We Are Not All Jelly Donuts

Berlin! I'm a city person, and I've been in Germany about a dozen times, so how did I miss this place? For some years I kept meaning to visit our friends, Henrik and Géraldine, who lived there; preying on my weaknesses, Géraldine once sent me a bookmark from the Pergamon Museum. But then they suddenly left, and Berlin slipped off my radar. But here I am, part business (to speak at the Technische Universität) but partly also to see a city that, if critics like the Economist are right, is in terminal decline...but then they think that of half the world. Thriving? Declining? Or both, going out in style? I couldn't wait to see.

“If passenger Yule-rich on board, please page a flight attendant. Passenger Yule-rich.” Ah, you know you must be on Continental. Could their American flight crew possibly know or care less about the world? (A moment later, one of the German flight attendants comes on-line and quietly re-pronounces Ullrich.)

Public Transport

Every dying city should wish it had Berlin's public transport. Setting aside an incredibly annoying, and poorly signposted, closure of track around Potsdamer Platz—which is a transportation hub—and the fact that all city transit maps, including the official ones, are out-of-date—the U1 and U2 have been merged into a U12 that does not correspond to either parent lines—the U- and S-bahn trains are superb. Both stations and trains are frequent, and a day's pass ends at 3am, which says something about Berlin life. Most remarkable are the small details that are so easy to get right and yet almost every subway system fails miserably: you always exit from the same side, which makes life easier for people to plan ahead, especially those with luggage; both directions share a common platform, so in a rush you can avoid making a decision until the last moment, and if you do make a mistake, correcting it is straightforward (nowhere is it less so than in Boston where, if you try to reverse directions in some stations, you must actually buy a fresh ticket!); the LED displays in most trains list the next three stops.

Not all signs of quality are so small. Some of the newer trains are entirely articulated, making it much easier to spread out the load; traveling in one of these, which also have LCD displays suspended from the roofs, as they go around or over small kinks in the route, feels a bit like being on the inside of a gigantic (and brightly-lit) snake. The most visible sign of progress must surely be the new Hauptbahnhof, perhaps more a statement of the aspirations of a united city than a reflection of reality; yet there it stands, several levels of gleaming glass and steel, looking like nothing so much as a runaway from the set of Metropolis (a quotation that was no doubt intentional and fittingly ironic). In contrast to the traditional underground bustle of German Hbfs, this one is an airy, spacious experience (rather reminiscent of the main JR station in Kyoto), full of shopping but sensibly equipped with services dominating luxuries; at the top and bottom, sleek IC and ICE trains hum in tune with the electricity. Gliding into it from the east, around a curve in the track that enters a semi-circular canopy enclosed in the square that is the station itself, is an electric experience.

Bauhaus

There is a modest Bauhaus museum in Berlin. Berlin's claim on the Bauhaus is minimal: the operation had lost most of its stars by the time it got here, and it was shut down pretty soon thereafter. But it would be out of character for cities to not exploit the very stars they once persecuted and drove out, and Berlin's artsy reputation demands something of this ilk anyway.

There were some nice surprises in its collection. There were several interesting mobile-like balanced sculptures that are not functional but nevertheless good eye-candy. I have long admired the undersung Gertrude Arndt's weaves, and she is well-represented here. There were some letterforms sketched by Albers. In one photograph of a table created for the Törten estate, I was stricken by the dullness and austerity of the black-and-white photograph contrasted against the rich two-toned beach-and-stained black fir chair in front of it: a room full of those chairs looks an awful lot more interesting! Overall, two things stood out from the collection: the sheer lowness of Bauhaus design, something that hadn't struck me until I saw this many objects assembled together (the chairs, for instance, have no wings, barely any backs, and certainly no headrests—this is prairie architecture imported into the living room), and the realization that some of the most beautiful pieces they produced were...ashtrays.

The Jewish Museum

One of the great new sites in Berlin is Daniel Liebskind's Jewish Museum. It's a mixed result. Liebskind was up against an astounding challenge—the museum of Jewish life, in Berlin—and it is a sign of his genius that he managed to deliver. Unfortunately, and perhaps unfairly, the latter part of the museum simply does not live up to the promise of the beginning, but perhaps it cannot. The beginning is solemn, reflective, startling...while the rest, an account of Jewish life in Europe through the centuries, is predictable and often somewhat pedestrian. I guess I had a sense of what to expect from the latter, and got just that. But do go, just to see the beginning. His Garden of Exile, a group of 49 towers on sloping ground, is claustrophobic and disorienting, the pillar-like towers serving as so many metaphors from smokestacks to the triumphal arcades of Nürnberg...and the Holocaust Tower, which is in fact the negative-space of a tower, again evoking a chimney, broken by a shard of light, transports you into mythological space. There is enough in those two Axes to occupy the mind for a long time, and nothing I had read prepared me for their power. Elsewhere, too, his sense of disruption is strong, as when the main staircase of the Axis of Continuity runs into a wall—anywhere else it would be a playful postmodernist joke, but here it's not funny (nor meant to be). But somehow there is a lingering sense that he invested all his emotion into the beginning. (The rest of the museum is both helped and marred by the large number of docents, who are usually solicitous but sometimes set about enforcing strange rules such as forcing you to either wear your jacket or wrap it around your waist, but not carry it upon your arm; or demanding that your bag must be carried in front of you, not on your back.)

