It was an awesome display of German efficiency. I have no idea how long they took to roll out the red carpet for Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at the Berlin-Tegel Airport, but I am eyewitness to the reverse process. He had barely stepped off the hallowed wool when, out of some mysterious space in the air, three spirits materialized. Incidentally or coincidentally, they were clad in brilliant red sweaters and jogging trousers. They took position at the top of the carpet. An order crackled in the thin rain, like a gunshot at the start of a race. On the further edge a woman sprinted, tearing the wide tape that has secured the red carpet to the black tarmac. The other two, man and a woman, caught the carpet on the roll as it were, as it was being released from the tape, and whirled it up at running pace till it vanished into a thick circle.
VIPs come and go. The tarmac stays black for ever.
Berlin begins at the gate of the airport. There is no pause for a highway. You hit a traffic jam on the first turn. Perhaps Berliners felt safer within walking distance of their lifeline to the west when the Cold War froze their lives. This was the frontier city of this war, isolated and disputed in the middle of East Germany. It was the prize that the Soviet Union and the West nearly blew up the world for. There was nothing left to blow up in Berlin itself, because American and British bombers had already done that in the last year of the Second World War. Some stark symbols have been preserved from a century of blood-river politics. In front of our hotel, at the top of Kudamstrasse, the street that has been host to both cabaret and spies, stands a cathedral without a spire, its jagged top cutting the air, its sculptured walls gaping with bombed craters. This is what the cathedral looked like when Berlin fell to the Allies in 1945, and this is what they have left it as: a memory of pain sublimated by faith. This cathedral without a cause has only one thing that works, golden clocks that tell the time, accurately and inexorably.
A thin wall sounds like an oxymoron. The Berlin Wall was the first modern wall. It was thin and it was low. The age of battering rams and sieges was over. The wall was a paradox. It was not designed to keep the invader out. It was erected to imprison its own citizens, to prevent their escape to a better life.
To partition a country is a tragedy. To divide a city is obscene. The Communists needed thin concrete, cutting wire, searching lights and cocked guns to protect their paradise. They separated neighbors with fear. Berlin held its breath and waited thirty years before an edifice cracked in Russia and emotions were released with volcanic fury in Germany. Berliners brought the wall down, slab by joyous slab. Like the cathedral, they have left parts of it standing to nourish memory with architecture that has become the art of shards.
If a wall can ever be said to have a heart, then Checkpoint Charlie was the heart of the Berlin Wall. This was the very American name of the gate in the US sector through which official — and, more deliciously, unofficial — traffic passed. Desolate sandbags and a fluttering Stars and Stripes mark the crossroads of superpower games played with spies, economists, armies and nuclear missiles. Spies, fortunately, generated far more literature than the rest put together. Berlin was the theater of all the great spy stories.
Windblown scraps of paper still litter the approach to Checkpoint Charlie. You walk across what was once deathly no-man’s land toward occasional remnants of the wall. An ornate, heavy and archaic building looms up. This used to be Goebbels’ office. In front, adjacent to a park, is a narrow quarry of concrete boxes some six feet below ground level. This is one of the concentration camps in which the fascist Nazis sent Jews, gypsies and other untouchables to slave or die. The gas pipes that administered the final solution have also been preserved. Lest we forget.
It is a bleak square mile, appropriately sparse, stark and unrelieved by either the green of the earth or the sunshine in the sky. Even the museum at Checkpoint Charlie is somber, despite being full of victory tags collected by the winning side in the Cold War. The only smile on the windowscape of the museum is toothless and familiar. A picture of Mahatma Gandhi dominates the entrance.
The first bit of graffiti that I saw as we drove out of the airport into the traffic denounced war. Chancellor Schroeder won re-election last year because he did precisely that.
To recreate the past is stupid, said a bureaucrat who was building the future. Devastated by the warm war and distorted by the cold one, Berlin became an invitation to an idea when it was restored as the capital of reunified Germany. The new Germany sought to soften its image of a harsh, war-hungry past through a marvelous resurrection of nature. Berlin, like other German cities, is alive with greenery, trees and parks and occasionally even dense foliage. A river like Isar in Munich, actually just an adult canal, sometimes seems to be speeding through a jungle. There is public art everywhere, on streets and open spaces, impressively comforting. The new government buildings in Berlin are light, sunny and minimalist, in deliberate contrast to the Gothic, columned, high and dense structures of an aggressive past. The future is going to be fashioned out of a minimalist present. The past is over. One of Hitler’s offices, I am informed by a friend who is an exile from Dhaka, has now become an Indian restaurant owned by a Bangladeshi. If Hitler had been accorded a grave, he would be churning in it.
Munich, capital of Bavaria in the south of Germany, was the political capital of the Nazi movement. It was in Bavaria that Hitler first tried to seize power, in 1923, but was stopped. Hitler’s first mass demonstrations took place here, in a city whose name means monk’s place. Munich was given its first trading and currency rights by Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, who took the most powerful Crusader army ever assembled toward Jerusalem. He might have changed that wayward course of history if he had not drowned in a stream on his way to Damascus. Hitler named his invasion of the Soviet Union, which changed the course of his history, Operation Barbarossa. Would that Hitler had drowned on the way.
We reached the Free State of Bavaria (which lost its independence only in 1933) on May 29, a regional holiday. This province on the border of Italy is Catholic country and takes religion seriously. The ruling party is known as the Christian Social Union and wins office with ease. Truth to tell, the whole of Germany takes religion more seriously than the rest of Europe. Every citizen has to indicate on his tax form whether he is a believer or not. Every Christian believer has to pay a church tax‚ of two and a half percent over and above the 40 percent tax payable by high income groups. This seems a Christian variation of zakah, by which two and a half percent of your wealth must be donated to charity every year. The church tax pays the salaries of priests and renovates church buildings of both Catholic and Protestant alike. In return, the church provides society not only with food for divine thought, but also crèches for babies. This is an important service in a society where all women work and state schools care for the child after class one.
Martin Luther was a German, but after more than half a millennium the Protestant zeal seems to have diminished. There is a growing desire to return to a single, perhaps non-denominational, church. The Catholics have however neither forgotten nor forgiven. The Vatican recently reminded its followers that they could not take communion from any priest except that of the Catholic Church.
Unnecessary Fact of the Week: The much-married Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder does not dye his hair. Why is this news? Because he almost lost the election after a magazine alleged that he secretly dyed his hair. Schroeder sued and the controversy died a natural death. I can confirm that when we saw the chancellor for about half an hour in Berlin, the gray had begun to show.
Arab News Opinion 1 June 2003
