Europe > Germany > Berlin > Berlin > Articles > Berlin: The Reich comes home

My first trip to Berlin was in 1968. I was seventeen and seeing ‘superpower stand-off’ live and at its most demented. It was the ‘Year of Student Unrest’. De Gaulle threatened to recall the French army on the Rhine to put down Paris. In Berlin, Rudi Deutschke was leading the students. They wore ‘Che’ and hammer and sickle buttons. Riot cops built up in side-streets during the afternoons, congregating around their water cannon.

“If you are near a riot, don’t get close to them,” warned one of our German minders. “If the jet catches you full in the stomach, it can open you from top to bottom.” She performed a quite gratuitous mime tracing a route with her forefinger up to her epiglottis.

We were still in the smooth chrome shopping streets of West Berlin. We had not reached the wicked void of the Wall, the checkpoints, the Volkspolizei, the viewing platforms from where we could peer across the mined strips between the peeling buildings to catch glimpses of the scurrying oppressed.

The Wall seems an accelerated time past. Berliners complain that it is hard to remember its exact course, as though they are losing an architectural heritage. Its wicked void, for thirty years unvisited except by policemen and their psychotic dogs, has become the biggest building site in Europe. Temporary footpaths and dense traffic confusion made the Potsdamer Platz more dangerous than during its deserted decades as ‘no-man’s land’. Only a stagey fragment of one checkpoint, the notorious ‘Charlie’, is retained as a curio. The indiscriminate souvenir shop next to it is the larger attraction. The Volkspolizei have probably been largely integrated into the eastern precincts of the Berlin police, now planting evidence where, previously, they did not have to bother with it at all.

The viewing towers are gone. To see east Berlin, one gets public transport as far as one’s tageskarte permits. In the old days, if one had a cross-Wall pass, one got off the U-Bahn [the underground system] at Freidrichstrasse, to be processed by the Vopos. The train crews changed at the same time. The interiors of the carriages carried a unique caution where one might have expected to see an advertisement. “Achtung! Do not go to sleep past Friedrichstrasse!”

The Wall has gone, but not much has gone with it.. The surreal quality of torchlight and polished leather, Christopher Isherwood and androgynous bars, the flavours of threat and promises that excited this schoolboy in his moment of history have their successors.

Berlin has a mood of dark chocolate. It is rich and bitter, a challenge to those who live on the edge of taste, who like to bite without being entirely sure they won’t be bitten back. For all the Enlightenment splendour of the Unter den Linden and the boulevard velvet of the Kufurstendamm, it is a city of the East. It is less than an hour’s journey from Poland, closer in distance and spirit to Posnan and Prague than the tamed and Frankified cities of the Rhineland. At the Brandenburg Gate, Turks and Pathans sell fake Soviet Army fur caps.

At corners along Friedrichstrasse, Romanian gypsy women beg with babes in arms. Around Alexanderplatz, an ancient market place and once glass-clad civic showplace of the evaporated German Democratic Republic, bruised and intimidating young men, jobless, some homeless, gather resentfully with their lolling German shepherds. In another centre of town, under the pocked and blackened spire of the ruined Kaiserkirche, long a symbol of West Berlin’s defiance against communist evils, street punks deal drugs at strolling pace. On Sundays families in anoraks and polyester, and daubs of cheap cosmetics, break free from the barrack-length housing projects on the fringe of East Berlin where wise men, rich men and coloured men fear to tread, and barrel into the U-Bahn lines that head for the ritzier shopping precincts of the West. Later at night going back East, their men folk, merrily but hopelessly drunk, tumble out of the wrong side of S-Bahn cars and onto the tracks.

Berlin was always tough. It was dug from marsh. It started as the small-time ‘Mark’ of Brandenburg. Brutal applications of its Hohenzollern ruling family raised it to an ‘electorate’ of The Holy Roman Empire. It became capital of its own kingdom of Prussia. It was vaulted by Bismark into the throne seat of the new German empire, lost glaringly by Wilhelm II in 1918. Berlin remained a place of cultivated, risky decadence till its last notoriety as capital, on behalf of Hitler’s Third Reich, for which it was most thoroughly blasted to bits, hung, drawn and cartographically quartered by the Russians, the Americans, the British and the French.

The capital of reunified Germany is now re-established in Berlin. The chancellery is there, the parliament, fifteen major ministries and one hundred and fifty three embassies. Politicians and civil servants from the old West German capital town of Bonn have been wary of the move. Federal civil servants have been given Germanic sized deals, including weekly round trips and accommodation for the first two years to lure them over the Elbe. All German rulers have felt the same discomfort over Berlin.

