Mitteleuropa: Berlin

I am always revolving plans and ideas of places I’d like to go, spinning half a dozen plates at any given time, because it’s fun to check out guidebooks and digitally stick pins on google maps, and because I need to convince myself I actually will go everywhere – even though increasingly I feel myself running out of time.

This past year I had been contemplating a return to Japan, but the prolonged closure of the country led me to change plans at nearly the last minute, and pivot to a region I that had long fascinated me, and yet which I knew comparatively little about: central Europe, or Mitteleuropa.

Now, the idea of there being a central Europe is a little bit contested, since traditionally everyone breaks Europe into west and east, but I prefer to think of it as having a central core around the old Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg domains, and, of course, Poland.

I had been fascinated by this area because of the images I saw from it, pictures of castles, of green firs, a dark and cold climate like my home, and cities that were entirely grey. I love all medieval history, but my studies skewed to the west, to France and Britain, and even south to Italy. I knew very little of the eastern half of Charlemagne’s empire and had no real sense of how the Hapsburg concatenation had ever agglomerated in the first place. But I was fascinated with Germany, with the old Hanseatic cities, and with the dark primeval forest in which my ancestors once worshipped stocks and stones. And it was also the site of the Iron Curtain, and in my mind an image of a grey, rain-clean Berlin in the 80s had become associated with a strange nostalgia I had for the Cold War, for the music of the time. This of course is very silly, especially since I have no experience of this time or place, but it’s been in my mind with nostalgia since I was a child looking at old pictures in encyclopedias.

So, with all of that strange and unreal baggage, I boarded a flight to Berlin.

On takeoff, I looked down on Seattle and could barely see the duskling city; it lay trapped beneath what looked like a black mesh, but it was really a veil of smoke, the malingering spume of summer. I was glad to be out of that black air.

After transiting through Charles De Gaulle, an airport that did its best to play up every French stereotype, stuffed with chocolateries and perfumeries, and yet still stuffed with Starbucks (they did their best to make them seem extra-fancy), I arrived in Berlin. Immediately I became stressed about the trains, compulsively checking to make sure I had the right ticket, in case I got caught by a conductor. In this mood, weighed down by a lopsided pack and self-conscious that my (perfectly-good) mask was not quite the exact standard for German transit (despite the fact that I saw many Germans simply disregarding the injunction to wear masks altogether), I slid into Berlin on an elevated S-bahn line just as the sun was going down.

In the morning I exited my hostel and found myself in an excellent example of the typical street in every city I visited on my trip. All of central Europe feels like this; flush mid-height apartments in either this style, or an even blockier communist style if the site had been sufficiently bombed, with ubiquitous graffiti at street level. I was immediately charmed by all the folks cycling to work, the children going to school – in short, the American’s European fantasy of the walkable, person-oriented city.

However, I shortly encountered a problem that would plague me for the rest of the trip: I became anxious about entering restaurants, self-conscious about my lack of German. Over the course of the trip this would push me to avoid many restaurants, to prefer coffeeshops where I felt more in control because I knew exactly what to get, or even fast food places. This sort of self-consciousness at not speaking the language, the fear of being judged as annoyingly out of place, has only happened to me on this trip and when I was in Spain and Portugal. The rest of my travels have either been in English-speaking countries, or in Asia, where I am obviously a foreigner and there’s no sense I will out myself as one by opening my mouth. I actually felt more comfortable and at home in rural Japan than in a European capital. At the same time as I felt this social anxiety, I felt anxiety that I was wasting my opportunity to try good German food, and betraying all the planning and research I had done for my trip. This is something that I struggle with – I make plans, and then when the moment to execute them comes, I don’t feel like doing it, for a myriad range of reasons, which then in turn makes planning feel futile, and creates a feedback loop of discouragement and self-loathing. And all of this just over where to eat!

That first morning I did find a nice bakery though, which was very good indeed.

I will say this – I’m anxious now, writing this, because I can feel that my memory has warped in exactly the way I knew it would. When I planned the trip, I was full of excited anticipation, and romanticized Europe; while on my trip, I was frequently stressed, tired, frustrated and critical of the places I traveled, and desiring to be home; and now that I am home, I romanticize it again and remember all the good things. I knew this would happen while on my trip, and it worried me at the time, that my view of travel is never aligned with my experience. What is gained by actually going somewhere if your memory of it aligns more with the fantasy than how you felt at the time, and how do I enjoy my hobby of planning more trips if I know that actually I experience them more negatively while actually traveling?                                        

One thing that hovered over the entire trip was the awareness that despite Europe’s advanced level of development and centrality in the western imagination as a hub of civilization, violence is always proximate. You could see it in the bullet holes on buildings left from the fall of Berlin at the end of the War, in the many physical reminders of the decades of Soviet repression and brutality, and in the constant awareness of the current war in Ukraine – not very far away. In America it’s difficult to reconcile the idea of a war that impacts civilians with our conception of first-world middle-class life, because for the past century and a half those wars have all happened overseas, and even when these wars happened on American soil they were tempered by the shared culture of the combatants – we fought ourselves, we fought the British and Canadians, and we fought (mostly) between the ages of razing cities.

