Apparently, that is what John F. Kennedy's famous phrase--Ich bin ein Berliner-- said after the Berlin Wall went up, really means in German, (A "Berliner" according to my friend Toby, who lives here and who I am happily visiting, is actually a type of jelly donut, filled with plum jelly). A nice little piece of knowledge to carry around.
Berlin is an amazing city. It was amazing when I was here in 1983 (23 years ago!) and is amazing now that the wall is down. Being with Toby is especially incredible. She has a HUGE apartment for the equivalent of under $1000 a month, in a trendy Turkish neighborhood, and has such a rich life here. She is especially cognizent of Jewish history in Berlin and is part of a very tightly knit Jewish community here--apparently, Berlin has the fastest growing population of Jews in Europe. Yesterday, we went to Friday night services at a synagogue from 1860--one that was partially destroyed on Krystallnacht, then almost completely destroyed during the war. It was kind of amazing to be there. Berlin is really interesting--there are monuments/memorials to Holocaust victims all over the city, from the ominous looking grey cement blocks in the center of the city to tiny little brass plates that you find at your feet on various places on the sidewalk. Each little brass plate is inscribed with the name of the person who lived there and the date they were deported and what happened to them--murdered in Auschwitz, etc. It's very poignant to be walking along, then suddenly see the names of a family--it makes you aware of the ghosts of Berlin, and there are many. Toby took me to a building that was a brush factory during the war--the man who owned the factory employed blind or deaf Jews, and managed to protect them for most of the war by bribing the gestapo; he also hid a family in one of the rooms. It was a fascinating story and one I'd never heard, and there are, of course, stories like that all over the city. Today, we also went to a lovely neighborhood near the Brucke museum, a small museum of German expressionist art, and there was an incredible holocaust memorial at the train station there. Apparently, in this leafy Berlin suburban-type neighborhood, this was one of the train stations where Jews were gathered for deportation. So, what they did to memorialize this is they left the track that the train left from empty and unused (track seventeen) and all along the platform, they have brass plates with each date during the year of the number of Jews deported, where they were from, where they went to. So you see that on November 2, 1944, they deported 38 Jews from Berlin to Auschwitz; on January 2, they deported 350. And right across the way, are these very well to do houses, a bucolic, leafy suburb.
Yet, despite these horrors all around, Berlin really is an amazing city, what I imagine NYC once was. It is extremely inexpensive here (MUCH more inexpensive than either NYC or Rome) so it attracts many artists and has an incredible art scene; there are galleries everywhere, open day and night, with very cool photography and other work. Not to mention theater, film festivals, great shops, and interesting, multicultural people. There is an excitement and liveliness to the city that Rome lacks--Rome is old, beautiful, and has a rich, cultural and artistic history. But there isn't a huge amount of innovation or ambition or edginess happening in Rome now. Berlin is the opposite. The city was bombed, most of what is here is new, and everyone wants to atone from the past rather than revel in it. So, it's great to be able to have the two different city experiences. I feel very lucky.
Tomorrow, I am going to steep myself in more museums--a small Bauhaus museum and then some of the major ones.
It is also interesting to see the (few) remaining differences between east and west Berlin--in the east, there are still some buildings that are pock-marked with bullet holes (see above); occasionally, you still see the little cars that were driven in East Berlin and were extremely flimsy and tiny. Also, some of the architecture in east berlin is distinctive--many buildings are basically cubes that were just stacked one upon the other. When the wall came down, everyone wanted to move out of the cubes as soon as possible, but now that the neighborhoods in the east have gotten so trendy, everyone wants to move back to them. It's all a cycle.
Speaking of cycles, it is time for me to end the cycle of this day and get some sleep, so I can drink in more of Berlin's delights tomorrow.
Paula
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