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A remnant of the Berlin Wall in Mitte.
It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master
― Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
A shaggy-haired Brit is discussing history in a city with too much of it. He’s at a neighboring café table in Mitte, the heart of Berlin, old and new.
“There was this American professor, Fukushima,” he tells his friends. “In the 1990s, after the Wall came down, he said history was over after communism was defeated by capitalism. You can see why people thought that—back then.”
The young man goes on, warning of a new digital totalitarianism. He’s got a juvenile offense on record back in Sussex. That file may be preserved forever, up in the sinister cloud. Think of all that smartphones hoover up for tech tyrants! “Ultimately, the thing is to get rid of them,” he says, by which I think he means our nosy apps. In Berlin, one might have bloodier revolutions in mind.
Here we are, discussing surveillance in the birthplace of the Stasi. I’m posing as another tourist while making notes for the dossier. It’s Francis Fukuyama, I want to tell this boy conspiracist, not even a speck when a fearsome barrier was breached. For a moment, it did feel as if the great clock had been reset. You had to be there.
Intersectionality has become a cringe-inducing term, but what is Berlin if not some snarled historical cloverleaf? So many lines cross here: Hitler and Honecker, Civilization and whoever marches through Central Europe next, Globalism and Nativism. Memory and Oblivion.
The Ukrainians are in Berlin, alongside refugees from a dozen other little wars, kindling for the bonfire that may be coming. An orderly global map is lapsing into an old game of Risk. With it surges familiar ugliness: The European Elections were good to hard right politicians in Italy, Austria, and Germany. Last month, Björn Höcke, leader of the xenophobic AfD party, was found guilty of using a banned SS slogan Alles für Deutschland ('everything for Germany') in a political speech.
History never ends in Berlin. It’s in a sky once blackened by bombers, in the canal where Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse floated, and embedded into sidewalks as memorial stolpersteine— stumbling blocks from the past. In Charlottenburg there lived a person with my surname, before he was dragged off to die in Gestapo custody. In Prenzlauer Berg there was another, who fled to Holland, where he was interned in Westerbork, then deported to Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt before making last call at Auschwitz. Wherever you walk, you are between a Prussian palace and a mass grave.
Intersections: The Jewish Museum, Berlin
Intersections: The Jewish Museum, Berlin
Yet somehow there is a lightness about modern Berlin. Perhaps it’s the relief that comes with having known the worst. The past is a weight Americans try to shrug off. The imposition of bleak history—street battles, antisemitism, authoritarians—makes us stoop. Germans, born with that weight strapped to their backs, have impeccable posture. Trim old Berliners, wearing designer glasses and bright orange trousers, seem more youthful than many young Americans. They may be the handsomest senior citizens in the world. They tote grandchildren around on bicycles and through the U-Bahn—so energisch! What a gift, to be freed of the burden of victory.
Berlin stitches itself together with edgy architecture and lush parks. It turns the jagged suture where the Wall stood into a museum. Bad memories are chased back with a decadent spritz (life being a cabaret and all that). A graffiti-splattered melding of Bushwick and Paris with the best döner kebab outside of Istanbul, it may be the last great city for artists. I still have a suitcase in Berlin, Dietrich sang. Like its greatest star, the German capital has the bruised sexiness of a survivor.
Berlin reconciles itself to history through relentless documentation. It makes amends, to the Jews most keenly, with a million little plaques and a thousand hulking slabs. In this tense moment, it is more forgiving of Israel than New York, and maybe Tel Aviv. Inside Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, there is a wall of fame with portraits of Anne Frank, the Marx Brothers, and, unironically, Jesus Christ. Outside the city, in tidy Oranienburg, a diorama at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp tells the story of 11 Jewish boys selected for hepatitis experiments. Somehow, they made it to old age in Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and even Berlin. Not far away are photos of vacant-eyed Soviet POWs, boys and men slaughtered in a pit.
These are the stolpersteine one trips over in Berlin. The country of Kant, Bach, and Lubitsch, of humanist philosophy, technological ingenuity, and the gardens of Sanssouci, is also the country of Zyklon B. The villa of Max Liebermann, the great German Jewish impressionist, overlooks the sparkling Wannsee a few doors down from the mansion where Heydrich debuted his Final Solution. They are on the same spotless electric bus line, a loop with stops at heaven and hell.
What do Berliners understand that we never learn? Better than anybody, they grasp the distorting power of information. Their city is a vast archive, holding meticulous lists of births, baptisms, banns, genealogies, deportations, murders, and state secrets. It’s all been tracked, with full names and addresses jotted down. European law insists on a right to be forgotten because Europeans recall more than enough.
It’s very American to believe old horrors were foisted on free people. But police states of any stripe run on coöperation as much as coercion. In the anodyne halls of the Stasi Museum, you begin to understand that the State, whatever else it demanded, most required acceptance of its omnipresence. Apparatchiks and dissidents alike breathed in relationship to it. In the GDR, a country of 16 million, some 300,000 citizens were working for the Stasi as the Wall crumbled; about one spy for every 50 people. More than 200,000 of these informers were inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators. They ratted on one another as a matter of course.
A Republic of Spies: The Stasi Museum.
A Republic of Spies: The Stasi Museum.
The State insisted, as the sellers of our digital future now insist, that people make it their immersive reality. It encouraged citizens to trade in disclosure out of party loyalty and formed a republic of spies. It manipulated gossip, envy and paranoia to its advantage—as cannily as any digital algorithm. The State understood the pull of a big, utopian idea better than any Ted talker, the tang of rage as well as any online troll, and most of all, the yearning of ordinary people to go along to get along. Its victims were rarely dragged from their beds in the wee hours. They were mostly endlessly observed, not by thugs in trench coats, but by their friends and neighbors.
It’s not surprising that Germans are obsessive about privacy, a right Americans—such big talkers about individual rights—rubbished without protest. We now document ourselves by the minute, crowdsourcing revelations on a scale the Gestapo and Stasi would envy. We know the harm those information pioneers did, because they put everything down in triplicate. Our innovation was to liberate secrets from paper and compile them at incomprehensible scale. But we haven’t quite grasped what our predecessors well knew, which is that people are not only driven by ideas of freedom but by a compulsion to control and be controlled. The need to divulge is a form of submission, and the obliteration of privacy was a surrender without bombs.
Would it have gone differently, had our apartments looked out across a no-man’s land, or if we strolled past political murder scenes on our way to the zoo? A chilling number of Germans may wish to remove such stumbling blocks. But unlike us, they can never pretend they did not know.
Yours Ever,
Misspent Youth
Brats (Hulu). In the olden days, magazine covers led the cultural conversation. So, when New York declared a clutch of hot young actors the Brat Pack back in 1985, it stuck. (What have they given us since? Nepo Babies?). Andrew McCarthy’s doc explores how the label pigeonholed him, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Allie Sheedy and others. The journo who wrote the piece, David Blum, ruefully weighs in. What we learn (again) is that whatever they call you, celebrity is pretty toxic. — Wendy Beamish
