Das ist Berlin

The first few days of my trip were spent in Berlin. Berlin is a great city; it is very spread out, not too congested. Much to my liking there are lots of parks and green spaces throughout the city. This is possible because Berlin only really became a city 200 years ago with the rise of Prussian power in the Holy Roman Empire. After the fall of the Hapsburgs as Emperors of Germany, Germany reorganized itself under Prussian princes, creating the German Empire under Wilhelm I. It’s a quite interesting story which I didn't know much about. Anyway, Berlin is really a conglomerate of two dozen towns that where pieced together to form a city. Even today there are twenty or so town halls (or Rathauses) in Berlin. The effect is a quaint feeling of being in a very large town, rather than a city. A town with one of the best public transport systems I have seen! The various neighborhoods all have there own town hall, but also shops, churches and character. In the midst of these town centers a capital city was built, which like Washington DC, is obviously a city that was created to be a political capital, thus it is dominated by many government buildings and palaces.

Sadly, not happy with a good thing, Berlin seems quite pretentious, wanting badly to be what it is not: a cultural center of Europe akin to Vienna, Paris or Rome. Since the fall of the wall the German Republic and the city of Berlin have spent billions to make Berlin a metropolis. In fact, I understand that the city is almost bankrupt because of government efforts to build up the city. Sadly this is a bad time in history to build a cultural capital, if that is possible at all. It seems to me that culture is a living thing and grows where the hearts of people provide rich soil. Sadly our day and age is a time of banal low culture, and so Berlins attempt to make itself what it is not results in many post-modern glass and steel cathedrals of materialism, as well as many museums, but not much else. One sad note is the large number of Churches that have been converted into art galleries and concert halls. Of course the Prussian rulers of Berlin were protestant and so according to the grotesque dictum cius regnum eius religio many ancient Catholic Churches today stand in protestant hands.

One thing that Berlin has a lot of is museums. History being a longtime interest of mine, I visited the key historical sites and the Museum of German History, while in Berlin. I was saddened though by what I perceived to be a state of denial about the reality of the Second World War. This view was confirmed by my cousin, who lives in Berlin and is a professor of History. Much of the material I read at the various exhibits about the rise of Nazism seems an apologia pro vitae nostrae. I was quite concerned that the focus of every exhibit, without exception, seemed to be on how Germans were victims of the Nazis. This of course is certainly true, once in power the average German had to live in a climate of ever increasing oppression, constant war, food shortages, horrible bombings, and finally urban warfare and occupation. However, the fact of the matter is that Germany was a democracy before 1930, and the Nazis came to power through popular support and a general acceptance of ideological warfare--that in truth covered the entire political spectrum. Before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, communists and Socialists on the far left, contended with Nazis in the center and Conservatives on the Right, and these power struggles were often violent. Germans tolerated this climate, and were willing to do anything to relieve there economic suffering. This is a reality that profoundly interests me and should interest the free world, least we be doomed to repeat this lesson of history. Yet in Berlin, the center of Hitler’s Germany the pain of the cold war and the Berlin wall, the pain of the occupation, any years of air raids, the pain of the destruction of Berlin, seems to overshadow the reality of the Nazism that took root there. Halters bunker, sits in ruins, with the German's unwilling to open it to the public, the ruins of the Gestapo HQ, form an outdoor historical exhibit called the Topography of Terror, but a permanent museum on this location, as well as the extant exhibit itself, are highly controversial. In the newly restore Reichstag one plaque proudly proclaims: Hitler never set foot in the Reichstag as chancellor, and another notes that the farce parliaments of the Nazi government never ruled from the Reichstag. While the Reichstag may have been burned by arsonists before Nazi ascendancy the fact of the matter is that the very act of arson that preserved the Reichstag’s "purity" from Nazi governments is highly symbolic of the political climate that Germans allowed to exist before the Nazi takeover. In a democracy, or democratic republic, it is easy to fall into an us versus them mindset, but if this happens we are just steps away from violence. Aristotle noted that Democracy was the least desirable form of government because it most quickly and covertly descends into mob rule. At the same time he concedes that most often its perversion is the mildest form of perverse government. This is born out by the fact that although Germans democratically turned to Nazism, its worst offenses occurred when all pretense of Democracy was cast aside. Democracy, in one of its several forms, for better or for worse is the predominant form of government in the Western world at the moment, and so it is very important to note how easily democracy changed to mob rule, which transformed into dictatorship. As free citizens of democratic states we are not just responsible for our own candidate, but for the level of divisiveness we tolerate. As citizens we are responsible for the common good and not just for our own agenda--and responsible for the defense of the rights of others possibly even before the assertion of our own rights. On this account, I think the American candidate for the presidency; Sen. Barrack Obama has it right. The level of divisiveness if Washington, and around the world, must change. Berlin seems an ideal place for a reflection on these themes, sadly honest reflection seems quite lacking.