Behind Enemy Lines: Travels Across the Channel.

Ok. Sorry it’s been so long, I’ve been traveling and having technical difficulties. Let me just say that the geniuses at an English Genius Bar don’t compare to the good ol’ freedom-loving geniuses at an American Apple store. But anyways, Berlin…
Berlin is not a pretty city. The dirty snow fades imperceptibly into the bland, concrete buildings, which in turn becomes the grayish white cloud and fog that perpetually hover above the city. The boundaries between Earth, buildings and sky merge into a sort of constant off-white haze. It might not always have been this way. Perhaps once upon a time the dirty snow and cloudy sky were separated by rows of beautiful structures, but those days are gone. This is becoming sort of a common thread in my travels around Europe. Clinging to the buildings and monuments that survived World War II. And Berlin, as one might expect, suffered worse than most cities in this regard. The city is littered with the half-built husks of buildings, apparently all abandoned, with ancient scaffolding still hanging, or falling, from their sides. It’s for the best anyways, since even if the construction on these buildings were completed it wouldn’t look any more attractive. It would just look like giants dropped rows and rows of huge cinder blocks on the city. The city’s tourist attractions didn’t fare much better. Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous crossing point between the USSR controlled half of Berlin and the half maintained by the Western powers, is now a clearly fake, plastic imitation: with people dressed like soldiers standing in front of it, not even bothering to clear off the candy wrappers and McDonald’s coffee cups, trying to sucker Asian tourists into taking pictures with them for a couple euros. One of the cities main attractions, and tallest structure, is the Berlin television tower. You know you’re in pretty bad shape when your tallest building and one of your main tourist attractions is a glorified antenna. The only museum we went to was the Jewish History Museum. This is not to be confused with the Berlin Holocaust Museum, which I hear is poignant and powerful. This museum was not. The first part of the museum has a few Jewish artifacts, letters written from hiding, tools, little suitcases, and along the wall is written all the different cities around the globe where Jewish people fled. Ok, a decent start. Then all of a sudden you go into a cold, dark room, which is supposed to symbolize the plight of the Jews in Berlin. This I found almost comically foolish. “Wow after spending ten seconds in a kind of cold, dark, sort of uncomfortable room I know exactly how it felt to be a Jew living in the heart of Germany from 1935-1945.” I was willing to forgive this as well. As an English major, and a human being, I believe quite strongly in the power of metaphors. Metaphors are not just literary devices but also a means to help people understand a foreign idea, and are used by people such as Darwin, Adam Smith and Einstein just as effectively as Dickens, Mark Twain and Shakespeare (ok…maybe not as effectively as Shakespeare). But the point here is that the Holocaust is not just a foreign idea, it’s unfathomable. It is one of the few things for which the power of language and metaphor fall flat. Which is why I was willing to forgive the museum for this foolishness. It’s understandable that the museum would try and include some metaphor like this and inevitable that it would fail since any metaphor attempting to convey the situation of the victims of the Holocaust is bound to be hollow and inadequate. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there. After this the museum continues with a basically chronological overview of Jews in Germany throughout the past half millennium. I wandered through about a floor and a half without encountering any sign of World War II or mention of the Holocaust or concentration camps, placating myself the entire time by saying, “it’s ok, it is a Jewish history museum, not specifically a Holocaust museum, they’re probably building up to it.” They weren’t. I learn about the Jews in Berlin in the 1920’s and the early 1930’s, of the ever-increasing fear and desire to flee. Then, all of a sudden, I’m in the 1950’s learning about the post-war Jewish situation in Germany and dealing with the aftermath. I look around, trying to make eye contact with the other people in the museum, who all look appropriately grave, and can’t help but laugh. There was an entire room dedicated to some Jewish man named Samuel Bloch or something who collected and categorized fish from the Berlin river system, but they skip the Holocaust?! The others who I’m traveling with react the same way. We have a lot of fun climbing through a little fake tunnel, at the end of which you can stick your head through a hole and take a novelty picture of yourself as a holocaust child. There’s also a game, reminiscent of the beginning of Oregon Trail when you have a certain amount of space and have to decide what you think will be best to store in your wagon, but instead you’re packing for the Holocaust. Also, one of the options was a mobile phone. No joke. The end of the museum, the very final room, has a sign that says “You can be German and Jewish” and a giant Christmas tree. I couldn’t make that up. It would be strange to see a Christmas tree anywhere in mid-February, let alone a Jewish history museum. Being generous I’d say the museum was uninformative and dull, but being honest I was kind of offended. And I’m not easily offended, I consider myself Jewish only in the sense that I have Jewish family members, and from a religious standpoint I’m completely indifferent. But this seemed to me like a mix between stupidity and poorly masked bigotry.
I realize upon rereading what I have so far that I’ve given an unfair representation of Berlin. I really enjoyed Berlin. Loved it, in fact. I remember getting off the plane to discover my phone was dead, I didn’t know where in the city my hostal was (I couldn’t even remember the name of it) and I had no idea where to go to meet people. I started to panic a little. Then this little German baby looked over a seat in front of me and started to make faces. Obviously I made faces back. Obviously the kid starts laughing. And that was it, I’d fallen in love with Berlin. It might just have been that it was the first place I’d ever gone alone, really alone, where I couldn’t understand people and people couldn’t understand me. There’s something really wonderful about that. There in front of me was a little, German baby breaking into little, German giggles. How could I hate this place? Also, the more you see of Berlin the more you realize that the museums, the tourist stops, all that crap, are not in any way the real places of culture. For instance, if somebody was going to New York you could tell them to visit the Guggenheim or Moma, walk through Central Park, maybe go to the theatre. If I met someone going to Berlin I’d say fuck the museums, skip anything you see in a tourist book, and just walk around for a while. Duck into dark, strange buildings and alleyways, under bridges, places that in any other city you’d conscientiously avoid. The corpse-like shells of buildings, colorless skyline and poorly executed cultural exhibits are really a Potemkin village. Like if you saw a man who looked like he was an inch away from death but in fact he had a young, vigorous mind and a heart pumping like Lance Armstrong. The city is full of small, eerie galleries with Germans wielding blowtorches and paint brushes turning anything they can get their hands on into small, eerie pieces of really cool art. And, if you can, try and talk to the young people doing this, because even though people speaking German always sound like they’re about to bite your head off, they’re generally nice and have really cool stories. It’s one of the few places where a group of people who many would consider petty criminals are the ones driving the city forward intellectually, culturally and artistically. It reminded me in that way of Brooklyn’s ascension over Manhattan as the “it” borough in NYC. Inside these drab and dreary buildings every inch of space is covered by colorful, bursting with energy, ever-changing graffiti that rival the Arab mosaics of the Alhambra or the stained glass windows of any Cathedral. At night you walk along streets that seem hauntingly silent, and then the doors to one of the brutish cement structures is flung open, vomiting forth a hundred green and red lasers that paint the snow and night sky and the uberbass sound of German house music. The key to understanding Berlin is not to be sad or unimpressed by the fact that it’s all a muted shade of white, but to think of the city as a giant blank canvas. It’s clearly what the Berliners do, each one wielding a spray can. If only the German people could discover a sense of humor, they’d have the most popular country on the planet.