Berlin

Berlin

Broadcast on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany in November 2009

This story was written one morning the week before the 20th anniversary or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin is a city more steeped in history than any others city I know. Fascinating and disturbing.

The reason for my first trip to Berlin was to see what remained of the Berlin Wall. But it was so long after the wall had come down, in November 1989, that the person I was meeting was in the process of documenting and recording what remained of it in order to argue for its preservation, to retain proof for future generations that such a bizarre thing as the Wall had once existed in the heart of Europe.

My mental geography had put the iconic graffiti covered facade as the front of the wall. It was a view that agreed with the German Democratic Republic’s spin that the Wall was an ‘anti fascist protection rampart’. But of course the wall was to keep East Beliners in, not West Berliners out. And while there was precious little left of what was actually the back of the wall, there were plenty of artefacts and sinister accoutrements of the front of the wall.

The wall came to dominate the image of the city, and in a sense it still does. But all the time we were on our tour of hinterland walls and roads, perimeter defences, marker posts, patrol tracks, foundations for various installations, lamps, electrical switch boxes and, probably the most defining part of the whole wall complex, the void, the archaeological desert of the former death strip, I could not stop thinking of Berlin’s past.

Before the Wall. Before the war. Before the Nazis. To a time when Berlin was the centre of European culture, of European modernity which was a vision so at odds with what I was looking at.

As one of the city’s chroniclers has written, ‘there are times in history when a city transcends its earthly role and becomes the stuff of legend’. Berlin between 1919 and 1933, during the liberal and democratic era of the Weimar Republic, perfectly fits that description.

My first day in Berlin started on a bench in a train station looking across the tracks to the station’s name in black tiles, set out in relief against white tiles: ‘Alexanderplatz’. It was nearly impossible to read it without thinking of the title of the novel, by doctor, socialist and writer Alfred Doblin. Berlin Alexanderplatz was the first novel to be set in the city and it follows the attempt of released convict Franz Biberkopf to go on the straight and narrow in a seedy, poor, depraved Berlin. Another novel to come out of Berlin was Erich Maria Remarque’s great anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. In 1931 Nobel prize winning writer Thomas Mann denounced the Nazis on the streets of the city. Anton Gill wrote in his book ‘A Dance Between Flames: Berlin Between the Wars’ that there were over 800 writers living in Berlin. There were 149 newspapers.

Marlene Dietrich lived on Unter den Linden and starred in the Blue Angel. Film maker Fritz Lang directed Metropolis while his first talkie, ‘M’, launched the acting career of Peter Lorre. Meanwhile one Samuel Wilder began writing screenplays in the city. In later years and in another country he became Billy Wilder and directed films like the Seven Year Itch, The Apartment and Some Like it Hot.

Painter Paul Klee’s first major exhibition was in Berlin. Wassily Kandinsky lived there. Then there was the demonic, scathingly satirical cartoons of George Grosz, the bleak depictions of the darker side of Berlin life by Otto Dix and the politically charged photomontages of John Heartfield.

In theatre there was the great innovator Erwin Piscator and the collaboration between Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht that produced the The Threepenny Opera. It premiered in Berlin in 1928 and the world heard ‘The Ballad of Mac the Knife’ for the first time.

Architect Mies Van der Rohe, whose influence can be seen in every modernist building in the world, lived in Berlin during the entire Weimar period. Berlin born architect Walter Gropius. He established the Bauhaus Art School whose influence on the world we live is everywhere – tubular steel chairs, flat roof architecture, almost every aspect of modern art, and also the design of a plethora of household items from the kettle we boil to the desk lamp that I write this piece by.

At the end of that first day in Berlin, which I can only describe as a confrontation with history, I took my seat in a booth in an art deco theatre tent with mirror-lined walls near the Ku’Dam, one of the main thoroughfares of Berlin.

I ordered a steak dinner and the first of a number of beers and watched the audience assemble.

A pretty waitress effortlessly worked the tables, like that was what she was born to do.

I was soon joined in the booth by, on one side, two women in their early thirties with what I assumed to be their mother and, on the other side, a woman in her late thirties with what I assumed to be her mother. Neither group viewed my presence appreciably.

Dinner finished, another beer ordered, the lights went down for the performance of Das Kabaret. Forget the sentimental Hollywood film version which is probably the best known cultural hand me down from Weimar Berlin. This was a far truer representation of the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood that were at its foundation. It was a gritty, provocative, uncompromising performance and portrayal of the tensions that

underlay Berlin life. At the end of it all of course the Nazis take power. And Weimar Berlin comes to an abrupt torch lit end.

When the lights came up I didn’t know what the Berliners in the audience were thinking as they put their coats on. Were they thinking of what had been lost? Or what was to come in their city? And I tried to comprehend what it must be like to live in a city with such a history as a city like Berlin.