Images from our last full day in Berlin

So we visited four bookshops and four cafes, the Spree, Friedrischstrasse and much else besides ... and yes particularly as a result of the book shops the suitcases are heavier this morning!

Memories of Berlin - 2 - the underbelly of a city

In September this year it will be 30 years since I came to live and work in Berlin - just for a year. I came to work at the Evangelisches Johannsstift which is a large Protestant diaconal institution based in Spandau. I worked in a children's home as a volunteer worker. I was just 18 years old. The five "children" I was working with were aged 12-17. Until half way through the year when we started to talk about birthdays they all assumed I was about 30 ...
The children were a family, they had the same mother but different fathers. Being in care saved all of their lives. The two youngest who had been in care and a stable home the longest were coping well with their education. The others were struggling.
Being a tourist in a city there is lots that we choose to turn a blind eye to, hidden and obvious poverty, clear sexual and other forms of exploitation, old people pushed to the margins, people begging ... homeless people.
Thinking about the five young people I shared a year with, about the couple who lived with them day in day out and their three year old daughter, I feel a bit guilty. I know nothing of their current lives. I was just another carer moving through. Was I part of the continuity of care or the discontinuity of care? Did I show them they were loved and important and worthy of better lives, or were they just part of the well-meaning CV of a privileged young woman. Quite probably I got more out of my year than I was really able to put in. Thirty years on I recognise much more clearly how much they needed continuity of love, relationship and care. But they were in a system and systems only rarely offer any of that. Caring for and living with disturbed youngsters takes its toll on the adults, the professionals being paid to do the job. Often the system ends up dealing with their needs as much as with the needs of the youngsters.
Big cities are wonderful vibrant cultural places. They are also places with many cracks for people to fall between. All of our societies need to be measured on how well we are looking after and tranforming the lives of the most disadvantaged.
Being a tourist today I still remember that one of the first sides to this city which I discovered was a side not in many guide books.

Memories of Berlin -1

Both Dr B and I used to live in Berlin, at different times and when the city was still divided. Technically I was in Spandau rather than Berlin proper, but in the West. Dr B lived in Friedrichshain in the East, a stone's throw from the great budget hotel we're staying in.
Every time we come back to the city it has all sorts of layers of meaning and memory for both of us together and for each of us.
Since we've been coming here together we tend to stay almost exclusively in the East, making occasional excursions to the West. This means that we are rarely walking around the streets of my former haunts, tho' I do sometimes take myself back to shop in Spandau - these days it's no distance at all.
For me this city is the place I grew up. I came here when I was 18, I worked, earned money, learnt German and how to party. Without that year I would have remained much more provincial and prissy for far longer.
But this is also my father and aunt's city. Sometimes sitting on the older trams I think about them and their cousin Elsa - who died when she was 13. The three of them would go around on public transport speaking German backwards and getting strange looks and incomprehending smiles form fellow passengers. Part of me likes to think I can hear them chatting still somewhere on the city's trams. That makes me think of the many other smiling Jewish children who must once have also travelled the trams, U and S Bahn and of whom there is no trace other than ash.
Yet here in Berlin, alongside the brash and crass adverts and commercialism there are countless memorials to many kinds of pasts - the national socialist past, the communist past, the Wilhelmine past, the "greatness" of Prussia and much more besides.
Recent very happy visits with our mothers and families are also part of our memories of Berlin, their pleasure and discovery of the city we love. Another layer of what being here means, as are the friends we have who live here - and whom we have hardly told we are here this time. Now we are here to do very little indeed. Just potter from coffee place to bookshop to then find a beer to drink.
Tomorrow we leave again, but we will be back and there will be more memories of Berlin as we travel forwards. Being next to the Spree has even inspired the beginnings of an idea for the sermon for my mother's wedding. It seems fitting that the city her first husband was born in should offer me the gift of time to think and creatively work around images for her second marriage.
Berlin destroyed and so much rebuilt, holds all the layers of memory and allows much creativity to bubble up.