The Holocaust Memorial

If you want real controversy, though, you can't beat the Holocaust Memorial.

First of all: a memorial? Is it possible to even monumentalize such things? Besides, having visited actual concentration camps, I can sincerely say that nothing is as powerful as visiting the sites of these crimes. Lincoln may have been on to something when he said, at Gettysburg, “we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground”. But nothing so simple as a non-monument passes these days, though the history of this Berlin memorial is tortured well beyond the standard as these things go.

But if you must do it, this result is difficult to surpass. It is in ground riddled with symbolism: formerly a no-man's land, a block south of the Brandenberger Tor—too close to be ignored, yet just enough out of sight to allow a modern country a chance of putting its past behind it.

At very first sight it is bland and unremarkable. Then, a moment later, your eyes take in the magnitude of the place—a full city square in a city of generous proportions—with a scale provided by the distant buildings of Potsdamer Platz, which is when you realize its real expanse. The plot is covered in about 2700 stelae of various heights, on a ground that is also uneven. Your first thought is of a dark wave, but if you've ever seen an old Jewish cemetery, such as the one in Prague—with gravestone piled upon gravestone—you realize that Eisenmann is quoting not only funerary caskets but a long history of Jewish oppression even in death. The plot accomplishes the neat trick of being both abstract and concrete at the same time.

As you walk around the site—the stelae are in a regular grid of paths—the structure becomes more and more oppressive as the surrounding buildings sink from sight and the sounds muffle. The references are evident, and effective. Near the middle, though, where the stelae are tallest and ground lowest, something strange happens: you are so surrounded in tall rectangular structures that the (perhaps inadvertent) quotation of Liebskind's Garden of Exile begins to actually feel derivative.

Part of the controversy over the memorial is that it wasn't Jewish enough, and that it didn't sufficiently reflect guilt. Here I think Eisenmann has redeemed himself wonderfully. It was by no means unanimous that the monument should be to Jews alone, and many still feel that leaving out other targeted groups was improper. Without doing so explicitly, Eisenmann includes them all. Yet the characteristic profile of a old European Jewish cemetary is unmistakeable, at once situating the site within a (forced) tradition. What, anyway, must a memorial be? It must be sombre, contemplative, and show remorse, all of which this does...but I think it must also, like this memorial, have in it an element of the universal, to say both “This could happen to you” and “you too are capable of this”: those should be the larger framework of Never Forgetting.

There is an information center under the memorial, which I did not visit, and the site itself was staffed on the cold, rainy evening that I visited by an eager young man handing out information pamphlets. The pamphlet is informative enough, even featuring an FAQ, though it can't but help pump up the center's management, answering a question that I bet nobody asks.

The other thing remarkable about this pamphlet, a trend equally visible at the Jewish Museum (and an increasing number of other sites worldwide), is the extraordinary emphasis on the architect. There he is on page one, in a black-and-white photograph, trying hard to look both pained and thoughtful at the responsibility of capturing the Weltschmertz. It is as inspecting the monument were not enough, that we must indulge this mutual admiration society of architects and commissioners. If Wren had the audacity to create the epitaph he did in his time, imagine what the pamphlet for St. Paul's would look like if he built it today! We'd be lucky to get to God by page 25. On the other hand, it's precisely the Wren spirit that is called for: I speak to you in stone, and the stone suffices: behold, and be awed.

Kino!

What is more Berlin than film? The city we associate with Lang and Metropolis, Dietrich and Der blaue Engel (and, let's admit, Riefenstahl and Olympia); a city that still trades on photographs of Gary Cooper landing in Tempelhof (an airport that, frankly, I more readily associate with Freud's flight at the last moment...); and—a city that just happens to be running its Film Festival while I'm in town! Not that they couldn't make it slightly easier to find information, tickets or shows, but eventually I was ensconsed in the Zoo Palast for a show at 2pm.

With several dozens of school children, actually, young enough to actually screech (rather than yell). I realized I'd ended up in a showing of short films for kids; but here I was, and perhaps I would understand more of the German anyway. What I saw for the next two hours was a series of films that each included at least one thing that would be considered too offensive for children in America: horror, pornography, infidelity, and in one peculiar instance, an animation featuring a rather violent spoon. Any of the shorts, much less the lot of them, would have readily ignited the entire righteous parenthood of Amerika (though it must be said that the spoon did get its comeuppance). I did find strange the sometimes emotionless voice of the speak-over translator (done on the cheap, perhaps, seeing as they used one woman to translate the voice of three different young boys). Also odd were the things they did and did not translate: the boys' names like Milton and Byron were “translated” (that is, simply repeated), whereas “sexy lady” was not (though none of the adolescents had any trouble with the concept). Given the sometime ponderous nature of European movies for “mature” audiences, and the weighty themes covered honestly and thoughtfully here, it was a far better experience than I could have expected (especially when I first sat down and looked around). Equally noteworthy was the extremely international mix of films, roughly one per continent—and the only German film was actually about the tough lives of illegal immigrants from the Ukraine.

