Quite Enough

It is Sunday morning in Berlin. The church bells are ringing, but I can assure you that the pews will be empty. Berliners do not go to church, and if they do, they certainly never admit to it. If a Berliner admitted to going to church on Sunday morning, then there would be the assumption that they did not go out on Saturday night, and that is an unpardonable sin - perhaps the only one - in this Sodom on the Spree. I am assuming that most people are asleep, although they could be at one of the all-night bars in Schőnberg where they paint the windows black to keep out the sunlight– those places that have not been renovated in 30 years…where they still play disco on cassette tapes and where strangers still ask you to dance.

It is almost 10. There are still a few brave revelers on their way home, swerving in and out of the sidewalk, glinting at the unwelcome brightness. One young man in impossibly tight leather pants raises a beer bottle to his lips but misses and in the process sprays himself with foam… a baptism of sorts – a sacrament of the cult of Dionysus – just one of the things you see every day in this city where carousing is an act of defiance, where scars run deep.

For in Berlin there is no half-hearted revelry, no tripping the light fantastic – here there is grit and seediness in pockmarked buildings – a desperate hedonism that is revolting, but which you cannot resist. In Berlin people still drink to forget - to overcome – and it feels as though the thousands of neighborhood pubs that define this city are a living theatre where world-weary citizens act out their collective history with a vital force that never sees the light of day.

Heavy, I know – and perhaps a bit outdated, for Berlin is changing fast. It is becoming more international - worldly, more style and less substance. It is more difficult to find that Berliner Schnauze – the pugnacious come-as-you-are crustiness of the people who have seen it all – people whose surly exterior reveal a genuine warmth once you get to know them.

Indeed, going for coffee in the recently rebuilt Potsdamer Platz feels like going out for coffee in any number of cities – sitting in a Starbucks, across from the Marriott, beside the McDonalds. You order your latte and your muffin and sit down – listening to the CD of the week that is the same one you heard everywhere else. It is hard to know where you are - until you look outside and see the double row of stones on the pavement, marking the place where the wall once stood. I asked my friend why they didn’t try to rebuild Potsdamer Platz in a more authentic way that was rooted in the history and culture of the place. He looked at me and calmly told me that the stones were quite enough.

Yes, the stones are quite enough. Stones where the wall once was, stones where the Jews once were, stones where the boots once marched…stones where the books once burned. Berlin changes, reinvents itself, stays the same, tries to remember and at the same time move on, can’t decide which one is more important...can't decide if one can exist without the other.

But I can tell you that even if Berlin were razed to the ground - if it ceased even to be a place on the map, that Berlin would still be marked forever. And this is right and good, lest we too become only stones - the ones that people step over on their way home from a night of drinking, the drinking they do to forget the fact that they knew – knew all along what had happened in this place.

And that they chose to do nothing.