In the Spring, through places once Verboten, we wander freely in a much-changed Berlin.
The discovery of an old passport resuscitates recollections of a cold war visit and I am borne ceaselessly into the past.
Then it is winter.
At the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing, a fresh-faced young man takes a seat on the West Berlin bound train. As their colleagues photograph from the platform, armed Grenztruppen board and sit opposite. Like psychiatrists, they wait for him to speak.
The train passes through Magdeburg, Brandenburg, and Potsdam.
They watch him watching a whirring grey landscape of strip lights and Trabants.
A studious young woman reading Schopenhauer asks, “Wie lange wird es dauern, bis das Ende der Welt erreicht ist?”
“How long will it take to reach the end of the world?”
She repeats the question, the young man transfixed by her beauty is unable to answer.
An invisible force forbids him to take her hand as they stroll along Friedrichstrasse toward the DDR fortifications. Despite or perhaps because of it, she beckons him to follow her into a sparse black and white Alexanderplatz where they sit next to the Fountain of International Friendship. She asks for a cigarette and magically produces a technicolour copy of Die Rote Fahne from under her duffle coat.
In this monochrome scene, only her lips are full and red as though all blood has been drained from her body.
“Je langsamer das Leben wird, desto schneller nähert sich der Moment.”
“The slower life becomes, the more quickly the moment approaches.”
They float to Flora Straße, then Wollank Straße, cordoned-off areas, dangerous places full of ever-vigilant soldiers, dead ends, bombed-out empty spaces, and acne-faced buildings pockmarked by bullets. On to Mitte, Friedrichshain, then Lichtenberg, Prenzlauer and Pankow they roam. Until they reach the grand socialist avenue Leipziger Straße, straining to connect with Potsdamer Platz, the wall in all its momentous greyness preventing it from doing so.
At one of those Berlin tenements with courtyard after courtyard, where everything ends and dissolves into silence, she vanishes.
Those we have loved are now strangers, calcified into irrelevance by absence, the great falsifier.
Later, the love-struck baby-faced tourist came across a memorial to those who lost their lives attempting to cross.
It was as if not only time had stopped under the weight of the dead, but the very perception of it had been obliterated.
The dead in cold possession of the centuries, ephemeral figures with an evasive remoteness about them, beset by the shadows of silent and hidden catastrophes the details of which follow them to the grave. Those odd people, skulking in the wings, their desperation, grief, and hope racing into a past that constitutes us.
Memory is an instrument of power, history the product of individual perspectives, annihilating the experiences of those holding up the daisies, a necessary and heinous act.
In the best traditions of historical revisionism, a rewrite, a sugar coating is fundamental to any form of mental recovery.
Nichts ist stärker als die Liebe.
Nothing is stronger than love.
The sprightly youthful figure scales a viewing platform. A panorama of a divided city awaits.
In the distance a nondescript mound of earth catches his gaze, the above ground remains of the Führerbunker, once a highly sophisticated fusion of architectural and engineering technology.
In 1988 the DDR authorities excavated most of the site, destroying what they could.
A year later when the wall fell, and everything that was named the present became the past, citizens of the DDR flocked to receive a capitalist welcome of one hundred Westmark.
Treuhandanstalt, a public trust agency (surely a misnomer) sold DDR state-owned enterprises for one mark to asset-stripping West German corporations. Overnight, four million East Germans lost their jobs.
Western speculators acquired vast tracts of real estate, the currency aligned, and rents increased tenfold.
I now understand what my mother meant when she said, “Money can’t buy happiness, a light can go out in the heart, the same as any other place.”
Beautiful and empty words, words without borders.
Currency exchange was a condition of entry for westerners visiting East Berlin. Twenty-five West German marks were converted into bundles of East German currency. Approaching the border crossing on their return journey, self-appointed philanthropic benefactors thrust novelty value notes and change at passing East Germans who today are accused of ostalgie.
The world turned.
In unified Berlin, Allied Checkpoint Charlie is a tourist attraction, where gun-toting guards are replaced by actors, who in between posing for selfies, sell replica Deutsche Demokratische Republik military-style hats.
A man carrying the weight of myths, stories, and half-truths, is ashamed to admit that he misses the wall, all twenty-eight miles of it through the heart of Berlin and another seventy-five miles around the edges of West Berlin. He admired the sheer scale of the crazy undertaking, its presence and mystery, and how it disappeared with understandable yet unseemly haste.