I had my own personal struggle as well. Shortly after arriving, I decided to declare war on Europe over a single, all-important issue: the serving size of coffee. Everywhere I went, I found it nearly impossible to get a decent-sized latte. Even a puny twelve ounces were hard to come by unless I gave in and went to a Starbucks, which I was loath to do. The coffee in Europe is great, but we must have more of it, and I don’t mean watered-down Americanos – I mean a simple increase in quantity. At home I drink a minimum of two litres of coffee with cream per day, and that’s a baseline. I think it’s time for a new crusade, it’s time for America to reinvade Europe and upgrade their culture on coffee sizes to something approaching what might satisfy a human.

The vestiges of communism were everywhere in East Berlin, and surprisingly quite prominent. They seem to have been embraced as part of a shared history, integrating the disparate experiences of the two Germanys – or at least that’s what this foreign tourist made up in his head without doing any research. Still, I was genuinely surprised to find Marx-Engels-Forum still prominently featuring its namesakes.

After visited the medieval quarter and a superb statue of lionized violence, St. George crushing the dragon, I visited the Pergamon Museum, a building housing entire structures taken piece by piece from the near East and brought to Germany, presumably by some of the same guys Indiana Jones used to fight. (Ok, that may be a bit uncharitable – in some cases).

Here’s a good reminder that wars have always been with us. And I also found a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story in which a man of selfish violence seeks meaning in the wilderness of his life.

Speaking of the enduring power of words, I visited Bebelplatz, the square in front of the university, in which the Nazis held their infamous book burnings, philistine bacchanals born of the fear of the truth. Processing down the central street of Berlin, Unter den Linden, I was encouraged that things can be restored, and new growth can spring up: Hitler had cut all of the trees to replace them with dead stone eagles, yet here they are again in all their glory.

Next to the famous Brandenburg Gate is the vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, permanently impressed onto the center of Berlin.

Its sea of coffin-like blocks cedes an entire city block to the dead, and it draws you in, swallowing you. But now the memorial is full of children running and laughing, or silly teens on their phones, as tourists wander through it. Across the street in the Tiergarten is another memorial, much smaller and less prominent, to the many gay people murdered by the Nazis. A single block, cousin to those in the larger memorial, contains a tiny portal, within which a film of gay couples kissing plays constantly.

And, if you proceed through the Tiergarten, a vast and native expanse of green, you come to third, more shockingly incongruous memorial: the memorial to the Soviet troops who finally broke the Nazi regime at the fall of Berlin. Of course it makes sense they would have a memorial, not only because the Soviets occupied the city and built one, but because of their great achievement in defeating Hitler. At the same time, it’s strange to see a prominent and well-maintained memorial to an invading army who vengefully raped their way through Berlin. Even with the context of all the evil they were responding to, it still feels strange.

Nearby stands the center of German government, somehow still here after all the fire and blood that has washed over it: the Reichstag.

It stands amidst a beautiful stretch of park and Spree waterfront, surrounded by pristine modern government buildings erected in the postwar era of clean European architecture I have loved since I was a child.

Walking home, I found other shadows of the past: the New Synagogue of Berlin, for instance, and bullet holes outside a church whose leadership had been divided on the question of acquiescence to the Nazis, and which would later play host to Martin Luther King Jr. speaking for justice while in Communist East Berlin.

Over the four days I spent in Berlin, I visited a number of wonderful museums, and saw a vast amount of art and artifacts. If you view enough medieval art, you quickly become familiar with its memetic quality, as the same religious subjects and scenes are depicted again and again and again. This is one of the many many depictions of the deposition of Christ’s body I saw:

There were interesting figures like this one:

Strange relics like this Byzantine gambling machine:

And then there was, uh… this:

I have nothing illuminating to say about this one, sorry.

Above all, I spent a huge amount of time walking all over Berlin, ogling the architecture, which included a water tower that had somehow became an apartment building, and the many looming hulks of commie blocks.

And of course, here and there, I ran into bits of the wall, shadows of the line that once had cut lives in two.

This last image of the wall was taken from the boundary of a plot of land which now houses a museum, but which once contained a building that served as the shared headquarters of both the Gestapo and the SS. Inside, the exhibits detail the full, excruciating history of the Nazis arc in power, and constantly reiterate the message that their crimes would have been impossible, but for the acquiescence, on a variety of levels, of the German public. Germany had been, albeit briefly, a liberal democracy. These things can and do happen, and if you are not careful, you will be without excuse when they do.

I also visited a museum to the various German resistance movements, which is housed in the naval office building where the famous conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was concocted. Here, in the courtyard, the principal conspirators were shot.

That same day, I toured the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who kept files on every single person in the DDR. In their attempts to intimidate those they viewed as dissidents, they emulated the Georg Cukor movie Gaslight, which gave its name to the term gaslighting – in the case of one activist, the Stasi would enter her apartment while she was away and rearrange various household objects.

Finally, I ended my time in Berlin with a sunset walk along the Spree, along a section of the wall which has been reclaimed as a colorful canvas for the freed city. After all that has happened to Berlin, life continues and grows in beauty.