Reunification Day in Berlin: An Experience for Americans

February 25, 2008

Photo by the author

As a citizen of a country newly vulnerable and flirting with the idea of world domination, spending this last October 3rd, Reunification Day, in Berlin was a profound experience. The throngs milling around Brandenburg Gate and basking on the steps of the re-built Reichstag, looked and felt like the Fourth of July, but for these people history is far more immediate and powerful.

For they stand where the Third Reich and the Communist empire, the visions of world domination that shaped the 20th Century incinerated themselves, and Germany was reunified a mere 15 years ago. This is a Phoenix moment for Berliners. Like the gloriously plumed mythological bird that incinerates itself then rises anew from its ashes Berlin today is truly a new city rising. But this phoenix is not plumed with dreams of glory. Berliners are determined to remember and to understand the meaning of their past”

Everywhere in the city memorials tell of the destruction wrought by two imperial powers and the architecture of new buildings expresses Germany’s sense of a lesson learned.In the words of architect, Max Adorn, they do “memory work.” At Potsdammer Platz, the heavily bombed site of Hitler’s headquarters and later of the Berlin Wall, three buildings rise. The central tower stands on the “death strip” the area bordering the wall on the East where those venturing too close were shot, and with its neighbors it forms a gateway now. The buildings, each differing in building materials to celebrate diversity, are of the same height; city fathers will allow no single building to dominate any space.

The new Jewish Museum is a powerful example of such work. Nothing in the building is straight, square, or balanced. Grey steel, its windows are uneven slits that run at random angles across its face and the pavement around it is of random materials slashing into each other. It is a monument to the shattering of a people, and the story told inside the building is of the repeated attempts from the Middle Ages on to destroy a culture that was seen as threatening the dominant group. The whole gives insight into the Jews’ determination to have a country of their own, though they have done so in the midst of their oldest enemies which should set us all to thinking about the eternal cycles of such culture wars.

The memorials tell over and over the price of war. In a Victorian house in the heart of the business district, the work of Kathi Howlik, a woman artist of the late Nineteenth, early Twentieth Century, expresses the grief and loss of the century. In life she was an anti-war activist during World War I who rose to eminence just as Hitler rose to power. In her sculptures, woodcuts, and drawings, mothers over and over mourn the loss of their children. Here, however, the artist seems fixated on death, as though, like the phoenix, we are doomed to repeat the cycle of power and destruction. This is not the message of the architects of the new Berlin.

They are determined to remember in order to overcome. In the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, again in the “death strip,” acres of coffin-shaped black marble boxes of varying heights memorialize the murdered Jews—creating an indestructible blot in the symbolic center of the city. The site is surrounded by the bulky barren blocks of Communist style buildings and is within site of the richly baroque Reichstag—monument to an earlier vision of power.

But the Reichstag itself, burned in 1933 (probably by Hitler himself to solidify his power), has been rebuilt with a dome of glass, symbolic of a new vision of the transparency of government. Berliners now call it the “Bundesstag.” “Reich,” in German, means empire, “bundes” means government; thus, the language joins architecture to overcome the visions of empire that destroyed them. Hitler and Stalin both dreamed of great stone domes to symbolize themselves; the new buildings of the city are of steel, glass, and terra cota—no stone.

Throughout the city, the theme of preserving the ashes while creating the new of different materials is repeated over and over. A bombed out church stands in the center of Berlin’s busiest shopping district surrounded by a new church of glass. Young men scarcely born when the Wall fell break-dance in the adjacent plaza. A section of the wall is preserved, and beneath it the prison cells of the Communist era, but Hitler’s bunker has been destroyed so it cannot become a shrine for neo-Nazis of today. Everywhere Berliners confront the two visions of world domination that successively destroyed their city.

You can, of course, go to Germany and see none of this. You can travel south into the Alps and wander among postcard villages, palaces and fogbound lakes or join the crowds going to October Fest in Munich. You can even stand in awe, as Americans usually do, at the visions of power Germany’s many castles represent. But as citizens of the most powerful country of this century, we have the most to learn from Berliners. We need to stand where they do, in the “death strip” between Nazi Germany and the Cold War and join in the “memory work.”

Many thanks to art historian, Thomas Abbot, for the historical insights presented here.

About the author: Judith Kirscht retired from a career teaching writing at the Universities of Michigan and California (Santa Barbara), and now lives on Camano Island in Washington and devotes her time to writing–largely fiction.