A City of Ghosts
Whispering to be remembered...
My room for the conference at the Wissenschafts Kolleg in Berlin looked out on a back yard dominated by a stupendous copper beech, a mass of purplish, coppery foliage whose branches drooped to form a dark, hooded space underneath. The Kolleg lay in the leafy Gruenewald section of Berlin in what had once been the mansion of a wealthy Jewish merchant, in a neighborhood of large, stately houses and quiet, tree-lined streets. Soft spring air wafted through my open window, an occasional crane fly made the trip from the pond below and the fluffy feather tick invited a nap. It was a spring as only the north temperate zone can produce--- soft, caressing, and full of sleepy promise.
Today's Berlin is a dynamic world city, vigorous, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, all business and snappy culture, but to me Berlin will always be a city with a past it cannot shake, a city that has sinned and suffered for its sins. There remains hardly a hint of the smoking rubble pile that Berlin was in 1945 and the thousands upon thousands of civilians that died in the bombings and the final Soviet push. Only a bombed-out church (Der Hohle Zahn, "the hollow tooth") is left as a reminder of the costs of war. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bullet-pocked walls of public buildings in East Berlin were repaired, puttying over the last evidence of those terrible times. Even the vast empty no-man's land of the Potsdamer Platz, a legacy of the cold war, has sprouted the sleek buildings of Sony and Daimler-Benz.
It took me a day or two to figure out that the wealthy suburb in which my conference was hosted had once been largely Jewish, and another day to come across a monument at the nearby bus stop--- a wall with hollows and gaps in the shape of people, a memorial to people who had vanished (Die Verschwundenen).
A day later, and only a few blocks away, I came across, Gleis 17 (Track 17), a former track of the Reichsbahn Berlin-Gruenewald, now abandoned with only a half-kilometer of track remaining, young trees sprouting alongside and between the ties, the former station buildings in a state of abandoned dilapidation. From here, 55,000 of Berlin's 66,000 Jews, including those from the nearby Gruenewald suburb, were packed into rail cars and shipped east to their fates in the ghettos and camps. An iron plate for each month between 1941 and 1945 recorded the number deported and their destination, deportations that continued to within a month or two before Germany's total collapse and the war's end, testimony to the depths of Nazi obsession.
The trees allowed to grow amidst this memorial suggested the track will never be used again. From iron plate to iron plate, month to month I wandered this grim sad history. On the other side of the station, Gleis 5 and 6 are still in use, with S7-Bahn trains every 10 minutes. Here on Gleis 17, it is silent, and there are no other visitors to distract.
Berlin is full of hundreds of small memorials to these terrible times and their victims--- an inscribed brass plate in the sidewalk here, a marble memorial there, a plaque on a building, a metal sign at a bus stop, the ruins of a bombed-out church. These are not massive tourist destinations, no grand memorials to the millions, to the cold violence and injustice. But they are everywhere, and in the aggregate, for those who notice, those who remember or can be reminded, Berlin becomes a city of ghosts, ghosts that whisper to be remembered.
Beautifully evocative, Walter. Thank you for writing about what is so familiar to me.
I want to thank you again for these writings you publish. They are always well-crafted and interesting.