After Covid-19, Berlin faces its challenging history

On the east side of Berlin, a few blocks from the Ostbahnhof, there’s an enormous artwork that recalls the most extraordinary year in the history of this wonderful, awful city. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, but Germany wasn’t reunified until October 1990, so for 11 months Berliners lived in limbo. For those 11 months, anything seemed possible.

For a while, people thought they could make the world anew. Artists flocked from all around the world, and a bunch of them repainted the longest surviving section of the wall – almost a mile long, along the north bank of the river Spree.

This collective artwork, comprising countless murals, became known as the East Side Gallery. Thirty years on, it reads like the record of a bygone age. I first visited the East Side Gallery in 1991, a year after it was painted. 

I was moved and inspired by what I saw. “1961 – refugees trigger the building of the Berlin Wall,” read one of these bold murals. “1989 - refugees trigger the fall of the Berlin Wall.” 

“Du hast gelernt was Freiheit heist, und das vergiss nie mehr,” read another. “You’ve learnt what freedom is. Don’t forget again.”

These murals seemed so full of hope, not just about Germany, but about the new world order. As the painting on the wall proclaimed, “No more wars, no more walls, a united world”. Returning here today, you realise how those hopes have faded: 1990 was supposed to be the end of history, the triumph of liberal democracy.

Thirty years later, we’ve ended up with Trump and Putin. Populists are on the rise in eastern Europe, Brexiteers are in power in Britain… what the hell happened? For millions like me, who were just starting out on life’s strange journey in 1990, it’s been a bitter disappointment. 

Yet ironically, the one place where things have turned out better than I dared to hope is Germany. Due to a combination of good sense, good government and good fortune, the pariah of the 20th century has become the 21st century’s guiding light.

Germany’s steady stewardship is epitomised by its common-sense approach to Covid-19. The Bundesrepublik has a much bigger population than Britain, and many of the same challenges – large densely populated cities with large immigrant communities – yet the caseload is a fraction of Britain’s. 

How do they do it? Lots of testing, track and trace, and lots of public-spirited citizens. Everybody wears masks indoors, and even in anarchic Berlin (supposedly the most rebellious place in Germany) virtually everyone obeys the rules.

Consequently, daily life is now pretty much back to normal. Who knew? Boris Johnson says Britons are more at risk because they’re more freedom-loving. Tell that to the brave East Germans who brought down the Berlin Wall.

Since that first visit to Berlin, I’ve been back to Germany more times than I can count, and I’ve seen the two halves of this reunited country come together. It’s been a difficult and painful process (and extremely expensive) but today it seems inconceivable that Germany could ever be divided in two again. 

I’ve reported from all over Germany, especially the former East, and each time I return here things are slightly better than they were before. The Bundesrepublik is no paradise. It has its fair share of problems. But it’s a world away from the dark dystopia some commentators foresaw.

It's easy to forget, now we know this story had a happy ending, but in Britain the fall of the Berlin Wall was greeted with apprehension, not jubilation. Margaret Thatcher even convened a meeting of Anglo-American historians to discuss the German character and came up with a list of national stereotypes, ranging from angst to egotism, from sentimentality to aggression.

Armed with this crude analysis, she did her utmost to thwart German reunification. It was the American president George Bush who pushed it through. Thankfully, Thatcher’s fears of a Fourth Reich proved unfounded. The reunited Germany has become an entirely different kind of world power, peaceful and pluralist, internationalist not nationalistic, and no German city encapsulates this change of heart better than Berlin.

The capital of the Third Reich has become a chaotic capital of culture, “poor but sexy” in the words of its charismatic gay mayor Klaus Wowereit. It’s still a work in progress, and will remain so for years to come, but during the past 30 years it’s enjoyed an incredible renaissance. Throughout the Cold War it was a cul-de-sac, a place whose time had passed. Now, against all odds, it’s at a crossroads again.

When I first came here, a few months after reunification, Berlin was still a divided city in all but name. West Berlin was brash and bustling, East Berlin was silent and austere. Lately, they’ve swapped places. Now East Berlin is loud and bright, while West Berlin feels old and dowdy.

They’re still two different cities, but the border between them is no longer clear. A thin line of cobbles marks the route of the East German “Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier” (built, despite the rhetoric, to imprison its own inhabitants, rather than to keep out the fascists) but the shiny new buildings on either side look much the same.

One place where the old border remains visible is Bernauer Strasse. Here, the wall ran right down the middle of the street. Some East Berliners escaped by jumping out of the windows of their apartments. When the border guards bricked up the windows, they dug tunnels instead.

Eventually, the East Germans demolished these apartments, creating a broad, barren “death strip” between West and East. Today that death strip is a garden. Sunflowers bloom amid the memorials to the Berliners who died trying to cross this street. 

For my generation, born and raised during the Cold War, this is a place of pilgrimage. For my children’s generation, born since the wall came down, it’s ancient history. For them, Berlin is a party town, not a mausoleum.

Yet the “Mauer im Kopf” (“the wall in the mind”) remains. One building that sums up Berlin’s competing histories, and the enduring tensions between left and right, is the Berliner Schloss, a spectacular reconstruction of the Kaiser’s palace. The Schloss was badly damaged in the Second World War, but it could have been restored.