Sunrise ... in Berlin

Yesterday morning's sunrise in Berlin seen from the Hauptbahnhof as I arrived from my overnight sleep from Basel. Such a surprise and blessing to have had glorious weather for these few stolen hours in my favourite city. Now as we listen to church bells ringing across Friedrichshain we get ready to return to Geneva, but it has been wonderful to be here, to be with frineds and to think about the past and the future.

Baptism with flowers or at the ocean

Last Sunday in Pankow there was a baptism as part of the Easter service. All of the children at the service - and there were lots there - were invited to come forwards and decorate the baptistry with flowers. We were sitting so far back in the packed church that we didn't see what it looked like until we went forward for communion. It's a lovely way of involving people it also reminded me of the German tradition my father brought into our family of decorating the table place of the person whose birthday it was with flowers from the garden. Baptism is about rebirth, a new beginning with Christ so I think this is a lovely tradition particularly for churches which have large old baptistries like this.
Meanwhile David Ker baptised his children on Easter Sunday in the Indian ocean. Read about it in a great post called "what water baptism means to me", sounds like a wonderful way of making baptism both special and part of life. The photos are beautiful too.
Of course you can find different perspectives on Holy Water over on Seven Weeks for Water. Next year we really must get someone from the Pentecostal churches to write a meditation for us.

What is lost is only there in black and white - wandering around the new national gallery in Berlin

Yesterday after walking in the mid day sun in Tiergarten some of us went to the New National Gallery which is in part of former west Berlin that was in no-man's land. The Berlin Philharmonie and Herbert von Karajanstrasse are part of the same space. The whole area around Potsdamerplatz was destroyed at the end of the war, then with building of the wall there was not much reason for business to move there so major cultural buildings were put up in the space. The 19th cnetury church stands in the middle of all of these museums and concert halls, there are no flats or houses in site, yet from the outside at least the church seems to offer some kind of ministry to the world of the performing and decorative arts.
Meanwhile with the fall of the wall Potsdamerplatz became the place where the "triumph of capitalism" needed to become visible and just further down from the Philharmonie is an enormous shopping centre. It's quite a strange bit of city architecture - born of war and the divisions of history. I do wonder at the hubris of the new development - although of course I visited the shops too.
The permanent exhibition at the gallery tells the story of German history through the art and artists of the time - or maybe that should be it tells the story of German art through its history. At various points in the exhibition there are black and white reproductions of "lost" works - mostly art willfully burnt and destroyed befor the war. It's a powerful way of pointing to the holes in the collection - at first you don't quite notice that something is different.
The 20th century art in the gallery is challenging and powerful stuff, trying very often to tell a story with brash colours and satiricial themes - even if the horrors of the Third reich later went well beyond satire. The colours and lighting of the famous painting by George Grosz particularly struck me yesterday. Looking at the paintings I thought about how Christians and church leaders sometimes go on about the importance of the prophetic word, speaking the truth to power. Yet here were artists - often atheists or like Max Beckman questioning "God's mistakes" - who were painting, sculpting and drawing their perhaps much more prophetic view of society. One of the figures in Grosz' painting is a judge who could be mistaken for a cleric ...
uncomfortable and powerful viewing.
Meanwhile I was rather less convinced by Rudolf Stingel's carpet and chandelier installation in the upstairs area. Also black and white but it didn't quite tell a story for me but then I've never been very fond of patterned carpets.

What is "strong" leadership, "strong" government - reflecting on the day the election is announced in my home country

