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Berlin memories
I first visited Berlin in 1985, while traveling with Randall Kroszner. We drove to West Berlin by car and we were terrified for the few hours we were underway in East Germany. Randy did not drive over the speed limit once. I was hardly a communist sympathizer but still I was unprepared for the day trip to East Berlin. I saw soldiers goose-stepping down one of the main streets. In the stores old ladies yelled and swung their brooms at me. Many buildings still had bullet marks or bomb damage from World War II. In a restaurant we ate a rubber Wiener Schnitzel and shared a table with an East German family; they did not have enough trust in their government to speak a word to us. I was unable to spend my mandatory thirty-mark conversion on anything useful; I carried back some Stendahl and Goethe but didn't want the Lenin. This was in the capital city in the showcase of the communist world.
My biggest impression was simply that I had never seen evil before.
In the summer of 1990 I stayed in a dorm in East Berlin. Everyone seemed normal. Cute girls smiled. Yet there were few signs of modern German life as a Westerner might understand it; it was as if I had stepped into an alternative science fiction universe. The Vietnamese ran the street markets and Russian still mattered.
In 1999 I heard an emotional performance of Fidelio there and most of the audience cried.
I like spending time in Berlin. But I am never sure I like Berlin itself, West or East. Berlin is Germany being imperial. Berlin is Germany looking toward the east. Today Berlin is Germany pretending it is normal, while not yet having a new identity. Here is Kurt Tucholsky (in German) on Berlin. Here is a silly quotation about Berlin:
“Berlin combines the culture of New York, the traffic system of Tokyo, the nature of Seattle, and the historical treasures of, well, Berlin.”
Here is the Berlin Sony Center. Here is the Reichstag. Here is the Jewish Museum. Here is Knut, from the Berlin Zoo.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 9, 2009 at 07:26 AM in History, Travels | Permalink
Comments
The picture is not the Sony Center, it's the Reichstag
Posted by: Flo at Nov 9, 2009 7:46:22 AM
Funny, you've nailed the exact reasons I don't like Berlin, and my first visit there was only in 2008. There was something that felt a little bit...Russian and heavy...about the place, even with the 18th century stuff that's a delight in a place like Vienna.
Posted by: Chris at Nov 9, 2009 7:47:08 AM
To the contrary, Berlin (2009) is the one place in Germany I didn't feel ill at ease with a past that is not fully examined. The elements in Berlin - from the Kaiser to the Soviets via Nazism - are all out there in their disquieting reality. I call the place Sleeping Beauty awakened from a 40 year slumber and playing catch up with the 21st century with remarkable dynamism. Vienna to me (admittedly 1982) is one of the dullest cities I have ever visited.
Posted by: martin at Nov 9, 2009 8:04:22 AM
'Many buildings still had bullet marks or bomb damage from World War II.'
Having first visited Berlin in 1992, I understand what you mean about East Berlin.
But having first visited West Germany in 1982, and living here in 2009, the bullet/shrapnel marks in stone buildings are as obvious and as unrepaired as ever before.
Germans don't really need to do much but look around at any stone building in any town with a population above a few thousand built to see what war means.
As for Berlin being the capital - a mistake, though hopefully not a grave one. But considering that the only thing the East Germans got out of reunification they wished for was Berlin as the capital, in exchange for being taken over by West Germans (the same secular West Germans who have attempted to reinstate mandatory religion classes in schools in, well, East Berlin's surrounding state, or who try to restrict the nude beaches that the SED allowed), it probably was cheap at the price.
However, as for that Eastern orientation - well, if Turkey is Eastern enough for you, then Berlin is more Eastern oriented than most of Germany.
Posted by: not_scottbot at Nov 9, 2009 8:11:49 AM
It's not the Sony Center, it's Parliament (Reichstag).
Posted by: Torben at Nov 9, 2009 8:17:02 AM
The Germans have an expression for the general attitude of former GDR guards and bureaucrats. It is that they were "mies" which is translated as "lousy or grumpy" but it means, for example, that if the former GDR border police could find a way to make your life difficult, they would.
Posted by: JC at Nov 9, 2009 8:21:00 AM
The Germans have an expression for the general attitude of former GDR guards and bureaucrats. It is that they were "mies" which is translated as "lousy or grumpy" but it means, for example, that if the former GDR border police could find a way to make your life difficult, they would.
