Berlin is the capital of Europe’s economic powerhouse, a vibrant city with a rich cultural life and a palpable sense of growing confidence, but if its future looks brighter than in generations, it also has an awful lot of dark history weighing on its civic conscience.
Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death but, like his birthday on Monday last week, it will understandably go unmarked. For many years the spot where he killed himself was also unmarked. The past can be an unwanted presence in Berlin.
It is, after all, only 25 years since a huge concrete wall separated East from West and communism from capitalism. At first, in an effort to reunify the divided city, the site of the demolished wall was so comprehensively built over that it was hard to know it had been there. Tourists became so baffled that a cobblestone outline was laid down in the center of town to show where the wall had stood.
Illustration: Mountain people
Today, there are also a couple of preserved sections of the wall, a Checkpoint Charlie display, a dedicated museum and even kitsch celebrations of the infamous East German car, the Trabant. After a period of determined “moving on,” the German capital has grown more at ease with the past that it was in such a rush to escape, but less so in the case of the past that originally led to the city’s division — the Nazi era.
There are few surviving buildings or monuments to testify to the period in which Berlin was the Nazi capital, when it was to become Welthauptstadt Germania — an Albert Speer-designed world capital of a massively expanded German nation.
The Olympiastadion, site of the 1936 Olympic Games, still exists, the disused Tempelhof Airport and, most notably, the forbidding former ministry of aviation from which Hermann Goering boasted of dominating the European skies. It is now the home of the German Ministry of Finance, which many believe dominates Europe in a far more effective manner than the Luftwaffe could ever have done.
The rest of Nazi Berlin was buried at the end of the war by a mixture of Royal Air Force and US bombing, and Red Army artillery. The memory of what it had been was further interred on both sides of the wall by a concerted effort to wipe out the legend of the man who continues to cast his ominous shadow over Berlin — Hitler.
On 30 April, 1945, with the Red Army only streets away, Hitler killed himself in the Fuhrerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in the city center. His body was then taken out into the open, doused in gasoline and set alight in a bomb crater. No one is sure what happened to his remains, although the Soviets believed that they had taken possession of them and kept them hidden in secret, but like some cursed relic, they were deemed too dangerous to conserve and in 1970 the Soviets had them dug up, incinerated and the ashes thrown into a river.
The Fuhrerbunker itself was blown up and built over, but when the Berlin Wall was dismantled, it was discovered that much of the bombproof structure was still intact and it was reburied all over again.
Today, it sits beneath the parking lot of a gray pebble-dash apartment block built during the East German era. Until nine years ago, there was no sign that identified its location, although interest in the place had been greatly increased by the film Der Untergang (Downfall), which depicted Hitler’s demented last days. The film proved to be a psychological breakthrough for Germans because it showed Hitler as a human being, albeit one riven by delusion, psychopathic rage and megalomaniacal dreams of violence.
When in 2006 Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup, there was concern that visiting soccer fans would go in search of the bunker and disturb local residents. So a discreet board was placed in the parking lot informing visitors of the history beneath their feet.
A couple of hundred meters from the spot is Peter Eisenman’s haunting memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. For all the Nazis’ brutality as an invading force, it is the industrial genocide perpetrated on 6 million Jews that singles Hitler out as uniquely evil.
As a result Hitler and the Nazis have come to occupy the extreme end of the moral spectrum, the immoral end. If you want to make a point about where racism, nationalism, militarism, flag-waving or almost any dubious behavior might lead, you need only cite the Nazis. In fact there is a rule governing Internet debate known as Godwin’s law that states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
It is as if all wrong paths lead to Auschwitz. That can be a paralyzing thought and in many ways it has inhibited Berlin’s and Germany’s ability to take stock of the past. Living under the injunction never to forget has not necessarily led Germans to remember more clearly and the blurriest of issues remains why they allowed Hitler to do what he did.
There are whole libraries of books devoted to the subject, each applying different degrees of responsibility and knowledge. The historian Michael Sturmer made his reputation by arguing that Germans needed to develop a positive view of their history.
“Germans knew and they didn’t know. The idea that all Germans knew what was going on is absurd, but there were no Germans who could not see people with the yellow star and should have asked themselves: ‘Where are they being sent to? Why are the trains coming back empty?’” Sturmer says.
He agrees that for a long time after the war Germans suppressed the truth, partly through shame, partly because many members of the Nazi state had been redeployed in the state apparatus of both West and East Germany, and partly because the division of the country enabled each side to blame the other for the Nazis. To the communists, Nazism sprang out of capitalism, and to the democrats of the West it was the totalitarian twin of Stalinism.
“It was not so much that people openly lied, but between not lying and speaking the horrible truth there was a vast gap,” Sturmer says.
Soon, though, no one who was an active Nazi will be alive and direct responsibility will cease to be a live moral issue, but solely a vexed academic one. The current trial of former Auschwitz SS guard, Oskar Groning, is probably the last of its kind. Once again it unearths horrific details that few have the appetite to take in.
At Berlin’s beautiful main synagogue, restored after severe wartime damage, Rabbi Daniel Alter says he often hears his fellow Germans say: “I don’t want to have to deal with that any more”, meaning the Holocaust and its legacy.
“There is a very widespread wish to avoid the topic unless you are an author who can make some money out of it,” he says.
Before the war there were 170,000 Jewish Berliners. Fifty-five thousand of them lost their lives in the Holocaust and most of the rest fled abroad. By the 1980s, the affiliated Jewish community was down to 3,800, but an influx of Russian Jews since 1990 has taken the numbers up to 10,500, although there could be significantly more who are non-affiliated.
Alter, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose grandparents died in the Holocaust, says it has been a struggle to identify himself as German, but having sought help for his “personal traumas,” he has come to terms with his nationality.
That said, he would leave tomorrow if he felt the position of the Jews was under increased threat.
The security checks and metal detectors that are standard at Jewish institutions and schools are things he has learned to live with. What frustrates him is a lack of openness about the past.
“I’m 55 and I’ve never met someone who was an adult in the 1930s and 1940s who said: ‘I was a Nazi and made a mistake’ or even: ‘I was a Nazi and don’t regret it.’ No, they all had no knowledge, were against it, their parents were in the Socialist party, they hid a Jew in the attic. I’ve never met anyone who had the courage to say: ‘I believed in it.’ If there is not an admission of guilt, then you can’t forgive,” he says.
History can exert a tenacious hold on even the most reluctant captives, but Berlin has slowly established a normalized identity at the heart of Europe. More secure in its future, it can also be more open about its past.
There are strong rumors of plans to make the Fuhrerbunker accessible to the public. The fear has been that the site could be used to glorify him, but what is there to glorify?
Hitler went to his death vowing to destroy Germany. It would be a measure of his failure if a secure Germany is now able to expose where that pathetic death took place.
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