Berlin: City of Satan's Throne

"It would not be enough for a poet to have memories," said Rainer Maria Rilke's protagonist and oracle, the young poet Malte Laurids Brigge. "You must be able to forget them."

Whether memories are something you have or something you should forget resonates and echoes in almost every street in Berlin. There are all the obvious echoes, Frederick the Great laying the foundations of what we now know as Germany, not just territorially, but culturally in the row of Hohenzollern palaces and universities at one end of Unter den Linden . Nazism, the Holocaust, Communism, the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the symbols and icons are everywhere. Here’s a remnant of the Berlin Wall, there’s a sign indicating the site of Hitler’s bunker. Here’s where the Communist leaders lived, set apart from the general populace, there is the office of Hitler’s secret police, now the Ministry of Finance. The uplifting realist murals of der volk, smiling and strong, are intact. One’s responses are inevitably cliché ridden. The ghosts stalk the streets and everywhere sotto voce can be heard Wordsworth’s still sad music of humanity. But, that Berlin is still there, intact and vibrant, is itself a miracle. It is a miraculous city of ghosts. Ghosts which it seems the city has decided not to forget.

Berlin’s museums contain three of the most remarkable relics of antiquity anywhere in the world. The Pergamon altar is a gigantic, classical temple of statues, pillars and carved friezes. Construction began about 160BCE; the altar was dedicated to Zeus and was a site of human sacrifice in the great city of Pergamon, in what is now Turkey. Ancient texts call it “Satan’s Throne” and it crops up in the Book of Revelations. The sculptured frieze depicts the struggle of the Gods and the giants, but also contains numerous embedded literary references. The library in Pergamon was second only to the great, now mythical, library at Alexandria. It was built following the decline of Athens when no other city had gained hegemony. Pergamon had ambitions. The heroic and morbid qualities of the Pergamon altar recommended themselves as inspirations to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. In this one of the greatest ancient monuments anywhere, with the benefit of hindsight, are the first resonances of Berlin’s heroic ambitions and tragic realities.

Also in the Pergamon Museum is the equally astounding Ishtar Gate, built by King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, now Iraq. It is a solid crenellated fortress wall around a high perfect arch. The wall and the arched gate are covered in the deepest blue ceramics decorated by alternating rows of aurochs and dragons. The dragons are elegant and long-legged, rather than frightening, conveying their unnatural, magical qualities. They are creatures of another world. The approach to the gate was made along a processional avenue, also tiled in blue. The frieze is inlaid with rows of life size lions, strutting with calm and dignity towards the Ishtar Gate. Statues of the Gods were paraded down this processional route on New Year’s Day. A replica of the gate was built in Iraq but has reportedly been badly damaged in the recent war.

The third great antiquity in a Berlin museum is the statue of arguably the most beautiful women the world has ever known, Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaton and the mother of Tutankhamen, both beautiful too. Olive-skinned, long necked, with high cheekbones and a long angular jaw line, her forehead thrust back, her eyes pointing upwards, the air of mystery and beauty is only compounded by the fact that Nefertiti now only has one eye, the other socket is blank but not empty.

Fast forward to Berlin’s troubled and tragic twentieth century history. The Nazi period is commemorated in two immensely sensitive, subtle and sad memorials. Under the cobbles in the square across Unter den Linden from the Humboldt University is a glass panel. Invisible from a distance, it is less than a metre square. Below the glass pane is a lit room of empty white bookshelves. This is the site where the Nazis brought 20,000 books from the University and burnt them. No commentary is offered. The empty shelves, as it were, speak volumes.

