Ruins and Resistance: Life Inside Berlin’s Past
Along a Berlin street called Linden Strasse I observed the shrapnel and bullet pock marks in the walls. Still present after all these years.
A city is nothing without its people. Yet a city is also a silent witness to the past. Walk any berlin street, day or night, and you feel the past. If you can see marks of the past in the cobblestones, then you can surely feel it in your bones.
I look for clues of the past in Berlin’s architecture. I’m always walking, looking upwards, often too much; Car horns warn me to watch where I walk.
Architecture shows us the present and the past. Tall columns that reach up high enough to make your neck ache. Designs that mix up a little of the Romans with the Greeks, Doric, ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan and Composite.
Northern European architecture favours smallness. Not tall columns reaching towards the heavens, but squat doorways, tiny windows that protect dwellers from winter weather. Country homes that are functional, workshops only big enough to roll a wooden cart into then load up with goods. That’s my imagination. Walking on Berlin cobblestones fires up the heart.
Berlin is always going through a process. A city that has experienced more than its fair share of violent change.
It’s as if the shifting sands that it is built upon can never settle. Ideas and movements that last so long, then sink into the netherworlds and undercurrents of Berlin’s history.
Walk along Berlin’s Unter den Linden and you’ll encounter a variety of architecture. They represent centuries of historical thought. The Prussians — Frederick the Great — followed by William the II (1744–1797), both loved the arts.
Fredrick William II built Brandenburg Gate. Its construction, under the architectural hand of Carl Gotthard Langhans and Johann Gottfried Schadow, lasted between 1788–1791.
Firstly, it was a symbol of victory then became an official symbol for peace.
The Berlin Wall integrated the Brandenburg gate into its structure. It stood like a captured giant surrounded by frozen stones that divided Berlin for 28 years.
Stroll down into the Friedrichstadt Quarter and you get a feeling for what William II was all about. He believed that at least people should live in dignified buildings and streets. He employed the skills and ideas of state architects, poets and philosophers, visionaries and artists to work up a fuss about what a beautiful city might look like.
Frederick William II’s advisors often tugged at his silked sleeve to remind him that the Prussian army needed his attention. He wasn’t a military mind, but understood the importance of paying attention to Berlin’s defences. Art, architecture and city dwellings could wait a little longer before his metropolitan dreams could be realised.
Frederick the Great built a magnificent army. Then turned them into a cavalry that could stand up to the formidable Polish Horse Guards. Don’t forget, if you were Polish born the word horse was the first word your mother would hear you say.
The Polish Cavalry and their legendary horsemanship frightened the butter out of European armies.
Frederick the Great of Prussia grew up loving the arts. He developed a strong relationship with Voltaire (1698–1778), the French philosopher.
After many letters and discussions about how to organise a state, the arts, and building cities, Frederick the Great became convinced that he wanted a life in the arts.
A failed attempt as young man to escape all stately things, to run away with a friend and live the life of an artist, his father put a brutal end to this idea then literally whipped him into shape as young statesman and soldier. The fires of his heart waned and he lived a life where he understood he had no choice but to become a statesman and soldier. This he did. It led to a life of cold statesmanship and soldiering at the front with the Prussian army.
He became the Soldier King of the Prussian Empire.
These thoughts come to me as I wander along Unter den Linden. A long and grand street that cuts through the heart of Berlin.
Unter den Linden has been witness to the politicians and armies who have marched along its metalled path. Each corner holds a story.
Frederick the Great, Frederick William II, Napoleon — he conquered Berlin, Hitler drove a fanfare convoy along Unter den Linden to take seat in the City Palace.
During the Cold War the Soviet Army marched along Unter den Linden. Crowds of cheering East Germans and state officials would obediently wave red flags.
Unter den Linden is steeped in history. For me, it seeps from the walls of Berlin sandstone structures. The cobblestoned side streets that lead you into small court yards all hold secrets.
At the rear of the Neue Nationalgalerie there is a small street named Stauffenberg Strasse. A small court yard that once housed a workshop, horses for deliveries, and a few metal workers, was the scene of the summary execution of Claus von Stauffenberg. His assassination plot, Operation Valkyrie, to kill Hitler, was thwarted at the last moment, and led to him paying the ultimate price for taking a enormous risk.
The Second World War, 1945 and the plight of Berlin’s citizens as the Red Army pushed deeper into the neighbourhoods. Red Army soldiers plundered and raped. The suffering of women and children at the hands of these brutes is beyond comprehension.
The streets of Berlin still bear witness to heavy street fighting. Pock marks caused by shrapnel and bullets during fierce fighting remain on many of the walls.
Many years ago, I lived as a lodger in the home of an older German woman. One evening she sat with me in the kitchen, poured some wine, and told me about what it was like to be a 14 year old girl living in Berlin’s Wilmersdorfer District, the Red Army entering the streets and searching for gold, silver, and women.
She spoke about how the Soviet soldiers would carry backpacks full of trinkets and gold stolen from houses.
She then told me what happened to the women and girls, her voice lowered, her eyes glazed over and in a trance like state she simply mentioned that her mother told her to comply with the soldier’s demands. It was the best we could do, she said, If you didn’t comply with a Russian soldiers demands, he would kill you.
I looked into her eyes and saw that the memories were etched somewhere deep — maybe, deep enough to be hidden forever.
When the Red Army entered Berlin and took control of large parts of the city, finished with their rampage of hate, they finally coordinated with the British and American forces. Berlin residents had to comply with a provisionary force that was neither government nor leader. It was chaos, and the main task would have been to stop the violence and get residents working on cleaning up of the city.
Most German men and boys had been called to the last stand and were either dead or on the run.
Berlin’s aftermath was left to the women and young girls who were put to the task of clearing streets of debris and bodies. The city had to become functional again, quickly.
The canals were blocked and overflowing, water pipes broken, outbreaks of Typhoid plagued the city.
A raging battle between the Red Army troops and a last stand by SS troops along the Landwehrkanal — city canal, meant that bridges and the embankment had been blown to rubble.
The remaining Germans left in Berlin after the war experienced a difficult adjustment.
After more than a decade of Hitler instructing them that they were the Master Race, new routines and martial law made it so they were faced with constant reminders that they are now ‘nobodys’. A total loss of personal identity occured.
A void filled German society that could only be replaced with a guilt complex that many Germans spent the rest of their lives dealing with.
The children of wartime adults also carried this guilt.
Not all gratitude is about the niceties of life. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to speak with people who experienced the Second World War.
My own family in England lived through the Blitz of London — the sustained bombing of London.
I have spoken with World War II Veterans on both sides, and with civilians who wanted to say something about that time. And I simply shut-up and listened when they spoke.
Where I live, Berlin, used to be full of people who remembered the war. Those people have mostly died, or are so old that we don’t meet them anymore.
To walk the streets of Berlin where fighting raged during the last days of the Second World War, to think about the butterfly effect of the years that have passed. The history that lives in the bullet and shrapnel marks along many of Berlin’s streets, makes a person of my generation grateful to have lived in a peaceful part of history.
