A New Berlin on Top of the Old

Live your life, never forgetting your past, but moving forward

It was time to shake it up .My wife and I were in the midst of a debacle involving scads of money for a special assessment on our condo. We’d also somehow drifted into a habitual pattern of same old TV shows, same restaurants, same sad conversations about the same old topics. We needed a change. It was time to take the every day life, tear it down and start over again with a new perspective.

So in the spring of 2017, we rented out the condo, stored all the furniture, and set out on what would become a year-long trip around the globe, settling here for a month, there for a month. And somehow, come September, we came to rest at a rented apartment just off Alexanderplatz in Berlin.

Directly across the street was an empty hulk of a building left over from the communist East German days when it housed the Stasi, the East German secret police. Now it lay empty and unused waiting to be repurposed or torn down, taking with it its secrets culled from a society that spied on itself.

As a part of my travels, I always pack my running shoes and upon exploration of my neighborhood for a month, I discovered that a few blocks down the street lay Volkspark Friedrichshain, the oldest public park in Berlin and replete with trails and byways. From my door to Volkspark, around the park once, and home again was just about four miles, per my trusty running watch.

Being curious, I did a little reading to discover what the mountain in the middle of the park was, only to discover there is no mountain in the middle of Volkspark, existing in nature. There is instead a huge pile of rubble left over from the bombing of Berlin in World War II. After the war, it was piled up in the middle of Volkspark and groomed with trees and greenery, with trails and spots for viewing the city at the top.

From the rubble of the old, the destroyed arose a man-made, carefully groomed thing of beauty.

“Maerchenbrunnen” by Cherishing the mundane is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“ It is this impulse that we came upon in spots all over the City of Berlin. Rebuild, start again. Parks, buildings, streets all over the city have been re-developed on the ruins of the old. This is not to say that Berlin has chosen to dismiss its past. Berliners openly embrace their ugly past, admit it, share it with the world, and then move on to something new, artistic, and beautiful formed from the ruins of the old.

Now, nearly two years later, I look back and Berlin stands as an inspiration still, for what Babs and I were trying then to do, and still seek to do.

Live your life, never forgetting your past, but moving forward, always creating new and better from the remains of that which came before.