Near to the Brandenburg Gate and opposite the Tiergarten are a vast collection of oblong grey stone blocks. This is the Holocaust memorial and, once one knows that, one immediately imagines in a literal way that these stones represent coffins. Perhaps, but not only that. From the edge of the blocks they all seem more or less the same height, rising evenly to the horizon. This is an optical illusion. Walk amongst them and the cobbled stone floor undulates and sinks rapidly down into a valley. Very quickly the blocks, now apparently set on their narrow ends, loom above you. Above only the sky. The alleyways between them are narrow and no one else can be seen. Occasionally someone fleetingly crosses your path – and immediately disappears. Again no commentary is offered, the passerby must decide on meaning and symbol for themselves. Children, unaware of meaning and symbol and unburdened by history, run around amongst the blocks treating them as a playground or a maze. They have accepted Rilke’s injunction about the necessity of forgetting.

Attitudes to remembering communism seem to be more ragged, much less clear cut. The tall, thin radio tower with its disco mirror ball at the top remains and dominates the Berlin skyline as its builders intended it should. Below is the spiky white concrete radio building, still a masterpiece of modernist aesthetics. Walk away from Alexanderplatz and towards Unter den Linden and you come upon the huge site of Frederick the Great’s Royal Palace. Much of it is now a car park, but about half of it was where the Communists built their people’s palace. In its latter days it was known as Honecker’s lamp shop. Square and gargantuan, through the smoky brown glass, clearly visible within were many of those gigantic hanging lamps with long cords and many white plastic shades which you used to see in every hotel lobby and public building in the old Eastern Europe. They cast a baleful and inadequate light, never enough to read a newspaper, over orange leatherette furniture and patterned chocolate carpets. But now the lamp shop is gone. It is being dismantled by huge cranes because demolition would do too much damage to the surrounding historic buildings, including Berlin’s cathedral, which was virtually demolished twice during the Second World War. Accidental demolition in peacetime would be frowned upon. So the brown glass skin has gone, as has much of the concrete structure. What remains is a rusting steel skeleton which is being removed piecemeal. Once the demolition is complete the intention is to build a facsimile of the old Royal Palace. This time around it will be a shopping mall, offices and a hotel. The price tag currently is estimated at 750 million Euros, which will no doubt prove conservative. Public funds are not yet forthcoming. That building, if it ever gets built, will tell its own story about what shall be remembered, albeit in a bastardised form, and the uses that memory can be put to. Outside on the chain link fence that surrounds the building site is a poster in English saying ‘East Germany asserts its legitimacy.’

Gendarmenmarkt is the most beautiful square in Berlin. On each flank are identical rococo churches, one the French church built for the Huguenot émigrés and the other the German Lutheran church. Between these two and facing the square is the neo-classical concert hall, all sweeping steps, arcades of pillars and statues stalking the edge of the roof. It is vaguely reminiscent of the Pergamon altar, as perhaps all neo-classical buildings are. In the evening all three of these buildings are built in different soft pastel colours, orange, pink and green this evening. The buildings glow and appear weightless; ethereal. On one corner of Gendarmenmarkt is a fantastic chocolate shop, Fassbender & Rausch. In the window is a gigantic dark chocolate sculpture of the Brandenburg Gate, complete with chariot and charging horses about to smash through the shop window and rush across Gendarmenmarkt. In the next window is a similarly huge chocolate structure of a perilously tilting Titanic.
On the south eastern edge of East Berlin is a fascinating flea market, not mentioned in the guide books. It too can be interpreted as a site of memory. The people wandering through the town square where it is held are punks, white Rastas and Mohicans. Occasionally people sunbathe nude in the market and cool off in the fountain. The books for sale at the second hand bookstalls speak of a particular moment of twentieth century intellectual history: Freud, Kafka, Koestler, Susan Sontag ‘On Photography’, Camus’s ‘La Peste’, of course. Anarchist slogans have been printed on clothes and bits of material: ‘Stop me before I kill again’, ‘the system works because you work’, ‘television is not the revolution’. The second hand records for sale are divided by cardboard dividers: ‘doom’ and ‘death’ are two of the categories. We use to have places like this in London, like Camden Lock, but mostly they have been redeveloped now. In their place are Starbucks and Lush. Unburdened of memories of tragedy and clinging dimly to memories of heroism perhaps we wonder what to remember and what to forget.

See the photos of Berlin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets