uns Frohlinn und Laune taken away our cheer
noch liess and good spirits
Hier sagt alles This says it all
Dies ‘Paradies’ This ‘Paradise’]
*
Perpetrators. Victims. Bystanders. These three words that attempt to categorise responsibility.
In Christian’s story some of the positions seem clear. His father was a perpetrator, clearly proud of killing for his country. Anna’s family were victims. But after that, distinctions are harder. Where can Christian and his sisters be placed? He was a bystander, certainly, but so young that all three were also surely victims. His mother, a fascist all her life, anti-Semitic, but she never killed anyone. But what would it mean to call her a ‘bystander’? How can we calculate the impact of the tens of millions of ordinary Germans who never did more than put a cross beside Hitler’s name at the ballot box? The majority who never lifted a gun in their lives? The ones who bought the newspapers, baked the bread, worked in the factories? Yet through their approval (whether expressed or not), through the billions upon billions of words and small actions carried out (or, equally important, small actions not done) by this majority, genocide became possible in this most civilised of European countries.
*
At the end of the evening we walk round the corner, find a hotel on Kastanienalle, Hannah telling us of her fury about how immigrants are being treated in Germany now, how the government have now said that it’s not enough to be born here to get German citizenship. She and some friends are considering setting up an informal agency to do marriages of convenience for supposedly ‘illegal’ immigrants. We end up in the Prater Garten, and I get a sense that the old Berlin is still alive. It’s not been entirely erased by the thrusting modernity of Potsdamer Platz and skyscrapers of glass. Here it’s all dark wood, bustling tables, a small red stage at one end with a piano. I go to the bar to ask if they are still serving food. A wonderful mixture of groups of old women drinking on one side, and shaven-headed students on the other, men with dogs sitting by the bar, lesbian lovers canoodling in a corner. And overseeing everything, an extremely camp waiter in his fifties who could have stepped straight out of an Isherwood story, directing the mayhem with aplomb and raised eyebrows.
As I return to our table Hannah is disagreeing passionately with something J. has just said about his reasons for still not having a mobile phone: ‘No! Come on, that’s just lazy bullshit! Just be honest, you like control!’ I love this Berlin directness! Or maybe it’s more Hannah than Berlin. A couple of hours with her and you feel totally reinvigorated. Later, when J. and I are back in the hotel, we try to put our finger on what it is about her. A kind of fierce curiosity about the world that most people lose as they get older. And a childlike, but quite unselfconscious, way of asking questions or giving her opinion. Of course, that kind of intensity can’t be easy to live with. So the turbulence of her relationships is hardly surprising. But this leaves her the energy to engage with art and activism and her academies and a thousand other things.
5. Walking from Morning till Night
29 December 2003, Berlin
As we walk south from our hotel, we’re reflecting on the remarkable, peaceful transition that Germany has made since Reunification, and how challenging it is when you’ve lived through years like we have to fully understand their historical significance. J. reminds me of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s famous reflection on the political genius of Mikhail Gorbachev in peacefully dismantling a totalitarian regime: ‘Any cretin can throw a bomb.8 It is 1,000 times more difficult to defuse one.’
Into Oranienburger Strasse, with J. telling me about the scandals that only emerged later of the corporations that were involved directly in the negotiations about Reunification in 1991. Yes, but we agree it’s still quite an achievement to have carried out that transition with no bloodshed. Dominating Oranienburger Strasse is the restored golden dome of the synagogue. We learn from Gilbert that this was the centre of Jewish life in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s. There were rabbinical colleges in the neighbouring streets where Kafka and Leo Baeck (who later contributed so much to the Wiener Library) studied, there were Jewish hospitals, schools and cafés, Einstein gave a violin concert here. I think of my friend Peter; his grandparents would have known this place intimately as they were pillars of this vibrant community and owned many of the cinemas in the city, and when they became successful moved out to a villa in (of all places!) Wannsee. They would come here, to Café Oren, to meet friends, to see and be seen. We also discover that, with the cruellest timing, just six days before Hitler came to power, on 24 January 1933 the Berlin Jewish Museum was opened in the building next to the synagogue.
Over the river, past an island of museums. Friedrichstrasse. Memories of the mysterious U-Bahn that absorbed my imagination and senses when I was last here in 1984. It took you through this part of East Berlin without stopping. Three or four ghost stations hardly lit at all, including Friedrichstrasse, where – it seems impossible now but I saw them with my own eyes – East German guards were standing, watching over this subterranean nothingness as our train looped from the West back to the West. Perhaps once every few years they actually had something to do … Now at Pariser Platz, no need to ask which building is the US Embassy. Vast concrete blocks and dozens of armed soldiers outside to thwart suicide bombers. The paradox of the ‘superpower’ – the intense sense of vulnerability created by intolerance. It cannot feel pleasant to work here. Just along from the embassy is the Academy of Arts building, where Albert Speer was based between 1937 and 1942 in his role as Hitler’s architect (Generalbauinspektor fur die Reichshauptstadt), designing megalomaniacal schemes for the future capital of the Reich.
We turn into Wilhelmstrasse, passing the modern British Embassy on our right. Wilhelmstrasse is a dullish, mainly residential street – lots of 1970s and 80s cheaply built blocks of flats. It’s hard to imagine that sixty years ago this street was the hub of totalitarianism, from where dozens of ministries oversaw the occupation of most of Europe. Very few of the old buildings survive.
This was the Foreign Ministry in the 1930s and 40s. It would have hummed with communications between Ribbentrop and Molotov about the non-aggression pact. But it’s also where, in early December 1941, Assistant State Secretary Luther received his first invitation to a meeting to discuss ‘eine Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage in Europa’ (‘a total solution of the Jewish question in Europe’), originally to have taken place at the International Criminal Police Commission, Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, on 9 December 1941. Due to the ‘exceptional importance’ of the meeting, as Heydrich put it, the invitation was delivered personally by courier, who would not have had far to travel – a matter of only 500 yards or so up Wilhelmstrasse from Heydrich’s head office of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD (Security Service) based in the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The original meeting had to be cancelled at the last minute because of ‘events that were suddenly announced’ (the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the US’s entry into the war), but on 8 January 1942 Heydrich wrote to Luther and the other invitees again to reschedule the meeting that has gone into history as the Wannsee Conference. Only known about because copy number sixteen of the minutes was originally sent to this building in Wilhelmstrasse to the civil servant Martin Luther.