Fourteenth Letter, February 8
Dear Berlin,
After sleeping through my alarm and realizing I’m going to be late for a museum date, I write a quick text to Jesslyn, shove my feet into boots, and make for Checkpoint Charlie. I find her reading in the back of the Starbucks on Kochstraße; she looks shocked to see me and tells me I’m early. Now it’s my turn to be shocked, until we discover that I had typed “ETA is 11:50” instead of “10:50” as I intended. A bit of laughter is a good start to the day.
In line, the people in front of me order in English, three groups in a row. The barista sounds American, and I wouldn’t find it hard to believe if she were, though I would also not be surprised to hear she’s a hundred percent local with a perfect accent. The family behind me discusses their order in English. I am certainly not going to rock the boat, so seeing as we’re in Starbucks by one of the most touristy streets in Mitte, I make sure to speak my native Weltsprache and fully surrender to the experience of a Starbucks soy cappuccino. It is only in retrospect that I think of how entirely unlike Seattle the experience is, in that I was conscious of everyone’s language choice (and cafe choice, for that matter) during my entire visit.
After a breakfast of Kaffee und Kuchen (absolutely violating all cultural norms that dictate when coffee and cake should be properly consumed, which is strictly in the afternoon), we head to the Topography of Terror for our daily dose of Berlin history.
This is not an understatement. Much of the time, it feels almost mandatory to be immersed in Berlin’s defining not-so-distant history of either the Wall/Cold War or Hitler/Holocaust/WWII varieties. There is absolutely so much history going on, and having learned so much about it in school makes it all the more apparent. I don’t have the same experience going somewhere like Istanbul, where the enormity of history also exists, simply because I don’t know as much about it and it isn’t impressed so much upon the twentieth and twenty-first century mind. In Berlin, it’s unavoidable, and justifiably so.
Everything is intensely historical, from the crossing signals to the cars on the road to the modern immigration situation, from which side of town you’re on to seeing black-letter fonts on newspapers. The level of awareness and analysis of this city’s consequential past is almost necessary to its daily functioning, in a way that might always be foreign to fellow Americans.
The Topography of Terror is housed at the former site of the SS Reich Main Security Office on Niederkirchnerstraße, or if you aren’t up on your Third Reich jargon, the headquarters of Hitler’s Gestapo (secret state police). Though there are far too many sites of inhumanity and unspeakable horror in Berlin to turn every one into a memorial or a museum, that hasn’t stopped people from making hundreds of them, turning the whole city into a living monument to the last hundred years of its history. As the name suggests, this museum focuses only on Hitler’s regime and legacy, from 1933 to 1945. It covers the Nazi rise to power briefly, and spends the bulk of exhibition space documenting the demographics of the victims, the strategies of Himmler’s execution apparatus, and the overwhelming amount of bureaucracy that somehow legitimized the Holocaust. The site also includes areas where they literally dug up the ground to uncover the Gestapo headquarters buried below.
Jesslyn and I spend over two hours looking at photos, reading documents, and marveling anew about the horrible things that once took place on the very ground under our feet. It’s something that should not ever get old, and it won’t. One thinks about how it could happen, how you would have behaved differently, if your children would be Nazi Youth or if they would be sent to a concentration camp because they are brown like Jesslyn’s, if you would be publicly shamed and arrested for your interracial relationship, your political views, your sexual orientation, your mental or physical disability.
There is a special exhibition of photos taken at Reich Minister R. Walther Darré’s instruction, which feels absurd in the totality of its racist agenda. Friends, if you ever question the danger of European beauty standards, remember that they paved the way for the deaths and imprisonments of 15 million people. The Sound of Music might have an anti-Nazi ending but the film’s entire aesthetic comes from a National Socialist conception of the strapping Nordic looking youth frolicking in nature and breeding with other white people.
Every time I reflect and consider the ways the events unfolded to place this city at the center of such a tragic and complicated arena, I always feel the need to step a bit more carefully in Berlin’s streets. Of course, history didn’t end in 1945, and its never long before more recent waves wash the shores of consciousness until I pass the next gold plaque in the cobblestones.
Despite the shivers I sometimes have from seeing a picture of Hitler at the Lustgarten where Bronwyn and I took photos, or at the Reichstag where I brought Allie on her first day in Berlin, I have to admire the city’s commitment to memorializing their history instead of burying it.
Berlin, you are nothing if not perseverant, thoughtful, reverent of your own past. For that, I love and respect you.
Bis zum nächsten Mal,