Instead, the Communists demolished it (largely for ideological reasons – they hated what it represented) and replaced it with a modernist eyesore called the Palace of the Republic. When Germany was reunified, the Bundesrepublik tore it down (they said it was riddled with asbestos, which was true, but there were ideological reasons too).

For a long time this huge site stood empty, a vast vacant lot in the centre of the city. Somehow, this blank space seemed to symbolise the uncertainty of the new Germany. Communism had been rejected, as had Nazism and imperialism before, but demolition was the easy part. 

What to build now in its place? In the end, the Bundesrepublik came up with a compromise that honours the best of Berlin’s history. After the last Kaiser abdicated, in 1918, and Germany became a republic, the Berliner Schloss became a museum.

Happily, it’s a museum once again. The exterior has been rebuilt – an exact replica of the Schloss that stood here until 1950 – but the interior is modern, a new exhibition space for Berlin’s ethnological collections (the director is Neil MacGregor, formerly director of the British Museum).

This marriage of old and new is what makes Berlin unique. It’s more like archeology than architecture, the past stripped bare. Bombed, ravaged and divided, made and remade so many times, you can survey its history on every boulevard, from the Kaiser to the Fuhrer, from capitalism to communism and back again. 

You can see it in Norman Foster’s dramatic cupola above the battered, bombastic Reichstag. You can see it in James Stirling’s new British embassy, around the corner, on Wilhelmstrasse. You can see it in David Chipperfield’s graceful renovation of Museum Island, opposite the Berliner Schloss. Why do so many of Britain’s best architects end up doing their best work here?

But it’s not just about the buildings, it’s about what they represent. As MacGregor has pointed out, for Britons, all too often, history is a comfort blanket, something we use to reassure ourselves, to tell ourselves how great we are. A country that tells itself such selective stories deludes itself and courts disaster, as Germany demonstrated between 1914 and 1945.

Germany is no longer interested in myths of national greatness, and this mature morality is echoed on the streets. Beside the Brandenburg Gate is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. 

Opposite Humboldt University an empty library marks the spot where Hitler’s Brownshirts burnt the books. Maybe Germany has more need of forgiveness than any other nation, but in seeking this forgiveness it’s become one of the most open societies on Earth.

Berlin was, and always will be, the capital of the Holocaust, and no number of memorials can wish this truth away. Since reunification Jews have been returning to Berlin, not just as visitors but as residents. There is now a thriving Jewish community, but it will never be what it used to be, and its absence is all around you. 

Outside one of my favourite restaurants in Berlin, Cafe Einstein, there are two stolpersteine (literally “stumbling stones” – little brass plaques the size of cobblestones, cemented into the sidewalk) which commemorate the cafe’s Jewish owners, who killed themselves after the restaurant was stolen from them by the Nazis. These memorials don’t absolve yesterday’s Germans, but they show today’s Germans the way ahead.

And thankfully, not every antique building in Berlin is a monument to an atrocity. The Hotel Oderberger was a public bath before it became a boutique hotel. Built at the zenith of the Second Reich, for the workers in the nearby houses, it was a municipal swimming pool under the Communists, and has now been beautifully restored. The Hamburger Bahnhof was a train station. Now it’s an art gallery. Here in Berlin, nothing is entirely as it seems.

On my last day I went to Potsdam, the Prussian version of Versailles. The town was a ruin when I first came here, and so was Frederick the Great’s palace. Now the town is bustling, and the palace is as good as new. The Schloss has been rebuilt, the cathedral restored, and the cobbled streets are full of people.

Down by the old canal, the Day of National Unity celebrations were in full swing: lots of flags and bunting – red, black and gold. Finally, Germans can feel proud of being German again, but it’s a modest kind of patriotism, the sort of thing you tend to find in smaller countries. It’s not remotely militaristic. The focus is on art and music, food and drink.

Frederick the Great would make a good poster boy for the new Germany. A great military strategist, he also hobnobbed with Voltaire. Religiously tolerant and probably homosexual, he lived simply, rising and retiring early. He brought peace and prosperity to this part of Germany. He kept his people fed. He’s buried here in Potsdam. Admirers still place potatoes on his grave.

A hundred years ago Germany was riding high: a booming economy, thriving industries, great social services and more Nobel Prize winners than you can count - a progressive, pragmatic empire that stretched from Lithuania to Lorraine. 

The 20th century should have been an Anglo-German century, built on the special relationship between those first cousins, Kaiser Wilhelm and King George V. Then the kaiser went and ruined everything by sparking the First World War. It’s taken Germany a century to recover. It’s been a long way back.

On my way back into town, my train stopped at Grunewald, the leafy suburban station where German Jews were shipped onto cattle trucks and transported to concentration camps across Europe. 

The platform they left from is empty, save for a long list of all the trains that left from here, and all the passengers, and the places where they ended up. Trees grow between the tracks.

I finished my latest visit to Berlin back where I began, at the East Side Gallery. I was looking for my favourite mural and I was glad to find it was still there. “Viele kleine Leute die in vielen kleine Orten, viele kleine Dinge tun, können das Gesicht der Welt verändern,” it says.

“Many small people in many small places who do many small things can change the face of the world.” That sentiment seems less certain now, and the wider world looks a lot darker than it did when I first came here, nearly 30 years ago. But here in Berlin, where the best and worst has happened, it somehow still rings true.

For more information go to  www.germany.travel or www.visitberlin.de