I -Everywhere in the city we found fragments of the Wall. There were shards sold with postcards and embedded as markers in the pavement. Nestled among modern glass facades of the shopping district, we found ugly slabs of concrete on display. Big, small, jagged and weather-worn, most are tagged with spray paint and permanent marker, and the most common images are female: women cradling emaciated sons; women weeping. Some are mildly obscene. All invite a closer look, sometimes a touch. Never mind their value to knickknack sellers, these fragments retain value as memento mori to an era of irrational hate now resurfacing in altered, but recognizable forms.
Later I learn this: when the wall fell, it fell by accident. A slip of the tongue by an East German news correspondent made it sound as if all travel restrictions had been lifted. Restrictions had not yet been lifted, and might not have been lifted, completely. Yet, people from both sides (east and west) raced to the wall. They brought sledge hammers and ladders and beers, and the soldiers posted there, who had been trained to shoot, did not shoot.
II - From outside, the Jewish Museum is imposing: Borg-like, metallic and angular, with oddly shaped windows set deep. Cold looking and severe, the building is as uninviting as the history it holds. Inside, we find a series of basement rooms with black floors and high, white walls. Buried within the walls are display cases with artifacts - letters, photographs, tea cups, spoons - of families who fled into exile, or stayed and were gathered up and murdered in the camps. There is no euphemistic phrasing, no “passed away” to suggest natural causes. The captions read something like: “Naomi stayed rather than abandon her aged mother and she was murdered in Auschwitz."
Nazism was a white nationalist movement built on racism and fed by fears of people who had lost standing, money, land, and loved ones in World War I. While it's true that a number of people openly and enthusiastically condoned Hitler's actions, a greater number chose to remain ignorant of the atrocities carried out in their names—or at least ignorant of the scope and extent of the evil. They remained quietly, even if not overtly, complicit. I wonder, not then at the museum, but later, walking busy Berlin streets to the hotel: how do the grandchildren of the silent collaborators shoulder the guilt of this complicity?
I've read stories of holocaust survivors and of their children. What they endured and overcame, if such experiences can be overcome, has been recorded and analyzed. But what of the sons of the guilty? How do they encounter these monuments to the dead everywhere in the city, without feeling unbearable responsibility? If they are Christians, how can they cry out, as Jesus did? “Forgive them father they know not what they do!” When their fathers and mothers must have known. When not knowing demanded an active denial, a deliberate ignorance. The sons and daughters do not have the luxury of ignorance. They bear the sins of their fathers, and history's judgment.
I think about migrant farms workers back home. Families laboring in terrible conditions so that I might eat strawberries. How conveniently I push the knowledge of their labor to the back of my mind when wandering grocery store aisles. I think of kids in detention camps, families separated. My sin, too, is ambivalence to the suffering of others. I think of a Trump voter, a friend, who insisted at a dinner party that she slept well for the first time in years on the night of the election. "We suffered so much under Obama. For eight years we suffered.” I could feel the anxiety beneath her elation, and considered saying nothing. Then I asked: “How? How did you suffer? Who is we?”
Her hair was dyed blond and bobbed. She wore flannel shirt, pearls and heels and drove a six-year-old Mercedes. She had two homes and had just finished telling us, in engaging detail - this was a dinner party - about her property business. But here she offered only generalities: about the terrorists, the illegals. "Obama lied. We suffered."
I think of her this night in Berlin, darkness falling, the shopping district blinking back tears of a rainy night. There is nothing general about suffering. Suffering is specific. Families divided. Loved one killed, starved, tortured in the name of what? False promises. The terrible legacy of tyranny is built on generalities and false promises.
Later I learn this: when the wall fell, it fell by accident. A slip of the tongue by an East German news correspondent made it sound as if all travel restrictions had been lifted. Restrictions had not yet been lifted, and might not have been lifted, completely. Yet, people from both sides (east and west) raced to the wall. They brought sledge hammers and ladders and beers, and the soldiers posted there, who had been trained to shoot, did not shoot.
II - From outside, the Jewish Museum is imposing: Borg-like, metallic and angular, with oddly shaped windows set deep. Cold looking and severe, the building is as uninviting as the history it holds. Inside, we find a series of basement rooms with black floors and high, white walls. Buried within the walls are display cases with artifacts - letters, photographs, tea cups, spoons - of families who fled into exile, or stayed and were gathered up and murdered in the camps. There is no euphemistic phrasing, no “passed away” to suggest natural causes. The captions read something like: “Naomi stayed rather than abandon her aged mother and she was murdered in Auschwitz."
Nazism was a white nationalist movement built on racism and fed by fears of people who had lost standing, money, land, and loved ones in World War I. While it's true that a number of people openly and enthusiastically condoned Hitler's actions, a greater number chose to remain ignorant of the atrocities carried out in their names—or at least ignorant of the scope and extent of the evil. They remained quietly, even if not overtly, complicit. I wonder, not then at the museum, but later, walking busy Berlin streets to the hotel: how do the grandchildren of the silent collaborators shoulder the guilt of this complicity?
I've read stories of holocaust survivors and of their children. What they endured and overcame, if such experiences can be overcome, has been recorded and analyzed. But what of the sons of the guilty? How do they encounter these monuments to the dead everywhere in the city, without feeling unbearable responsibility? If they are Christians, how can they cry out, as Jesus did? “Forgive them father they know not what they do!” When their fathers and mothers must have known. When not knowing demanded an active denial, a deliberate ignorance. The sons and daughters do not have the luxury of ignorance. They bear the sins of their fathers, and history's judgment.
I think about migrant farms workers back home. Families laboring in terrible conditions so that I might eat strawberries. How conveniently I push the knowledge of their labor to the back of my mind when wandering grocery store aisles. I think of kids in detention camps, families separated. My sin, too, is ambivalence to the suffering of others. I think of a Trump voter, a friend, who insisted at a dinner party that she slept well for the first time in years on the night of the election. "We suffered so much under Obama. For eight years we suffered.” I could feel the anxiety beneath her elation, and considered saying nothing. Then I asked: “How? How did you suffer? Who is we?”
Her hair was dyed blond and bobbed. She wore flannel shirt, pearls and heels and drove a six-year-old Mercedes. She had two homes and had just finished telling us, in engaging detail - this was a dinner party - about her property business. But here she offered only generalities: about the terrorists, the illegals. "Obama lied. We suffered."
I think of her this night in Berlin, darkness falling, the shopping district blinking back tears of a rainy night. There is nothing general about suffering. Suffering is specific. Families divided. Loved one killed, starved, tortured in the name of what? False promises. The terrible legacy of tyranny is built on generalities and false promises.
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