Mehr Berlin 2007

BERLIN 1 Oktober 2007

Where I live is in the District called Mitte, which means "middle" in German and is in fact in the middle of Berlin. There are some 21 districts in the city with names that reflect the names of the former small towns that were incorporated into Berlin as it expanded over the years, such as Charlottenberg in the west and Kreuzberg in the east.

Across the bridge next to me is the Museuminsel, or Museum Island, which is in fact an island surrounded by the Spree River and its canal and which contains approximately six major museums, the Berlin Cathedral and many other cultural venues. Across from the island, in the early 1200’s, a small trading and fishing village was established on the outer banks of the Spree, and it was called Berlin. Across the river, on the island, was established a sister village called Cologne, and eventually they became the single town of Berlin. Some 600 years later the village became a metropolis of about 4 million people. Today its population is about 3.5 million.

All of Mitte from the Brandenburg Gate east was in the former Soviet zone, and thus was behind the infamous Wall, which came down after 28 years of service to the communist government. It was called by the commies “The anti-fascist wall,” meaning it was meant to keep out those terrible, free and prosperous fascists on the west side who might come in and pollute our values. It certainly was not to keep in the poor saps on the east side who wanted out of the “workers paradise.” Before the wall went up and before the shooting of the easterners who tried to leave, some two and one half million Germans fled from east to west. Such is the way with totalitarian double-speak.

Language note: wherever you see “berg” as part of a German town name it means it was on or near a mountain or a hill, as that is the meaning of the German word. Whenever “burg” is part of the town name, it means the town was associated with a castle, or later a fortified town, as is the meaning of the German word. In the U S we have towns with “burgs” and “bergs” all over the place, nearly none of which has anything to do with the original German meaning of mountain or castle.

After the wall fell in 1989 the re-unification has been slow and painful. The new government left in place most of the drab communist buildings but tore down a couple of monstrosities that were full of asbestos. They also changed back to the former names of many of the streets named by the communists for the usual panoply of Russian heroes, but left the name of a major boulevard as Karl-Marx-Allee, and left intact a small park called Marx-Engels-Forum at the east end of Mitte, and also left the bronze statues of the two early communist philosophers in the middle of the park. But after all, at least they were German, and famous at that.

About 90% of central Berlin was severely damaged or destroyed by allied bombing in both the east and the west of Berlin. I just read that the Mitte, where I live, and which was in the western part of East Berlin, was the most severely damaged part of all Berlin. This was because most Nazi buildings were located here, including the Gestapo, the SS, the Reichschancellery, and Hitler’s living quarters, and also his bunker where he took refuge during the last two weeks of the war and where he committed suicide on 30 April, 1945. I highly recommend the movie called "The Downfall" which depicts (accurately I am told) those last two weeks of the war, including the suicides and surrender. This demonstrates, again, what can happens when people believe anything fanatically deeply, whether it is based on god or some other ideal.

For another example of wanton destruction, there was a famous pre-war commercial area called Potsdamer Platz in the Mitte, which was considered a sort of crossroads of Berlin and consisted of dozens of low rise 18th and 19t century shops, theaters and stone buildings. It was a large and popular area with no military value and it was bombed flat in 1945. Later the communists did nothing with it but simply cleared the rubble and left it largely a barren wasteland. They designated a large swath of it as a “death strip,” and anyone traversing the area would be shot dead by the East German border guards, so they could maintain the purity of their system.

After the wall fell and the new democratic government took over, investment money poured into the place and now it is once again a bustling commercial area, only this time with high rise buildings made of glass and steel. Sony Corporation built a large office tower and a radically interesting building there, and the complex now provides just about anything a good capitalist, or even communist consumer could ever want.

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