Berlin: Twenty years later

( For full slideshow of images from Berlin, visit here)

My first visit to Germany was when I was ten or so, to Stuttgart, to the U.S. base there. On the same trip we visited Rome then, when you could still drive right up to St. Peter’s Square, and we visited Paris. It was a driving tour of Europe. But the first time I went to Berlin was in 1988. We were on a student exchange with the students from our German classes. The German students came to visit us in Nashville in the spring and in June we went to stay with them in
Taunusstein, near Wiesbaden, accompanied by our German teacher. The European Soccer championship was going on in Germany and Germany had a real chance to win.

At the end of our month stay, we spent several days in Berlin. Berlin, and even more isolated West Berlin, was an island in the sea of East Germany. We took an overnight train from Wiesbaden, a seemingly epic journey into the
unknown, across a sea of fear. Once we passed the border between East and West Germany, the East German police boarded the train. Dogs sniffed the wagons as their handlers searched underneath the trains for defectors with
pizza-sized mirrors on poles, the giant version of what the dentist uses to look at your teeth. The best word to describe how I felt was fear, especially when they asked for our passports, even though inside I knew that I had done nothing wrong.

Our hostel in Berlin, I couldn’t tell you where it was. It was a Turkish neighborhood, maybe Kreuzberg, because they threw things at us from the windows. Antiamerican. Our days in Berlin were spent seeing World War II and holocaust related sites. Studying German, as I did from 7^th grade through sophomore year of university, was an in depth study of the psychosocial effect of the war, the holocaust, the division of the country overnight, that night in 1961. It was depressing. And there, we visited in first person the ghosts of the atrocities we read about in books. We went to buildings where people hid—the scratches on the walls marking the days they’d been there. There was still blood in some places. I remember leaving one tiny basement space overcome by nausea at the thought of what it meant for people to be packed into these spaces, hiding to save their lives.

The whole history of East Germany was grey to me, not unclear, grey.. And so was the day we actually went through Checkpoint Charlie to the East. The sun shone in the West part of the city, in full color. But the East part was grayscale. And there we were, forced to exchange 25 East German Marks to spend, and turned loose for a few hours one afternoon. We found a cafeteria in which we could eat, and buying everything remotely appetizing (2 triangular cartons of chocolate milk), I didn’t even manage to spend one whole mark.  As we sat at the table we noticed a large expressionless East German woman with lots of facial hair. She was alone at the long table, her tray in front of her. That
personified East Germany to us.

We bought a few postcards and stamps and spent the rest of the time in Alexanderplatz. It made a lasting impression on me. And even greater was the impression made by the Wall. THE Wall. I guess we’d thought THE WALL would be kind of like the great wall….But it wasn’t. It was so unimposing. It only made sense that people would try to ‘jump’ it. At least that was our view.

Shortly after our return, the wall fell, and a year later the country was united. I couldn’t believe it. I had stacks of pictures of the wall, Brandenburg Gate, the guards with their binoculars. And when the wall fell, a little afterwards, I threw them away, symbolic of throwing away that horrible past. This June was my first trip back to Berlin in twenty years. On the plane, a woman from the eastern part of Germany, who lived between Germany and Italy explained her life story to her Italian neighbor. She told of how life changed for her overnight, how it changed for a whole country. Some people adapted, some people didn’t. She was one of the people who did.

I landed at Tegel and went straight for the bus. Riding the bus into the city, I was able to take in so much that I hadn’t seen before. The European Soccer Championship was being played and German and Turkish flags were everywhere. There were no visible scars. The integration was seamless. And shouldn’t it have been, after twenty years? I tried to think if the United States will heal from its gaping wounds. I tried to think what it would be like to wake up one day, at the age of 25, like the woman on the plane, to see everything you knew and believed turned over on its head– exceeding your wildest expectations.

For three days, I visited the city, in complete awe of how things had changed. How two populations had merged to form one, how new construction, rich Western ideals had been built in places where they had previously been anathema. Beautiful buildings in the East had been converted into Western ‘monuments’. The crosswalk lights stayed the same, the tiny little reminder of which parts of the city were formerly DDR (German Democratic Republic), and which were BRD (Republic of Germany), what had been there before. I had nowhere to go, I just needed that time for the change to sink in. At Checkpoint Charlie, now just a pathetic little guard house, I smiled as a soldier took a picture of an American mother with her children. Nobody was smiling there 20 years ago, I remembered.

I did nothing special while I was in Berlin but take it all in, and three days wasn’t enough to get oriented. I asked the concierge at the hotel for the best wurst stands, and he drew them on the map—the best in the East (Konnopke)
and the best in the West (Curry 36). That was what I wanted to eat. And then I just walked. And every so often, I’d come to a place that I had remembered from 20 years before. Or I’d look up and notice the crosswalk light
and take stock of my surroundings, noticing how many of the really nice areas of Berlin are located in the now colorful and sunny Eastern part of the city. The wurst in the East was better too, restaurants were plentiful with inviting menus, and the grocery stores were stocked with familiar brands, save the triangular chocolate milk cartons. Before I left, I got some post cards and stamps, and mailed them off. This time, I didn’t have to worry about how to spend my money. ( For full slideshow of images from Berlin, visit here)