To salve his conscience, he heads for Niederkirchnerstraße (Prinz-Albrecht-Straße). The SS Reich Main Security Office, the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei, Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS), the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party, were once located here, as were the headquarters of Einsatzgruppen and the Gestapo, including Inspektion der Konzentrationslager.
In a space measuring eight hundred cubic metres, ‘Topographie des Terrors’ an exhibition containing thousands of images documenting the Nazi reign of terror, now occupies the site along with the largest remaining section of the Berlin Wall.
As tears carve rivulets, he stands before a photograph clinically described by a curator with the words ‘mass hanging,’ in which a terrified condemned man is attached to gallows by a rope that is too long for its death purpose. The man’s feet drag in the dirt, temporarily delaying the inevitable until a Gestapo man rushes from the crowd to raise the poor soul’s legs until he is dead.
Overcome by a vertige, our ageing tourist is choked by the dead intent on returning, their grip tightening around his windpipe with the force of every extinguished life. In search of some fixed point, his eyes are drawn once again to the picture and the 1944 crowd of Berliners held back by stormtroopers. There in the background, her cloudless gaze surveying the terrible scene is the beautiful time traveller.
In this great city, one cannot ignore history creeping from frightening shadows, hell-bent on confrontation. In Berlin, history is the monster under the bed.
Experiencing time as a series of moments rather than a continuous flow.
He lost her.
A past sown with memories.
Lovers, births, marriages, and deaths.
Time did an unforgiving good job well, making various layers and paths that sometimes overlapped but still kept them separate.
Without time everything happens at once.
The problem with others was that they were not her.
All that had gone before was meaningless. It was her; it had always been her.
He found her.
And now they must outrun time.
Through the art of evocation, the man returns to a tour of the Hessen-Thüringen border accompanied by a friendly Bundesgrenzschutz.
The garrulous guard explains the strategic importance of the Fulda gap, along which a once invincible Napoleon withdrew his armies after the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813. A defeat that marked the first stage of failure for Le Petit Caporal and the resurgence of a powerful and militaristic Prussia.
The Retreat of Napoleon after the Battle of Leipzig, 19 October 1813. Louis François (1782-1849).
“Traders raked the battlefield, sending millions of bones, the defective, the crumbled, the diseased, back to England to be ground into fertiliser, an abominable lucrative business.”
One hundred and seventy years and countless wars later, the chess pieces of NATO and Soviet forces faced each other across the Inner German Border. One of the world’s most heavily fortified frontiers stretches from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. A continuous line of high metal fences, walls, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, automatic booby traps, and minefields patrolled by fifty thousand Grenztruppen.
Humanity and nature are separated by a border both terrifying and brilliant in its architecture.
In a dark wall cumulonimbus, decades pass. Our guide falls in love, marries, and becomes a father. Each morning patrol he follows a ritual, a form of acknowledgement in which he salutes his opposite number on the other side of the fence. Only once did a young conscript dare to return his salutation, he never saw him again.
The currents of time narrowed and trickled horribly slowly along the border, eventually unifying those with a shared interest in its future.
For forty years, over six hundred animal and plant life species flourished undisturbed.
The law of unintended consequences had transformed the fields of oblivion.
Once divided communities work together to protect habitats and preserve the historical infrastructure for future generations.
Today the former border area is home to half the European population of Red Kites.
An old solitary walker, beset by shadows in the most genial light, an invisible constant beautiful companion by his side, wills unsteady feet to grip the ground.
There amongst black storks, otters, orchids, and rare mosses, she stares into the distance searching for a waning memory of what it was like to be alive.
His head is in the clouds, his breath does not know which way to turn.
He wipes an ancient tear from her face and makes a final attempt in clumsy German, to impress her.
“Wenn ich in deiner Schönheit verloren bin, lass die Zeit stehen bleiben.”
“When I am lost in your beauty let time stand still.”
“Wie der Mond und der Himmel Wir sind miteinander verbunden Du und ich Wie die Sonne und das Meer Ich bin für immer du Und du für immer.”
“Like the moon and the sky
We are bound together
You and I
Like the sun and the sea
I am forever you
And you forever me.”
“Reine Verzweiflung kann durch Menschlichkeit, Freundschaft und Liebe überwunden werden.”
“Pure despair can be conquered by humanity, friendship, and love.”
“Einem Mann sollten die Augen herausgerissen werden, wenn er nur die Vergangenheit sehen kann.”
“A man’s eyes should be torn out if he can only see the past.”
She doesn’t reply.
Some things are better left unsaid.
Grünes Band Deutschland is part of a wider European Green Belt network.
Nature healing Germany’s broken heart.
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