I Heart Berlin

Berlin isn't romantic like Paris or charming like an English sea-side town.  It's grungy and underground, but clean-shaven too, and, because of everything I've learned in history books, a bit taboo.  I fall in love with the city one evening, drinking mugs of German pilsner in Prater Biergarten, Berlin's oldest outdoor pub.  Rows of picnic tables are lined symmetrically, one after the other, and strings of light bulbs criss-cross above your head.  I'm sitting with two substitute teachers from Maryland.  Later that night, we play ping pong in an empty white room, then we get our hands stamped and go dancing.  But at this moment,  with two strangers from Maryland, slap-happy and on-the-verge of sloppy inebriation, I sort of stumble on my words when I pronounce, barely, "I love this city."  I mean it too, every single syllable.  It's the artwork that's tagged on the side of concrete buildings and it's the relevancy, how recent everything is.  In 1989, the wall crumbled down and the east ran west, bottles of champagne spilled in celebration, and, as history goes, David Hasselhoff was somehow responsible.  Berlin is zany in that way.

Right after leaving Berlin, all I want to do is return.  It's my favorite city, hands down, and the people are ultra cool and I drink lots of Berliner.  I travel to the east-side gallery of the deconstructed wall and I get lost in a fenced-in-lot with Carribean music and imported sand.  The streets are studded with curry wurst stands and vintage shops; I like the people and I love this weird city.

Berlin has been divided and broken-down and bombed, but, miraculously, it's transformed itself into this phoenix, rising from its ashes (and in Berlin, there's a whole lot of ashes), an emblem for re-construction and reinvention.  And, although the city is spanking new with lots of cement and mohawks and worn-in combat boots, you can't really escape its past.  On a free walking tour, the very short guide leads the group into a parking lot.  "This," he projects for the whole group to hear, "was the location of Hitler's bunker."  Cars are parked and the ground is un-paved.  And that's basically it.  There's the past, which is very much present, even if it's a parking lot.

And I'm Jewish and my dad's a Rabbi.  Growing up Jewish, you eat bagels and lox, and kugel, and kishke.  When you meet a fellow Jew, there's this mutual understanding, this nod.  We, you both think, share the same ancestry, the same history, and together we were persecuted, and together we were saved.  It's this knowledge that we, somehow, share something and maybe it's Yiddishkeit or maybe it's the holy land, or it might just be that we both eat matzah ball soup, but it's something.  It's the common 'we.' And there's the Holocaust, where families were dismembered and humans were slaughtered.  Survivors come into your first grade classroom and speak to you and they say, "I survived, but there's this number," and they show you their inked wrist, numbered like a bar-code.  And this amazing city of Berlin was the epicenter, the blinking control room, for Nazi Germany.

When I'm there, I don't think about it much.  There's too much happening in the present.  I'm above ground, where Hitler's bunker is land-marked, standing next to a sea-foam green hatchback.  "Alright," it doesn't process, and then I'm off, walking to the next historical site, following the absurdly short tour guide.  After being home for several months, looking back, the city's very strange and very far.  It's similar to when you're so close to someone and then, all of a sudden, you're not.  A falling out perhaps.  Something happens and that person becomes the furthest and strangest human being to you and you think, "Who are they?"  That's the way I feel about Berlin right now.  I'm conflicted and confused.  I still love the city, but it's different now.

My last day in Berlin, I take the train to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.  There's a huge concrete tower before you enter the premises and there's a memorial garden with butterflies.  Weeds disguised as yellow flowers grow rampant.  There's a gift shop with souvenirs and, for a pound, you can purchase a map of the grounds.  When I first get there, sludging through the mud, tourists pose for pictures, smiling in front of the tower.  This place, which symbolizes death and human cruelty, has a gift shop and smiling tourists with flashing cameras.  After you enter the iron gates, it's quiet and isolated and spread out, so that most of the time, you're completely by yourself.

When I first arrive in Berlin, I don't know what to expect.  It's overcast and a dark fog creeps low. You can't see much, except for the tall pin-needle of a building, several kilometers away.  The city's history precedes itself and is eerily present- it's in the skyline and in the fog- and you think: 1940's Berlin, this must have been hell.