The City of Scars

The poetic cafes that line the elegant Parisian boulevards and the calculated brush strokes which add beauty and life to everything they touch are in stark contrast to the dour utilitarian power of Berlin‘s architecture.

Upon arriving in Paris, le Arc de Triomphe met our eyes before we met the city; today, in Berlin, we were dumped off in an alley way and greeted by gruff Germans polishing their Volkswagens to a pristine sheen. VW makes a fine auto to be sure, but our arrival certainly lacked the grandeur of our French welcome.

Two cities could not have made better consecutive stops for the freshman traveler. Paris is breathtaking at each turn, but Berlin simply provides air. Paris wows its visitors’ with each landmark, but at first glance, you might wonder why you bothered to stop here in Berlin. Fois gras is decidedly French, whereas the Germans seem more suited to a lumpy stew.

But Berlin’s beauty must be seen without fanfare, for there is none. A Parisian tour leaves one inundated with an excessive culture in a society that masks its history with gold. But Berlin ‘just be’ with subtleness that drips historical significance, allusion and comedy.

The city is haunted by the atrocities it has seen in just the past 100 years. After their final monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, brought war to Western Europe which spread throughout the world, the city and country were plunged into terrible debt, first stemming from the reparations they paid for losing the war, to millions of dollars in debt being recalled by the United States following the stock market crash of 1929. The shame from the Treaty of Versailles encouraged extremism throughout the Duetchland, and the fascists won, naming an Austrian as their leader who imprisoned most of Europe before being beat back to the capital by the four Allied powers.

Nearly 90 percent of the city was razed, a large part of Europe lay smoking from Nazi bombs and Germany was again without a government. And at its weakest, yet another foreign dictator came to rule, and shackled half of Berlin along with part of the country behind the Iron Curtain.

The Germans have lived through a historical history that makes this American tremble, and the scars left behind are not covered by a Band-Aid. A Holocaust memorial resides downtown, but unlike its haunting peers, it acts as a subtle, constant and gentle reminder at the apex of the legislative and business districts. It bears no signage to suggest what it is, and it is comprised of a series of rectangular stone blocks that stretch out across a city block. At each of the four street entrances, the blocks gently begin to rise from the ground, growing in height as they reach the middle before gently receding into the opposing block. The memorial does not beat its message into any visitor’s head, but like most things in Berlin, it causes one to think.

The city is not without startling allusion. The public square in front of the renowned Humboldt University was where the Nazi’s burned 20,000 texts from the university library. Today, below the bricks of the square, a memorial to the books is laid out. It is visible only by a glass window from the square, and houses empty shelves with a capacity for 20,000 books, and has been permanently sealed by the designer, suggesting that the books can never be replaced. Not 50 meters away is a plague with a quote from Heinrich Heine, which roughly translates to, “When books are put to the flame, people are not far behind.” The quote, however, predated the Holocaust by more than 100 years, having been written in 1820 in one of the books that was burned by the Nazi party.

But despite their dark history, the Germans are not without a sense of humor. The aforementioned Brandenburg Gate was commissioned to pronounce peace amongst the German people, but Lil’ ol’ Napoleon stormed into town and stole the statue on top of the gate and placed it on display at the Lourve. After the Germans successfully won the war, they requested the sculpture back, but found that Napoleon had placed Victoria, the goddess of Victory into it. Instead of changing it back, the German people placed it back on the gate, and faced Victoria towards the building at the north end of the square: The French embassy.

The cities beautifully juxtopose one another, and not merely because they have been opponents many times. A German couple woke up one morning in 1961 to find they were on opposite sides of the wall, and their relationship ended soon after when the male, in West Germany, quickly moved on and found a new girl. The new relationship progressed quickly, and they soon decided to “holiday” in the new East Germany, easy enough with their West German passports. But when the new couple arrived, they came upon the former girlfriend. The male asked his new beau to open her door to get a view, and swiftly kicked her out, stole her identity and took his true love back across the wall. Unfortunately, the second girl was the daughter of a diplomat, and the two lovers did not pass go.

We have left Paris, the city of lovers, and landed in a town where it once sent you to jail.