Berlin: Some Reminders of the Brutality of Goverment

Berlin Some Reminders of the Brutality of Government:

The NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in the Lexus and the Olive Tree that the worlds “New Economy” and the concept of Globalization in the modern era began on Nov 9, 1989 (in his new book he pokes fun at the irony that this date is 11/9 and has far more significance to the world than 9/11) with the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the collapse of the worlds most heavily monitored and fortified boarders signaled the collapse o f Communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War.

Never has any place stood out to me as a lesson in the follies of control. The obvious atrocities committed by Hitler and the Third Reich are the first to come to mind but that was only the beginning of the control exerted on Berliners in the last century. Three sights illustrate these follies perfectly. They are the Reichstag, The Empty Library, and of course the Berlin Wall. All are with in a shot walk of each other with a number of tours operating in the area (the best is the New Berlin Free Tour leaving from the Starbucks in front of Brandenburg Gate).

The Reichstag is where the control stems from Hitler’s use of the burring of the Reichstag as his opportunity to seize power. He claimed that the arson was actually a communist plot and a signal for revolution. Hitler said he was the man with the plan and persuaded the government into giving him absolute power for 30 days. Those 30 days turned into 12 years of World War and one of the darkest moments in the history of civilization. It was this centralized concentration of power that allowed Hitler’s dictatorship to rise and take control of Europe. The Reichstag remained in its burned shell state up and until just after the fall of the wall. The architect Norman Foster patched the dome with a glass top as an obvious reminder for the past. In addition a spiraling walk way that serves as an art gallery winds up along the dome. From here citizens can look down upon the government in session and elected officials can look upward to the people for inspiration. A fantastic physical analogy for how government should function, for the people.

The Second sight is the Empty Library. This is a subterranean library serving a a memorial to the Nazi book burring. You know that seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy needs to go to Berlin to get back his father’s diary. When he gets there he saves it from a book burning and gets it singed by Hitler himself in the process. Well that burning is what the Empty Library is memorializing. Thousands of books by Jewish authors, liberals, foreigners, communists, and basically anyone Joseph Göbbels deemed unfit to read were tossed from the top window of the Berlin Library and onto a massive bonfire in the middle of. This included authors like Hemmingway, Kafka, Marks, and many others with some of the only copies in existence destroyed. The memorial is a completely empty room with empty white shelves enough to hold about 26,000 books or just ½ of what was burned. You look down though a glass panel in the middle of the square. There is a marker next to the window into the library that has a quote from Heinrich Heine another author whose works were burned. Although the quote was written in response to another book burring 100 years earlier, the words are a chilling forecast of what was to come.

“This was just a practice run. For those who burn books also burn people.”

The final sight is the one that dominates the central Berlin landscape at almost every turn. This of course is the Berlin Wall. Erected in 1961 by the soviets as a means to better control the population of Deutsche Demokratische Republik and in particular the population of East Berlin it quickly became the symbolism of the metaphorical Iron Curtin. Eventually the wall really became two walls with a “killing zone” located in between both. The Soviets made sure that it was secure and employed highly sophisticated security measures to thwart would be defectors. If trying to cross you were forced to one of the 3 designated crossing points Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. The latter being the most infamous of the three. If trying to cross on your own you would be meet with attack dogs on guide wires, land mines, machine guns designed to fire at sound and motion, and of course armed soviet boarder guards. Within the confines of the wall your every as a citizen your every action was monitored, regulated, and controlled. The Gestapo had some 1 agent to every 400 people during the Nazi era. By the late 1970’s the KGB was in the range of 1 agent to every 8 East Berliners. The state knew when you farted. This was all at the fore front of an effort to shape and control German thought into the perfect socialist state.

By 1989 the relaxation of media regulations in the Soviet Union two years earlier had started the disintegration of the Eastern Block. By Nov. 1989 and with the help of a few blunders on the part of the East German DDR government the border was open and the wall was coming down. I was 9 at the time but its significance is clear. Few other events have shaped our world like this and it has defined the world I will grow up in and the differences between the one my parents did.