Secrets of Berlin

When I first came to Berlin, I was expecting a city full of guilty secrets. The one time capital of the Third Reich, the guilt of the holocaust and the butchery of Hitler’s regime must weigh heavily on Berlin. In addition, the collapse of the Soviet Regime with its omniscient network of Stasi spies feels alarmingly recent. It cannot be banished into the distant past as other shady aspects of Berlin’s history may be since most of the people of working age in Berlin today will remember the regime. They lived for a large portion of their lives under its shadow, and the legacy of these years remains apparent today. How could a city recover from such a dreadful past without trying, albeit subconsciously, to banish all memory of them? Before I came here I kept thinking of the Fawlty Towers sketch with the punch line ‘Don’t mention the war’, (which was, in fact, all anyone said to me when I told them I was moving to Germany.)

When I reached Berlin, it slowly dawned on me that what had happened was the exact opposite of what I’d expected. Rather than trying to suppress memories of the past, Berliners had filled their city full of reminders of the Second World War and the Hitler regime, the Holocaust and the allied occupation of Germany. Right in the centre of Berlin, the newly opened Holocaust Memorial is a vast disorienting forest of concrete pillars. They appear from the surface to be all approximately the same height, but in reality the ground at the base of each tower rises or dips in a disconcertingly unpredictable manner. Before you are really aware of it, the memorial swallows you up and you are gaping at the tiny window of sky at the top of tree sized pillars. In a basement underneath this extraordinary monument is a museum to the holocaust. As if this vast memorial is not enough, dozens of museums dedicated to every aspect of the war and the Third Reich have sprung up all over Berlin, documenting in precise and horrifying detail the crimes of those years. There is no suggestion of hiding the horrors or relegating them to low priority in history museums around Berlin: Berliners face their history squarely and with an almost desperate sense that the horror must be documented to prevent any reprisal of such things. The Jewish Museum, with its eerie artwork dedicated to the holocaust victims and its ‘garden of exile’ dedicated to the Jews exiled from Berlin is billed as one of the main tourist attractions in Berlin: Berliners want their sense of shame about their past to be made known to visitors from all over the world. Even the new Reichstag dome was designed transparent to indicate the transparency of the proceedings inside: a constant reminder of the appalling secret decisions made inside the original building, reinforced by the exhibition inside the dome of photographs of the Third Reich inside the Reichstag.

Museums and memorials to the Berlin wall have similar attitude: the wall must never be forgotten. In addition to the huge museum at Checkpoint Charlie on the border between West and East, stretches of wall around the city act as memorials to those who died crossing them, galleries to express the hope for peace and unity in the future, and starting points for information about the divided Germany. There is even a museum dedicated to the Stasi, revealing in all its sickening detail the extent of their monitoring of the German population. Every German citizen has the right to look at their own records, hence breaking down the walls of secrecy which had been erected around the government during Communist rule.

Everyone in Berlin seems almost desperate to talk about its shameful past. Quite contrary to my expectations, I found myself mentioning the war time and again with my new German friends and hearing their opinions on this subject and any other aspect of German history. The young people of Berlin seem highly educated in their own history and eager to discuss it, not to excuse it but to understand why it happened.

Does this make Berlin a depressing city, wallowing in its own grimy history? Not one bit. Although the crimes of the Nazi and Communist regimes don’t make for easy reading, Berlin is a city looking forward. The great thing about an ending is that it also represents a new beginning, and to Berliners the end of the Communist regime has meant just that: a chance to finally build Berlin into whatever kind of place they want it to be. Unhampered by the restrictions of oppressive regimes, Berlin is finally being given its belated adolescence. And this is very much the feeling which Berlin gives; a teenage city, choosing what it wants to be and a little unsure of itself.

Far from hiding guilty secrets, the secrets which Berlin hides are its private gems, the creative attempts to build up a fascinating cultural centre from the ruins of a divided, broken wasteland. After the fall of the wall, East Berlin revealed itself as still wounded from the war. Museums were still riddled with bullet holes, great tracts of land remained undeveloped and bombed out buildings remained, still standing (just) on many East Berlin roads. After 1989, many businesses found themselves forced to close due to fierce competition from the West.

It didn’t take Berlin long to find its feet. Within months clubs were springing up in these deserted factory buildings, bars in the basement of bombed out buildings. One of the most famous communities of modern artists in Berlin is that which occupies the former brewery Tacheles, which went from being a small hidden community to a large and popular venue for concerts and art exhibitions and contains a warren of studios for private artists. Since I’ve been living in Berlin, I have been to a party where we had to cross an outlet canal on stepping stones to reach a deserted factory where the party was held, I have wandered down a tiny alley behind a posh shopping centre to find an art gallery exhibiting sculptures made out of scrap metal on the third floor of a dusty building covered in shrapnel scars, I have sipped at a beer on a bar on a beach beside the river, sitting on imported sand and watching the plastic chandeliers swing eerily in the trees, and I have eaten at a café in the basement of a building overgrown with greenery but with a pockmarked shrapnel façade. Best of all, I have spent an amazing night in a club housed in a defunct brewery. Entry is through a small kindergarten, complete with clown wallpaper and tiny plastic chairs, after which we crossed a large grassy parking lot and entered the brewery, descended four deep stories and found ourselves in an extraordinary vaulted warehouse, lit in striking blue and red. The techno music, coupled with the vast underground secrecy of the place (the kindergarten could only be accessed up a steep, pathless, wooded hill, devoid of all signposts) gave the whole evening an air of the excitement of being ‘in the know’ about such places. Apparently shortly after the wall came down, such places existed but only illegally and they were forced to constantly change location. Nowadays, the clubs are mostly legal but retain these amazing, hidden venues.

So the secrets of Berlin, I have discovered, are not the painful stories of its dubious past but the hidden signs of the tentative awakenings of a culture which has everything to hope for, which is not afraid to confront its mistakes but can create a new, vibrant society out of the ruins of the past. Rather than the infamous eagle adopted by the Third Reich, the symbol of Berlin should be a phoenix, rising out of the ashes, as Berlin has done. From the secret bars and beaches, art galleries and studios, to the jubilant graffiti reclaiming a city which now belongs fully to her people, Berlin is showing signs of growing up, experimenting with its identity and having a damn good party in the meantime.