History bludgeons you here, repeatedly, and in convincing fashion. No other major European city has undergone the apocalyptic accidents of history that have befallen this place. This is not news of course, but living here exposes you to this reality in very real, grim and sanguine terms.
Barely two hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate is the labyrinth of stone blocks of the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Running through the center of the city are fragments of the Berlin Wall. Where the Wall has been removed, there is now a double line of cobblestones that has been laid in the former path of the barrier, cutting ghost-like across the current landscape of parks, busy streets and sidewalks.
In many places the history is obvious. In others is takes a little scratch to see what is under the surface. And then you are immediately knocked on your ass with what you find.
This recently happened while we ate croissants, sipped Baileys & coffee and made Christmas ornaments with the kids at a friends' flat in Prenzlauer Berg.
Rachel, Thomas and seven-month old Oscar live in a 4th floor walk-up of an "Altbau" (old construction) building in this former East Berlin neighborhood. These Altbau apartment buildings were constructed in the late 1800s during a building boom and were designed around a central courtyard. This approach is seen all over the city, in fact our building has the same setup. Nowadays people store their bikes in the courtyards to get them off the streets. Rachel's courtyard has an old brick horse stable used by the some previous resident long ago.
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| An elementary school (red) occupies the corner. The stable is the leaf-covered roof in foreground. |
While standing at their window gazing down into the courtyard, which backs up to another apartment building and the playground of an elementary school, I noticed a series of irregular holes in the brick of the building directly across. What were those holes?
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| The view out their window. |
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| Zoomed in..Suspicious holes! |
When they first moved in, Rachel met some men who had been children at the school in the early 60's. They detailed the history of the wall marks:
It was May 1945 and the Russians were making their final assault on the city. They'd infiltrated the city from 13 different directions. Hitler had just killed himself. The end was near, yet the fighting continued, as burning buildings and tank battles had turned the air black with smoke and soot. The remnants of the German Army had been split off from each other and mostly were reduced to fighting from isolated strongpoints.
Because of the looming defeat, many of these men tried to hide themselves among the civilian population in the hopes they would not be taken prisoner. For Germans, getting taken prisoner by the Russians was essentially a death sentence, largely a direct result of the actions they took when they initially invaded Russia. Getting taken prisoner by Russians meant being marched to Siberian gulags with little chance of returning. If you were an "SS" soldier, you could expect even worse.
What was the SS? Alongside the regular German Army was the SS, a separate fighting force that was originally designed to function as the backbone of a special paramilitary police force after the war was won. Members were chosen for their fanatical Nazi Party devotion as well as meeting specific Aryan physical criteria. Over time they evolved into the Reich's most reliable fighting units, being the fanatical SOB's that they were. The SS formations were the ones largely responsible for the slaughter of Russian Jews during Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union and earned a truly hateful reputation among the Soviets. SS men were in it for life: their blood types were tattooed on the inside of their arms, which later served as a tip-off (and death sentence) when they were interrogated.
The red building in the above picture was a hospital during the war. In the final battle for the city, it was (like all the hospitals) stuffed to over-capacity with wounded from the fighting and other disasters that were occurring as a result of the battle. Amid the confusion a group of SS men were hiding. This put everyone at risk: if Russians found German soldiers with civilians they figured that they were trying to protect them. In these cases the Russians sometimes just blew up the building, burying everyone inside.
When the Russians overtook the block, soldiers went through the buildings looking for combat-age men. If they decided not to blow up the building, they would just drag the men outside and shoot them. During this process the SS soldiers were discovered and a gun battle ensued. This action flowed into the courtyard, where the SS men made their last stand among the rubble.
These bullet holes directly opposite the school playground are the impacts of the Russian fire.
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| Machine-gun pockmarks on the wall opposite the school playground. |
Fast forward to the early 60's. This part of Berlin lay in the East Side. The hospital was now a school. One of the school projects was to dig a vegetable garden for the kids to plant and tend. Preparation of the site involved some digging. They had not dug far before they ran into the forgotten bodies of the SS men who'd been machine-gunned in the courtyard 20 years earlier. Plans for the garden were put aside until the bodies were exhumed.
This kind of thing continues to occur in Berlin's new building and road construction projects. Many of those who died were just left where they fell as there was nobody left to manage the burial. Most of the men in the city were either dead or prisoners and the women were too busy figuring out how to survive and feed their children and themselves.
Nearly 1000 bodies are recovered annually between the battlefields outside of Berlin and inside it, yet another ongoing reminder of the scope of the human tragedy surrounding the final battle here. Here is a recent article about battlefield archeology on the Seelow Heights, site of the last major engagement before the battle for the city.
Rachel wondered how she should think about all this. They are planning on staying in this flat for good, and young Oscar will one day go to that elementary school. They will be staring at these reminders for years, so the question was do you push to get the walls plastered over and forget what happened or do you accept having an everyday reminder that people were machine-gunned in your backyard?
It is a question the city planners grapple with constantly. Mostly the decision is to plaster it over and build something new and shiny. There are a few "marquee" ruins that Berlin has retained in an effort to remind people of what happened: The Kaiser Wilhelm Church near the Zoo and the remains of the grand entryway to the former Anhalter Bahnhof. Ruins of the Flak Towers remain as well as various bunkers scattered around.
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| What's left of Anhalter Bahnhof |
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| Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church |
The city owns up to its National Socialism period: on lightpoles around Schoeneberg's Bayerischer Platz neighborhood hang various 1930's-era Nazi edicts proclaiming the ever-more constricting rules for Jewish people in order to keep the memory alive of what these people had to face. There are also the "Stolpersteine" (Stumbling Stones), brass cubes set in between the cobblestones in front of former Jewish residences. Each stone has the name of the person who lived there and where they were sent.
The idea is that by seeing a name, at least some concept of that person will be kept alive, even if everyone who sees the stone has no actual memory of that person. In front of our kids Kita (pre-school) is a Stolpersteine for a Dr. Anna Hirschberg. She was taken to Theresienstadt in October, 1942 and later killed at Auschwitz. She was 61 years old. The house she lived in no longer exists, since her building was bombed to rubble during an air raid. After the war they built the preschool on the cleared lot.
But every time I drop the kids off I look for Anna on my way down the street to the U-Bahn. Clearly I never knew her or any descendants, but somehow she's not forgotten as I am currently blogging about her.
I guess I'd prefer the history to remain obvious. Otherwise these people, and why they died, will be forgotten.
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