Memorial to the Roma and Sinti Victims

Monuments and memorials can  commemorate heroes  such as Washington and Lincoln  or acknowledge sacrifice of Vietnam’s soldiers.  They are also useful to publicly display regret at a past event.  In this mea culpa category, Berlin, Germany has finally owned up. 

It took 60  years for Berlin to build a memorial to the six  millions  Jews killed under Hitler’s regime.  The delay had its reasons.  Facts were painful to face.   Many Germans were ignorant of the holocaust and placed blame on their leaders.  Berlin was divided. Germany was busy rebuilding a broken country.  Only after the two Germanys reunited in 1990, worked out the many details and finances of reunification, and moved the capital back to Berlin  was the country ready to face its past here.  And,  as with most memorials, controversy surrounded the attempts to display the compromised past.

Every decision for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe  was debated.  Location (Berlin or nearer a concentration camp)  and design (12 artists submitted ideas) had to be approved.   Who was being remembered – just Jews or others murdered?  And an unexpected controversy appeared when the IG Pharmacy Company provided anti-graffiti paint for the blocks despite the company’s association with producing the nerve gas used in concentration camps.  These agitations disappeared once the memorial was completed.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

No names are engraved on the 2711 solid concrete stele and each is a unique size.  The arrangement of the blocks yields strong images –  a graveyard, cattle cars, camp barracks.  From the outside, it is not obvious how deep the blocks descend, symbolic of the  public’s ignorance of the Jews’ plight.  From the inside,  visitors feel the hopelessness of internment in a camp.  Yet children dashed about, playing hide and go seek as teenagers huddled here and there – the classic image of life moving on which it has.  After World War II, only 5,000 Jews remained in Berlin out of 180,000.  Today that number has grown to 40,000 made up mostly of Russian Jews who have been welcomed by the city.

To acknowledge other groups targeted by the Nazi regime, Berlin built more memorials.  Gays had to also wait until 2008 for  their own monument.  A slit window in a concrete enclosed structure allows visitors to watch a video of a gay couple kissing.  Its controversy centered on whether to include lesbians as most of the discrimination occurred against male couples.  As a compromise, the film alternates every two years between female and male couples. 

At the Gypsy memorial to the Roma and Sinti victims, just opened in 2012,  traditional Roma music plays.  Designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, the still water pool features a triangular stone pillar, symbolic of the triangle badge required to be worn by this population.  A new flower is placed in the center daily.  

Outdoor Reading Library at Bebelplatz

On May 10, 1933, 20,000 books were burned at the Bebelplatz to rid the pure Aryan population of ‘dangerous’ authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Jack London.   Today, a window on the floor of the plaza looks down into a room lined with empty bookshelves.  This is known as a voided monument – one that marks what is lost.  Heinrich Heine’s prescient quote from 1820 lays nearby , “This is only a prelude – when one burns books, one burns people.”  On the day of our visit, the local library had appropriately turned the plaza into an outdoor reading space, complete with reclining chairs, bean bags and lots of books.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Concentration Camp Victim

A final memorial was the most moving.  In an old artillery storage building, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Concentration Camp Victim lies beneath a single Pieta like figure.  Above her, light pours in through an open skylight.  When it rains on the statue, she appears to be crying.  

The subject of memorials in Berlin generates strong feelings among those who feel it necessary to acknowledge culpability and those who feel it’s time to move on.  Complaints of too much hand-wringing are becoming more common.  As our guide said, “Memory is tricky in Berlin”.   With the Nazi and Communist histories, the argument will always be what to remember and what to forget.  Monuments and memorials make it much harder to forget.  

Recommended Guide – Heather Mae Ellis, an American living in Berlin.  
Contact her at orangeheather@googlemail.com  

Last Remaining Tower of the Berlin Wall

 I last crossed the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie in 1969 on a family vacation to Europe.  We flew from Hamburg to Berlin on a short 35 minutes Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight. Twenty four years after the end of WWII, West Berlin had been cleared of rubble.  The streets were clean but many blocks empty.  Cranes dominated that half of the city as new construction began to carry out instructions from international architects brought in to fill a world lost to bombing.

