroying 70% of the city. Neither our Canadian guide nor we felt any the better for our own ancestors’ role in this, as we discussed it over a coffee in a break in our tour.
The Germans themselves clearly accept and demonstrate their part in the origins and the conduct of the Second World War. Across the city certain ‘Memorial Sites’ are left in a state which demonstrate its effects. Most noticeable of these is the KaiserWilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, patched up for safety’s sake but left essentially as it was after heavy bombing in 1943. Similarly, the underground torture chambers of the SS, partly destroyed, have been preserved, as have the bullet-pocked walls of what is now an art gallery. This building was attacked during house-tohouse fighting as the Russians took over the city. All museums and exhibitions devoted to the rise and crimes of the Nazis quite deliberately offer free access to the public, so that none shall be missed.
For me, one of the most powerful experiences of our trip was the visit we made to the Käthe Kollwitz museum. Kollwitz, an artist who lived and worked in Berlin 1891-1942, vividly depicted the lives of the poor, through a multitude of sketches, etchings and posters as well as some sculpture. Her husband was a GP, deliberately based in one of the poorer parts of the city. He, and thus she – for they lived near his surgery, amongst his patients – had daily evidence of the sufferings of ordinary families, especially during the country’s financial struggles. Early in WW1 she became a pacifist, driven to this by the death of her younger son in Flanders in 1914, he just 18. Subsequently, many of her pictures reflect the privations and sufferings of ordinary people, innocent victims of war. On viewing one particular sketch, drawn in 1942, one can imagine young children gathered in a mother’s care during an Allied bombing raid.
I am slow, but sometimes ‘see the light’. We saw letters written by Käthe to her son. Reading of her hopes and fears for him and of his subsequent death, I realised that, of course, the enemy of whom she spoke was us!
John Pearson is Chair of SOF Trustees.