Posted by: JC at Nov 9, 2009 8:21:45 AM
Link is fixed...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Nov 9, 2009 8:30:34 AM
Surprisingly forthcoming value judgements in this post. Well done, Tyler. I've never been to Berlin, but I find German history fascinating. Would love to travel there some day.
Posted by: Ryan at Nov 9, 2009 8:53:33 AM
Tyler, surprised you didn't link to this post:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/east_germany_ci.html
Here are my own memories of visiting East Berlin in January 1990:
http://togetrichisglorious.blogspot.com/2009/11/berlin.html
Posted by: Colin at Nov 9, 2009 8:58:34 AM
I have never been in Berlin but I knew some British students who were in
Germany at the time and who came back with a treasured "relic" from the
Wall. In the 1990s I met some students from East Germany who thought
West Germans too much in the grip of the materialistic life. And I have read that Wessies think that Ossies, having grown up in a non-entrepreneurial culture, do no work hard enough. The 20th anniversary understandably evokes the euphoria of unifification but things have become more complex since then.
Posted by: Candadai Tirumalai at Nov 9, 2009 9:13:25 AM
Reposting the links from Colin's post:
http://www.brianrose.com/journal/2008/03/new-yorkeast-berlin-1987.html
http://www.brianrose.com/journal/2008/03/new-yorkeast-berlin-1987_30.html
http://www.brianrose.com/journal/2008/04/new-yorkeast-berlin-1987.html
I'm amazed those pictures are of Mitte. Mitte is the gentrified, expensive district nowadays. It's the Manhattan of Berlin.
Posted by: Zach at Nov 9, 2009 9:52:58 AM
Tyler, I had almost the exact same experience in April of 1989. I drove across from the crossing near Hannover, and was struck by the nastiness of the border procedures (even though I'd expected them). Then I was deeply disturbed by my first sight of the Wall, even though I knew its history well. I got to it near midnight, which didn't help, but still, I was struck by how furious and disgusted I was at the sight of the thing - and the accompanying searchlights, razor wire, guard towers, and so on. How anyone could look at it and not immediately think "horrible high security prison camp", I couldn't say.
And I crossed on foot through Checkpoint Charlie the next day, was similarly robbed of 30 West-marks, and couldn't spend them, either. I had a foul bratwurst for lunch, and thought that on that evidence alone there must be something seriously off when the Germans were unable to produce a decent sausage. I saw the goose-stepping guards at the Unknown Soldier tomb (in the company of some appalled Brits who swore under their breath), and at the Friedrichstrasse U-bahn platform (an island inside an island) I watched in shock as the booted, armed, long-coated guard went strolling along the catwalk above us, watching the crowd. "I've seen this movie", I kept thinking.
I ended up buying a book in the Volksbuchhandlung as a souvenir, after similar being yelled at by the cashier woman for trying to shop without a hand basket, the way the sign said I had to. I dropped a copy of "Amnesty International: A Biography of Lies" into it, and the handle fell off.
And at the end of the day, the guard back at the checkpoint informed me that I could not leave with any DDR currency. "Was soll Ich denn tun?" I asked him, and he replied flatly in thickly accented English: "Enchoy a ress-taurant". I walked out a couple of blocks away and gave my currency to the first East German couple pushing a baby carriage I saw.
I, too, thought that I'd definitely seen evil right in front of me. I've never had reason to think differently.
Posted by: Derek Lowe at Nov 9, 2009 10:01:16 AM
perhaps you should visit hamburg, munich and duesseldorf. much more western and friendly, less russian.
Posted by: amv at Nov 9, 2009 11:32:39 AM
Tyler, your comments brought back memoies of a trip I took through Europe with a friend in the '70s. Our Eurail pass woouldn't work in East Gremany, of course, so I decided to hitchhike to Berlin! I got picked up with my thumb out in front of one of the checkpoints. In the car were two young Berliners. I had rudimentary German and they spoke no English, so conversation was limited.
I remember rolling through the countryside; there were frequent billboards and signs along the route proclaiming "Socialism is the wave of the Future!" You were forbidden to stop on the highway, there were no gas stations, and my impression was thas it was not a good idea to break down.
To my astonishment, after a while, my companions asked me if I had "Papiern" or a "Pfeiif"; they wanted to smoke some marijuana! I gave them some cigarettes that they emptied and fashioned into joints. I was very afraid of what the consequences could have been, but we made it through into Berlin without incident.