Liquid Lounge

Berlin's Tegel is a modest airport, with about fifteen gates arranged in a ring, each (rather inefficiently) having its own security and departure section. It is, by the way, named in honor of Otto Lilienthal, though that name is printed virtually nowhere: I only found out by walking outside and looking back up at the control tower. But there is a small reward for those who take the exit less frequently used: just outside, besides the row of benches usually populated by smokers, there is a very low-slung sculpture—never more than a foot off the ground—of a man, lying prone, belly-down, wearing an aviator jacket and goggles, wings strapped to his hand, and tethered to the ground with a rope like a goat. An aviation buff would immediately recognize it as a wonderful tribute to Lilienthal himself.

Anyway, back to security and departure. I walk into my section and put my bags through the x-ray. The security guard politely but firmly wants to know what a particular object is in my bag. Expecting she's referring to the snake-like cable that accompanies my OQO laptop, I tell her it's computer wiring. No, she says; she's pointing at a ghostly rectangle. I tell her I have no idea; oh dear, she says. Is it shaving supplies? No, I point to the shaving cream I have in the separate sealed plastic bag, so we open up and start digging. It's my deodorant stick.

Now she's examining the stick, frowning and deep in concentration. I helpfully point out the obvious: it's a solid deodorant. But the x-ray does not lie, while passengers might, and she's not having anything of me. A little annoyed, I explain that I have just flown in from the US with the same stick, and indeed use the same brand all over the US and abroad, and I've never been stopped before, not even after the ban on liquids. Why, I ask, have I never been pulled over in America? She stoutly shakes her head, fixes me with a stare, brandishes my solid-as-a-brick deodorant with a grip so firm it would have sent any fluid squirting and, with no sense of irony any German has ever been accused of, says: “In Zhermany zis is a likvid.”

I am sputtering. She is considering me with the pitiful look one gives a competition contestant who has participated fairly but has no chance of winning. Finally I play my trump card. I have just flown out of Frankfurt last week with the very same deodorant. “How”, I ask, “is it possible for the same substance to be a solid in Frankfurt but a liquid in Berlin?”

An American security guard would make mincemeat of such an argument, usually by tapping on a gun or offering some other symbolic gesture. Here, however, she stops in her tracks as Teutonic rationality kicks into high gear. She calls over her supervisor. There is a small exchange of whispers. The supervisor finally says, “It's fine”.

Of course, we are not done. The guard must save face. “You vill put zhis in your sealed plastic bag?” I look at the bag. It is already packed to the point of bursting with little containers of toiletries. And even if it weren't, even were it empty, the stick would be far too large to fit into it. But I know the rules of the game we are playing. “Of course!”, I say, make a big fussy motion, and when we are both satisfied that Security has been Enforced, I calmly close my bag and walk away.

Squaring a Chalk Circle

The subway signs are telling. Neatly validating a Wall Street Journal article I'd read on the flight into Berlin, Canada—specifically Alberta—boldly advertises a job fair, no different from any other merchant peddling wares. Berlin? Alberta? But unemployment in Germany, though not visible the way it is in America, remains very real and a much more significant phenomenon.

And yet, amidst this sense of decay, there is the sense of being in a happening place. The German automobile club, next to the major Volkswagen dealership at the heart of Under den Linden (the intersection with Friedrichstraße), advertises a collection of nature photography. It looks like an obvious ploy to con people into visiting an automobile showroom. Sceptical but nevertheless curious, I pop in ready to beat a hasty retreat. But I stay for over an hour, admiring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2006 Europe-wide nature photography competition, being particularly impressed by the subjects, technique and patience of Ingo Arndt. The arts are a serious matter here.

Berlin's past will never entirely disappear. On my last evening, I was walking from Mitte to the Museumsinsel. One route goes through the most statesque parts of Unter den Linden and, just before that, passes the imposing Staatsoper. Berlin, opera, culture—these are the thoughts that occupy your mind as you walk past a pleasant but rather barren little green space between the Opera and Unter den Linden. And then you see the square's place written in that stark black-on-white Fraktur that they use all over the city: Bebelplatz. That's right: seventy years ago, they burned books here. In this, and in so many other respects, the dispatches of William Shirer and his ilk never entirely escape the mind.

But when you finally get to the Museumsinsel, and walk up the dramatic entrance of the Pergamonmuseum, enter, turn right, and right again, and are suddenly in the presence of the Ishtar-Tor. You see the remnants of the azure blue tiles from the wall of Babylon itself, and you have just passed through the very gate Nebuchadrezzar II himself. It is imperial theft, to be sure, and of the very highest order. But then you spend a half hour walking and examining the reconstructed ceremonial pathway approaching the gate and the gate itself...it takes quite a bit to impress us Indians, because age is in our blood: old things to others are quite new to us. But once in a while the ancient world can throw up something stunning, and at those moments you are transported, in this case, from the problematic space of Berlin into the pure abstraction of time.