It's not really surprising that I think about a quote from Heinrich Grüber's memoirs as I wander around Berlin this week. Grüber describes in his memoirs how he voted for Hitler - as did many others of his class and background - because he wanted "strong" government and the experience of Weimar democracy had been of weak ever-changing government.
Today the election will be called in Britain to take place in just one month's time. It's quite interesting chatting with our family about their voting intentions - our oldest nephew is (shock horror) probably going to vote Tory - but we've also been having discussions about voting systems, whether it's better for democracies to have change after a decade and the place for conviction in politics. It's fascinating to see how approaches to democracy and voting systems are very culturally determined. Do I want strong government or good government?
At a personal level I've also been thinking about "strong" leadership and our need to embue these words which tend to be seen as male virtues with value. Is the only way of describing leadership positively to be seen in macho language? Of course women are also strong and it is very much a female virtue as well. But surely goodness, integrity, mid-wifery, artistry, brick-laying, sculpting and many other things may offer us more useful images for the sort of government and society we want rather than this steroid obsession with strength.
Grüber learnt the strength of saying he was wrong to vote for Hitler and took up resistance to teh regime he had voted in very quickly. There is strength in recognising when we have been wrong, it's called humility and it's not a bad virtue for politicians and leaders to learn.

Stolpersteine - history under your feet

Late last night going back to Nollendorfplatz with our friends Horst and Gaby they showed us two Stolpersteine in the pavement just outside an ordinary house in a side street.

I hadn't come across these small local memorials to people who were deported during the Nazi time. My research this morning tells me that these "stumbling blocks" - more than 1800 in Hamburg and 1600 in Berlin - have already become the world's most delocalised memorial. They were the idea of the artist Gunter Demnig and have spread outside Germany to Austria. The great part of the project is that it involves local people and schools in the research and also to raise money to make the blocks. It is about discovering the lost stories of local people who were forcibly removed. A real example of how the artistic imagination can encourage research, build community today with a sense of the past.
Here's an extract from wikipedia about the project:

Schools, relatives, and various organizations investigate facts about people, who were deported or persecuted during the regime of Nazi Germany.Once the investigation work has been done, Demnig manufactures a concrete cube of 10 cm/ 4 in, which he covers with a sheet of brass. Then he adds the writing “Hier wohnte” (Here lived), the name, year of birth and the fate: mostly the date of deportation and of death. The Stolperstein is then put down flush in the pavement/sidewalk in front of the last residence of the victim. The financial requirements are covered by donations, collections, individual citizens, contemporary witnesses, school classes, or communities. One Stolperstein costs €95.

History: how do we live with it?

We have been walking aorund in an overcast Berlin and seem to have already packed masses in to the day and it's not yes 18.00. Time now for a rest and a think.
The flats where we are staying overlook the extraordinary memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, just around the corner is the Brandenburg Gate with on one side Unter den Linden and on the other the Strasse des 17ten Junis ... We caught a bus this afternoon on the corner of Rosenstrasse, where the non-Jewish wives of Jewish imprisoned men protested against the imprisonment of their husbands just around the corner from the Gestapo headquarters. Read more here and in Nathan Stoltzfus' book Resistance of the Heart.
We spent time going around the exhibition about the path to German parliamentary democracy in the German Dom on Gendarmenmarkt, (the English title is: Milestones - Setbacks - Sidetracks and the German title Wege - Irrwege - Umwege). This was the exhibition that used to be housed years ago in the Reichstag before the wall came down and the German parliament finally moved back there. It was interesting to go around it today with young people who are about the age I was when I first went around it with my father. Some of the most powerful images were those of the total destruction of German cities at the end of the war.
Looking the French Dom opposite led us to talk about the French Protestant refugees who had been welcomed by the Elector of Brandenburg following persecution in France. And then we went on to Bebelsplatz and looked down through the glass in the ground onto the completely empty bookshelves beneath - this, the square just next to the Kaiser's palace and opposite the university, is where the Nazi's famously burned books early in the Third Reich. Yet thousands walk past without even noticing this very discreet monument or memorial ... walking over history.
From here we walked up the Unter de Linden and went in to what was formerly the tomb of the unknown soldier following the first world war and which became a memorial to the victims of fascism in GDR times and which now - rather than an eternal flame and goose-stepping soldiers - houses an absolutely wonderful and desperately powerful sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz with the simple dedication "to all victims of war and violence". I had never been inside before and didn't know about this change which deeply moved me. The scupture shows a woman cradling her dead son. Not only the male soldier "heros" of war are remembered but the ordinary families suffering violence, a huge difference in how history can be viewed and the conscious placing of women at the heart of remembrance.
After that we headed to the Reichstag, for coffee and cakes, but also to show the family Richard Rogers' extraordinary dome. The building of parliamentary democracy in Germany has become a worldwide tourist attraction, it really makes the building belong to the people, makes what happens in the building a bit more attractive too. Politics can become a bit more fun if its architecture is like this.
So our day has been a little bit like an exercise in a historiography of public buildings and official monuments.
Walking up and down in the dome, looking across the once divided city, seeing the golden domes of the synagogue and cathedrals, looking at the hideous and beautiful highrise buildings of capitalism and socialism, the victory column and gate of the princely past and the huge sky, I thought about the huge discontinuity and continuity that are part of German history. Then I wondered about how nations build up national myths of continuity - some have integrity, others less so. What is amazing about wandering around the central parts of Berlin is how the ambiguity of continuity and discontinuity are made visible in the ways exhibitions are organised and memorials are built.
How do we live with history? My neighbour in Ferney recently said to me "We need to remember that wherever we put our feet the dust we are walking through is the dust of humanity". I felt that very much today walking around the city where my father was born. He was 15 when he had to leave and yet this is the city his daughter still wants to return to. My way of living with history perhaps.