Having met up with my friend in Berlin, we took the train back. It was pulled by a steam locomotive, something I'd never seen before. At the train stations we saw guards with submachine guns.
No one thought that this brutal system would go away anytime soon. Now in my office I have a little piece of the Wall that my sister gave me later, after the Wall no longer served the function of separating East and West Germany.
Posted by: blades at Nov 9, 2009 11:37:07 AM
I was a missionary in the former East Germany for two years, 97-99, mostly on the Polish border. Your depiction of things brought back a lot of powerful memories of the way things still were.
Yet not a day went by but someone told us that life was so much better before Reunification: no unemployment, no crime, the cities weren't so empty, "I honestly don't know what you young people have to live for." Every day. Multiple times a day. "What did it brings us? Oh, yes, we can travel to the West now. Big deal." Teens were fairly evenly divided between unconscious enjoyment of Western lifestyles and the same bitter attacks on all things capitalistic. The two families (2!) who told us they wondered what their compatriots were smoking stood out strongly in my mind. My first day there it was gray: gray buildings, gray streets, and the sky remained a flat gray without noticeable cloud or sun for 3 straight weeks. A very appropriate color.
My wife and I visited again during our honeymoon and though the building facades have gotten more paint, the flood of people out of the East has only grown without unemployment notching down noticeably and the attitude is much the same.
Posted by: D. Watson at Nov 9, 2009 1:26:05 PM
Berlin is rather a one horse dorp. But, dear God, the opera is wonderful value.
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 9, 2009 1:35:34 PM
"I was struck by how furious and disgusted I was at the sight of the thing - and the accompanying searchlights, razor wire, guard towers, and so on."
This is exactly what I thought when looking at the wall at the Tijuana border.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at Nov 9, 2009 1:42:15 PM
"In the stores old ladies yelled and swung their brooms at me." I saw the same behavior in Nuremberg in 1982. Are you really surprised women who were bombed relentlessly and lost their families in the 1940s might not be fond of Americans and Brits even 40 years later?
There was one decent use to which you could put your otherwise useless East German Marks in 1985 - the selection of classical music was usually good and full of performers and orchestras that were hard to come by in the West.
Posted by: vanya at Nov 9, 2009 1:43:07 PM
"Berlin is Germany being imperial. Berlin is Germany looking toward the east. Today Berlin is Germany pretending it is normal, while not yet having a new identity." I see, just US can be imperial.
Posted by: Antonio at Nov 9, 2009 2:45:06 PM
Most revealing article on the "new Berliners":
Organic or Bust! (Bionade-Biedermeier)
Posted by: JasonM at Nov 9, 2009 2:58:25 PM
I was in Berlin in the summer of 1988. (No one had any inkling of what was coming a year later.) East Berlin was just as Tyler describes it: opressive and opressed, a socio-cultural desert. But West Berlin was also very different: dominated by twenty-something students and Turkish immigrants, shabby but vibrant, it was the sort of leftist playground that only massive subsidies can support. It was a very unusual place at a very unusual time.
Posted by: David Wright at Nov 9, 2009 3:57:10 PM
This is exactly what I thought when looking at the wall at the Tijuana border.
While the Mexico/U.S. border wall is a colossal waste of money and resources, comparing it to the Berlin Wall is just stupid. The U.S. government isn't preventing its own citizens from leaving in any way, shape, or form... and millions of illegal immigrants are able to come to the United States, get jobs, attend schools, receive medical treatment, publicly protest government policy, get drivers license, and even vote in local elections.
I mean, I get it. You hate the U.S.. But you are seriously self-deluded if you think anything in the U.S. is remotely compatible to the Iron Curtain during the cold war.
Posted by: Vehical Driver at Nov 9, 2009 4:11:06 PM
@Vehicle Driver: Why do you write something insightful and then throw it all away with a pointless and mean-spirited attack like that last little bit?
Posted by: Dan * at Nov 9, 2009 5:08:26 PM
I'm sure we all remember our first drive across Europe with a Governor of the Federal Reserve. For me, Ric Mishkin and I drove from Budapest to Minsk in 1982. We stopped for a fantastic bowl of borscht in Vinnytsia. Nice town.
Seriously though - you've lived an interesting life Tyler.
Posted by: Jim at Nov 9, 2009 10:59:16 PM
