Spent days wandering through a city that seems always in the midst of deciding whether to escape itself or embrace itself.
Berlin is haunted by a history that is still alive in memories, still clinging to life in untold many graves.
To step through the Brandenburg Gate is to tour transition--the red coated emperor Napoleon stole the four stallioned carriage Quadriga from its panoramic peak and left it before the Louvre before it was remounted, reinvented as the symbol of Germany before Hitler made it his pulpit and pedestal both. Until he fell from its graces and the gate nearly did as well from bullets and bombs and all that black-hearted smoke, until it formed a frontier circumscribed by barbed wire and cement rising up on its own soil to separate a city from itself, to make sides out of a people and play them against one another as though pawns in a game of chess.
I took a five hour long walking tour on my own the first day and saw so many faces of the city, saw through to younger versions. Walked along the Eastside Gallery which is the longest segment of the wall still in tact though now muralled over by artists from around the world. The paintings made me think so much of prisoner art, the same motifs of freedom, doves and open air, the same longing laid behind brushstrokes. Because this is what walls do--imprison people in the very place that they stand, sleep, speak, and eventually starve--of course, I thought often of the Seperation Wall in Israel which is meant to not to divide political systems to avoid their dilution, but to divide people. "To create a separation between us and them" as Yitzhak Rabin stated when he pushed for it.
Walls are built so one side can allow itself to go deaf and numb and blind all at once to cries from the other side.
And tearing down the Berlin Wall may have made communism fall like dominos across Eastern Europe, but it didn't tear down the lines that have always existed between East and West, and even if it meant to undermine difference in some economic sense alone, it still didn't fully succeed because capitalism can conquer but not cure...And more and more I think it was never out to remedy but only to reclaim...
And these are the sentiments that I sought to deconstruct the whole while that I stood in this two-faced city, with my new bourgeois fur babushka cap and sickle and hammer gold pin…how to avoid the egoism that has so often been the flipside of communism, because most of those living in East Germany wanted communism, unlike what American textbooks might claim, they just couldn't stand the authoritarianism the GDR increasingly embraced. And when I was standing on a balcony on a street called Strasse der Parisier Kommune, I was asked what I felt when I looked out at it all, the strict square apartments, oppressively identical, the wide anti-riot avenues, and I couldn't help but think that they seemed so isolated, alone, ominous which is exactly the kind of counter-rhetoric to communism that is rehearsed in America…contrary to ideals of communal gain, it is cold and callous and it will kill you if you dare say that it is…
And all my thoughts came to a for standing behind the Reichstag in the miserable cold wet night that was the 20th anniversary of the night the wall came down…And as a generation of Germans sang around me, lufte, lufte, lufte, I was untangling the complicated mess of ideological strings tied around my wings….
