You keep stumbling upon Germany’s convoluted past in odd, sometimes deeply disturbing, ways in the streets of Berlin. It confronts you everywhere and often, quite inadvertently, you will step on it. An area of the city’s former eastern half that now houses fashionable art galleries is a fenced-in park. On the pavement stands a doom-laden bronze sculpture of women and children. Passersby leave small stones and flowers at its base. This was once Berlin’s largest Jewish cemetery and a Jewish old people’s home. Under the Nazis it was turned into a detention centre, with 55,000 people awaiting deportation to concentration camps; in 1943, they destroyed the graves, including the grave of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, using the headstones to build trenches.
Such memorials dog your footsteps throughout the city. Inserted here and there in the cobbled streets are small brass plaques, each commemorating the name, birth date and tragic end of Nazi victims. They are called Stolpersteine, meaning stumbling blocks. There are 9,000 of them and for a contribution of ¤120 you can add another.
Elsewhere in the buzzing metropolis are other reminders of the city’s stiflingly repressive, if less brutal, past. Tour guides point out the severe Stalinist facades extravagantly lined with Meissen tiles where the Communist apparatchiks of the erstwhile German Democratic Republic lived in relative style, or the headquarters of its dreaded secret police, Stasi, that employed 91,000 with an additional 180,000 informers — numbers far greater than the 7,000-strong Nazi Gestapo. Most visited of all is the remaining section of the Berlin Wall, about 1.8 km long, now emblazoned by murals and christened the “East Side Gallery”; the rest was hacked away by the city’s jubilant population in the tumultuous days following November 9, 1989 when restrictions on the movements of East Berliners were over. People hammered down the hated “anti-fascist protection barrier”, carried it off, or sold it, as souvenirs.
I was last in Berlin in 1990 shortly after the Wall came down when the contrast between the gloom and deprivation of the East and the prosperity and openness of the West was painfully apparent. It was that period in German history known as Die Wende (“the turn”). Not only have the borderlines vanished today but the unified Capital bears the stamp of robust homogeneity; so much so that when the young filmmaker Florian von Donnersmarck made his Oscar-winning film Lives of the Others a couple of years ago, about moral corruption under Stasi snoops, he was hard put to recreate the exact locations in East Berlin.
Lingering resentments between easterners and westerners (once teasingly called Ossis and Wessis) in this multicultural metropolis of 3.5 million are a thing of the past. Dark and damaging turns of history are neither forgotten nor buried here; rather they are carefully restored, even memorialised, as investment and innovation transform Berlin into the most happening Capital of Europe. Down-at-heel neighbourhoods of East Berlin such as Mitte and Friedrichshain are flourishing centres of avant garde art and counterculture; there are so many new museums, galleries and performance spaces competing for attention that the city has recaptured its place among the cultural strongholds of the world.
In the space of a few days, I visited an old water-pumping station by the river converted into a dance-and-music theatre by the choreographer Sacha Waltz; a bomb shelter from World War II that houses a private collection of contemporary art; and attended a beguiling production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in modern dress in Max Reinhardt’s 19th century theatre that interpreted Shakespeare in Freud’s dream analysis.
A new rule of unified Germany is that 5 per cent of the budget of every public project must be reserved for art. The new secret-service building coming up in Berlin has an art budget of ¤2.5 million; and the new Brandenburg airport reserves ¤3 million. Perhaps Capitals like New Delhi, aspiring to world-class status, could take a tip.