The Berlin Wall was eight years old and West Berlin a political hotspot, where the Cold War played out daily.  President Nixon had visited West Berlin in March of that year to huge crowds.  Miles Davis would play in November with equal numbers of fans.  Americans were loved for keeping supply lines open to the western half of the city.

I remember clearly the excitement of crossing into East Berlin.  We sat on the top level of a double decker tour bus, providing a nice view of the guards.  East German guards closely checked our passports pictures and ran mirrors under the bus.   Despite instructions not to photograph anything,  my oldest brother slipped out our movie camera, put it on his lap and filmed the gate and wall as we crossed the border.

Compared to West Berlin, its eastern counterpart was shut-down.  Rows of apartment buildings had been built but many old bombed out apartments stood silent, awaiting their turn to be torn down.  As the tallest building in Germany, the TV tower of  Berliner Fernsehturm had just been finished in 1969 but we weren’t allowed to ascend. Few people or cars were out.  Our guide followed a script as we rode through the quiet streets.  It just felt sad.

Tourists at Checkpoint Charlie

Forty four years later in 2013, one must search to find remnants of the Wall that fell in 1989.  A brick pattern inserted into streets and sidewalks marks its past presence. Checkpoint Charlie is now a tourist trap with fake American and Russian soldiers posing for pictures with young women.  Einstein’s Kaffee Checkpoint Charlie Shop sits on one corner with Ben and Jerry ice cream for sale on another.  Looking north across the “border” is an active business street filled with cars and pedestrians and the cranes are now in East Berlin.

Outer and Inner Wall of Chapel of Reconciliation

Only three parts of the original 100 mile Wall still stand and we visited them all.  The Berlin Wall was actually two walls with a cleared space between for easier shooting of escapees.    Design of the Wall changed each time an escape was  successful,  ending with a curved top to prevent anyone from holding on.   At Bernard Strasse, the  original layout made clear the difficulty in getting out.  Even if one scaled the first barrier, a second awaited.  On a walk through the interior space between walls, we slowly viewed  names and photos of the 138 persons who died trying to flee. The only remaining guard tower that would have been feared in 1969 now seemed lonely and harmless.   Most moving was the new Chapel of Reconciliation, built of earth in the round, with an outer and inner wall symbolizing the actual Berlin Wall.

East Side Gallery

East German Trabant Crashing though Wall East Side Gallery

At the East Side Gallery, graffiti artists were commissioned to paint murals at a second Wall location.  This portion follows the Spree River which can be seen through chiseled out holes in the wall.  The crowd was younger and very international.   Paintings tugged at our hearts.  One showed  the leg and shoe of a young man trying to escape over the wall.  In another, an East German Trabant car crashes through the barrier.  Several had peace and love themes and many artists signed their names and websites.  Just before we arrived, protesters tried to stop a developer from tearing down a portion of this wall but heavy equipment was brought in at night to do the deed.

Berlin Wall near Topography of Terror

At the final location, a small section of the Wall borders the Topography of Terror display and museum where the story of the Nazi’s use of intimidation and ruthlessness to come and stay in power is detailed.  Anyone who spoke up was interned or killed and all were humiliated. Painful photos of the descent into hell are abundant.  By placing this museum next to the Berlin Wall, the two tragedies intertwine, revealing years of repression for East Berlin and Germany.

Walls never work or at least they don’t work for long.  From the Great Wall to the Security Wall in Israel to the talk of a border wall with Mexico, the idea always seems simple.  But it is really a break down in imagination.  A government can’t find a better solution than a concrete wall, which only gives resolve to those being penned in or kept out.  They do eventually fall.  Berlin had the foresight to preserve portions of this inconvenient and unintentional monument, reminding us all the human spirit will eventually prevail.