Reading Herta Müller in Berlin

Going round the splendid independent bookshop just off the Kollwitzplatz I bought myself some books by Herta Müller whose work I've not read before. I'm reading a very slim volume called Der Fremde Blick oder Das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne. The language is wonderfully precise and poetic, the subject matter and setting - totalitarian Romania - less so. Harrowing but brilliant writing. It's also interesting to read someone writing in German about the Romanian context as I wander around Berlin that has changed so much, holds so many diverse and complex memories for me, and where I almost don't understand the underground map anymore.

Happy Easter!

We are drinking tea in Pankow following a really wonderful Easter service at the church of the four evangelists which was led by Ruth Misselwitz. What I found particularly heartening were the large number of young families and children at the service which was full, it was traditional and simple and real. I was deeply moved simply to be part of it, to realise how deeply I still know the German liturgy by heart and what a privilege that is too. I'll write a bit about some of my complex Easter emotions later - I was in tears for parts of the service but there was laughter too, as the children stormed back into the church carrying their Easter chocolates, just as the final communion thanksgiving prayer was being said at the altar!
For now I'm a little too close to the emotion of it all and truth be told I'm actually just trying out my new Easter egg, a German vodaphone dongle which means I can connect across borders much more cheaply and practically than via my mobile phone. It took non-technically minded me precisely 90 seconds to set it all up. I'm impressed. You won't be able to stop me tweeting now - must be all those Easter chicks!

Night train to Berlin

The stranzblog arrived in Berlin just after eight this morning. We set off on the night train from Basel and were served breakfast in our sleeping compartment which we ate watching very familiar territory go by - Bitterfeld, Wittenberg, Jüterborg ... place where I was living and preaching just 20 years ago. It was wonderful to be in the city so early on Saturday morning, really crisp and cold but also very sunny and very lovely.
So we have already walked along the Spree, been to the Hakescher Markt, Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate and more importantly had a deliecious brunch on Kollwitzplatz as well as visiting the nearby bookshop - (ok it's true I did not come away empty handed, more about that later.)
Tomorrow Stephen's sister Myra, her husband Tom and the three children will join us. These few days in Berlin are our rather belated 50th birthday present to her. We also hope that they are the beginning of the final phase in Dr B's recovery. Berlin manages to energise him so let's hope he doesn't get too exhausted.
Meanwhile on Wednesday a real gathering of the clans is planned as my mother, her sister Doreen and her partner Martin also arrive in Berlin for the afternoon. They are on a church twinning weekend near Magdburg. We are going to have to find quite a noisy cafe to be able to cope with all 10 of us for Kaffee und Kuchen that afternoon. Should be fun if we mange to meet up though.