On a recent visit to Berlin, I was reminded again how a city can serve as a memory site. Everywhere you turn in this beautiful city is something reminiscent of both its glorious and its atrocious past.
Berlin – destroyed during the final months of World War II, divided between East and West by the famous Berlin Wall, and reunited after the fall of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 – is being rebuilt at a mad tempo, but everywhere new buildings are in conversation with the past. For example, behind the Brandenburg Gate, the best architects in the world have left their mark on Pariser Platz, most famously Frank Gehry’s design of the DZ Bank. The ‘new’ square converses with the recently restored Brandenburg Gate – a symbol of division during the Cold War, and now epitomising German reunification.
One cannot avoid history in Berlin. Above all, I am always impressed how the city commemorates the destruction of Europe’s Jews. The most monumental is the Holocaust Memorial, which took 17 years to discuss, plan and construct, and which occupies a space the size of a football field on high-profile real estate just south of the Brandenburg Gate.
The monument – a series of rectangular concrete blocks of varying heights – is puzzling, and to get the most of it you need to visit the Information Centre lying underneath, where a presentation of the timeline of the genocide is followed by a projection of the names of victims and their dates of birth and death, while a sombre voice reads their short biographies.
Another impressive memorial is the Jewish Museum, the largest such museum in Europe. Designed by the Polish-born architect Daniel Libeskind, the museum – which documents the history of Jews in Germany over the centuries – is a zinc-clad zigzag construction which includes the ominously silent Holocaust Tower, one of the museum’s several ‘voids’.
But Berlin commemorates the genocide in more mundane ways, too. Everywhere in the city you can see small brass plaques set into the footpath, with names and dates of deportation, or street signs reminding passers-by of deportation places, or of services forbidden to Jews during the Nazi times. From time to time, signs carrying the names of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps in the middle of the busy streets stop Germans and tourists from forgetting. Thus, apart from being a model of renewal, urban planning and culture, the city is also one big memorial, making the visitor wonder how these cultured people could become Nazi perpetrators of untold crimes.
However, today’s Berlin is also remarkably white. Apart from the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg, where most shop signs are in Turkish rather than German, I saw very few people of colour.
In shops and coffee houses, the waiters were largely German, and there was little visible evidence of mass migration. Yet contemporary Ger-many has created various categories of migrants, including the legal status of ‘tolerated’, assigned to people not granted refugee status but who cannot be deported for ‘humanitarian reasons’. Some 180,000 people hold this status of ‘toleration’, which implies restricted freedom of movement. In addition, between 100,000 and 500,000 ‘illegal’ migrants live in the city of Berlin alone, and, like the ‘tolerated’, they live in a state of uncertainty and fear of deportation.
All of this makes me wonder whether this beautiful city, which knows how to preserve and commemorate its past, has really learnt anything from its atrocious history.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eireann