The Hohenzollerns had endless trouble with Berlin townsfolk over the dynasty’s sadisms and desire to turn the town into a barracks. Frederick The Great so disliked Berlin that he built the Sans Souci Palace and Park miles away at Potsdam, had only French spoken there, flogged his pages, and died unlamented by Berliners.

Seeing past the withered arm and slightness of stature, Berliners generally counted Kaiser Wilhelm II gross in attitude and led the cutting of the ground from under him in the 1918 workers and army revolt. Hitler, an Austrian, distrusted Berlin instinctively. He planned to have Albert Speer raise the centre and build a neo classical ‘Germania’. In the meantime, he lodged in an apartment in the Reich’s Chancellory and, when that was obliterated, in the cramped bunker under its ruin. Whenever he could, The Fuhrer, essentially a lazy man when it came to daily government, was to be found far away to the south in Berchtesgarten, the sort of ‘faux’ Bavarian log-cabin over which Berlin sophisticates would have sniggered.

What I found so transfixing in 1999 was Berlin’s ability to degrade selectively the follies of its former masters. The smells of the Hohenzollerns, The Nazis and the German Stalinists are in the air but their habitats are either corseted relics, revamps for the new democracy, or slippage into the developers’ slime.

The Prussian monarchy left so much behind it, largely because the Communists could not bear the disintegration of its East side history prize, the Unter Den Linten. The Warsaw Pact’s most intractable satellite meticulously restored the Baroque and Neo Classical grandeur of monarchy after the 1945 battle of Berlin.

In 1968, I watched East German soldiers goose-step a guard change outside the Neue Wache- the royal guard house, a celebrated stand of early nineteenth century neo-classicism, then a memorial to ‘The Victims of Fascism and Militarism’ The GDR army had little sense of irony. East Germany’s rulers under a stony complexioned Stalinist with a goatee called Walter Ulbricht, were suspected of trying to hitch their state’s star to the glories of Prussian history. It is doubtful if anyone outside the Politburo took the link seriously.

The regime took pains to revive the Berliner Dom, the bulbously personal cathedral of the house of Hohenzollern. With a dome on the lines of a half melon, it was a Lutheran copy of St Peter’s. As a celebration of German Kaiserdom, and with some splendid gold filigree touches, it is probably one of the most godless places of worship ever consecrated. That its bulk should have survived within flame licks of the Russian onslaught is one of the peculiarities that can give one the occasional chills about Berlin.

On this visit, I walked under the Brandenburg Gate several times to check that I could really do it. Last time , the gate had been only just on the eastern side of the Wall. Visiting communist dignitaries were escorted through it by Russian officers to stare at capitalism from a viewing platform. We schoolboy capitalists were yards away on the other side. On our platform, visitors from West Germany, fresh to the immediacy of it, broke into torrents of scatological abuse. I remember the Russian officer demonstrating us to his visitors and smiling with assured contempt. I wonder what he is doing now, an old man on a worthless pension in a collapsed world.

Yards into the western side is the old imperial Reichstag building. Now it is the Bundestag, the federal parliament, acrimoniously completed in glassy splendour with water leakages by Sir Norman Foster. They will continue calling it the Reichstag out of habit, possibly out of perversity for its dark, ‘other-Germany’ connotations.

The Nazis certainly burned it down themselves and blamed it on a Dutch madman as an excuse to shut down civil liberties. In 1969, it was still a charcoal crusted shell. Improvement was impossible. The Wall defences were feet away. If construction workers had dropped a hammer, it would have fallen in East Berlin and invited a pot shot back from a Vopo. This ugly abuttal of dead building against deadly wall seemed to say something hopeless and helpless about middle Europe in the mid 1900s.

The Reich left little that was purely of itself. War prevented Albert Speer from getting underway in Berlin. What was built of his crypto-Arianism has been raised to the ground. Even where Third Reich buildings have been destroyed, there appears to be a residual embarrassment over the spots on which they stood.

The Gestapo Headquarters is in a weedy block-long hump near the Potsdamer Strasse. Alongside it is an open air photograph gallery of guilt showing Himmler chatting to Jews through wire. A block away, between Ebert Strasse an Wilhelm Strasse is the site of Speer’s big achievement: the vast, white marbled Reich’s Chancellery. The building was bombed gutless and to stumps.

From early 1945, Hitler disappeared into the banal and satanic mysteries of the ‘Führerbunker’. He died. The mistress died. The wicked wizard and his children died. The dog died and the dark bodyguards tried to disappear through the rubble.

Thirty years ago, I got as close to dugout Valhalla as anybody could. I went with a schoolboy chum, Philip, a Jew from Manchester whose remains of a Latvian family were still feeling the losses of the concentration camps. We had our day passes under the Wall. We did the Friedrichstrasse shuffle. The Vopos pouted at us and we were up for air in the sunlight of The German Democratic Republic. Philip, dear man, never blinked.

