July 31, 2002
Berlin, The Divided City
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| Un-reconstructed. 29 Juillet. |
Now's it's been restored to its deserved position: capital of the democratic German republic at the heart of Europe.
But what can you find in Berlin? A crisis of monuments.
Here to the right is Kaiser Frederick's church, damaged during the war and never rebuilt. This is a formidable, massive stone church ruin on Berlin's finest, upscale shopping street in the heart of old West Berlin: the Ku'Damm. It's as if St. Paul's Cathedral on 5th Avenue were a massive empty hulk.
There is an uncomfortable dynamic, however, between these scars and reminders of war and the many histories that intersect in Berlin. The Germans regret the atavistic impulse to war--they leave this monument at the center of the consumer and tourist quarter. This church was built as a memorial to Kaiser William II's father shortly after he acceded to the throne. William was the modernizing leader of great ambition who ultimately led Germany to its defeat in WW1 and the disastrous Versailles peace (recall his Chancellor Bismarck's doctrine of realpolitik and game of machtpolitik).
The violent, imperialist aspirations of the newly-born state are quite apart from some of the other horrors to follow.
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| Arendt. 29 Juillet. |
This is what Hannah Arendt is pointing out in the video they have of her at the Jewish Museum. Everything else could have been repaid she says, except for the Auschwitz. When the Germans themselves learned about the Holocaust, they learned about an unforgiveable horror.
The Holocaust had a moral status quite apart from ordinary war. How can you address a cataclysm at the roots of modern Germany? The East Germans chose to distance themselves from it, but the West German government had inherited the culpability of Hitler's defeated regime.
At the over-architected Jewish museum, less than a year old, they have attempted a history of German Jews. The dominant theme is of a diasporic people that have suffered at the hands of their German hosts always, never worse than in the disaster of the Holocaust.
The basic project: reconciliation through engagement with history. But who is party to this reconciliation? The Germans. The people invented by 19th Century nationalists like Bismarck, in fact the race invented for Nazi ideological ends. And on the other side are the German Jews. The museum is not a history of the Jews. You do not hear about their fate in Spain (or the Catholic Inquisition) or in Eastern Europe (or in Stalin's gulags).
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| Inside the Void. 29 Juillet. |
In fact, the basic principle that organizes this monument to and document of Jewish ethnic history and apology for the crimes of the German state, is a conception of a national race: on the one hand the German race that murdered and the German race that suffered.
Not many Jews remain in Germany after all, and here in the old quarters of the Berlin Museum they have built a history of German Jewry that ends in 1945 and extends thereafter not with Jews but with stories of the successor state that has struggled with Marx's Jewish Question recast.
The old problem was a Christian state oppressing its Jewish subjects, a problem of religion. The problem is a German state oppressing its Jewish subjects, a problem of peoples in opposition.
If that is not the problem, then what have the Germans to apologize for? The state itself is not guilty. It is a people that sits guiltily. It is the conception of a nationhood underwritten both by the nationalistic notion of a German people and by the supra-religious notion of Jewish identity that continues to prevail. They are locked in historical struggle in virtue of their very existence. How can the dialectic be superceded if both parties linger on, their existence itself pointing vividly to the other party's identity?
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| Holocaust Memorial. 29 Juillet. |
A few meters from the un-wrapped, glass-domed Reichstag is a patch of verdure that reminded me of Prague's old Jewish cemetery not because of the long grass but because of the huge grave stone. This sign marks the future site of the memorial to the Romani ("Gypsy") people murdered by the Nazis. Just a few blocks away is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, just now beginning construction after a long controversy.
What can you build? Will it be enough?
Just to the left of the Brandenburg Gate is the site, surrounded by a fence.
All the while there is an entirely separate history carefully being erased: 50 years of division and escape attempts in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.
The wall is gone, there is no trace of it. At the old Checkpoint Charlie, there is a small, private museum and its documents of the division. And the builders are quickly eradicating any memory that one half of the city is 50 years behind the other.
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| Another famous sign. 29 Juillet. |
West Germany, US bases, soldiers in Berlin discos, defectors and dissidents, and all the Cold War souvenirs. They are neatly separated in Berlin. Two cities entirely with two unrelated histories. You are meant to pity one of them, and stare at the other's horror in awe. And for the old Romantic Germany of Goethe and Schiller, Humboldt and Helmholz, which built the muscular, bald wise men that adorn the places wher the French would have put Beaux-Arts blindfolded Muses, there is yet another attitude: the history lessons of the lately-born lately-industrializing European states.
Of course there is also a cute and cuddly art show all over Berlin. Giant polar bears painted up in various designs, like the traveling cows that came to New York some years back.
The construction is everywhere in Berlin. How difficult it will be to build on these foundations!
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| Angels over Berlin. 29 Juillet. |
Berlin was only capital of Germany for 74 years when the Allies split it up and the Soviets took possession of the burnt shell of the Reichstag. But now it's back and from it is broadcast the future of Europe. A continental European war between the major powers seems impossible now, not only for the facts of history but because of the international order they have mutually constructed (in part De Gaulle's vision of a Europe to rival America, but also a vision of multilateralist commune of non-militaristic powers in Kantian perpetual peace).
They have certainly built this into all the transparent glass government buildings in Berlin. They can see themselves. But where will be the fund of their national identity and pride in the future. It is not easy to define your statehood on the crimes for which you apologize. Inside the glass buildings, into which everyone can see so easily, what do you find? What do they have inside? There is nothing inside.
Posted by amol at July 31, 2002 02:22 PM