We were followed by the Stasi secret police with all the subtlety of a brass band. We walked to the Brandenburg Gate and watched the West Germans call us ‘shits’ too. We lunched in a restaurant decorated for ‘The Third Man’ movie, and terrified a hapless East Berlin woman who was compelled to share a table with us thereby bringing out her conversational English, so doubling the size of her Stasi file overnight.

After our uneasy chat with her, Philip and I arranged to go where she could not afford to go. We attended a performance of Berthold Brecht’s ‘Corialanus’, at the Schiller Theatre in Marx-Engels Platz. Brecht’s widow took the mother role. The dark red velvet boxes concealed high ranking Party members.

Before culture we had sought out chaos. We skirted the Potsdamer Platz and walked towards the Bunker. In the corner of a thinly vegetated bomb site was what the Americans have come to associate with somewhere else; a grassy knoll. This knoll was too sudden in the flatness to have been crafted by nature. It was an entrance.

The Fuhrer had ended his life feet away beneath me. I walked to a nearby Stasi man who was absurdly pretending to read the Party’s indigestible ‘Neues Bild Zeitung’. Could I get permission to go in? He grunted negatively and turned away: cover blown, home for tea.

Today, West Berlin’s last viewing platform provides a view of the bunker across a construction company’s fence. Restraints over the old Chancellery site had been let go. The land was bald and wet now, ready to receive foundations. Through a temporary wire gate, into what had been the Olympus of the Thousand Year Reich, a worker with a cigarette stuck on his lip waved in cement mixer trucks.

The knoll had turned into a wart. Months ago, a bulldozer took the scab off it to reveal frayed blocks of concrete. It is to be covered over again. The authorities very much want it to go away. I would not be surprised if molten concrete has been sent rolling down those dank passages and into the lightless rooms where a nightmare long ago put an end to itself.

The East German state has left its own construction legacies, often risible as long as one does not have to inhabit them. The most famous and probably the most abiding is the globe-topped TV tower in Alexanderplatz - built as much to taunt West Berlin as improve the East’s doleful television. The glass cladding accidentally reflects the sunlight in the form of the sign of The Cross. ‘The Pope’s Revenge’, West Berliners dubbed it gleefully.

‘The Palace of The Republic’ has been much less of a credit to The People’s memory. Built in the 1970s on the site of the royal palace which had been shelled beyond redemption, the State took special pride in completing it in a thousand days. The haste shows. It is a huge building of arthritic angles in a shade of excrescent brown found in many American kitchens and car interiors around the same time.

Its interior is a hundred committee-sessions’ worth of bad taste with another hundred disassociated light fittings suspended from the ceiling. The locals called it the ‘Ballast der Republick’. Days before Die Wende [reunification] it was discovered to be a huge asbestos hazard and closed. It stands empty in one of the most beautiful streets in Europe, a decision minefield for the city.

Back in 1969, there were parts of East Berlin I never considered trying to get to. This time I took the U-Bahn well past Friedrichstrasse to posh Pankow where the Party bosses lived behind double patrols. Another was Prenzlauer, a nineteenth century working-class district with a revived synagogue which is being gentrified by western renovators. Another missed visiting opportunity of mine in 1969 was the Karl-Marx Allee, a late 1950s showcase of workers’ apartments.

The Allee is very wide. The style is Stalinist classical. The units have high ceilings, parquet floors and proper plumbing. I walked half the length of it in driving rain to get a feel for communist triumph. The spectacle was gaunt with a chilling magnificence. People’s regimes, embarked on cod-classicism, do not pay much attention to wind breaks. The apartments are being bought by West German realty companies. Once proud ‘model workers’ are being paid to move out. As one German academic put it to me, “It is a consequence of creating 16 million second class citizens overnight.”

Sheltering in the subway from the razor rain, there was one more bite of the bitter-sweet I would liked to have had. In the Lichtenburg District is the former Stasi secret police headquarters, a rambling, if little-attended tourist attraction with the apartment and office of its long running director Erich Mielke still intact. Lichtenburg is a working class district of prefabricated housing and inefficient factories hit badly by the collapse of the old order. It has a reputation for housing skinhead group violence, easily fired by racism. I thought of my wet but unprotesting travelling companion, an American Chinese, and decided that the risk would not be a fair one.

It is said that Berlin has taken over from Cologne as the centre for Germany, if not Europe, for radically edgy, avant garde art exhibitions. In the eastern fringes radically edgy youths are demonstrating violently against anybody that looks different. The bitter-sweet noix of Berlin has taken on capital status once again.

Articles

• More from Stuart Wolfendale