Berlin, Germany, March 2016 - Memorialising the Holocaust

This is about two Berlin monuments.  They both commemorate the Holocaust, and specifically the Jewish dimension of that (as opposed to the murder of other groups).   I prefer one over the other.  I know my views will not be shared by everyone, but I want to develop a case.   

It is a sunny morning.  As I walk past Monument A there are a variety of tour buses lined up alongside, with groups (generally of young people) being instructed on what they are seeing, what it is supposed to mean, and how they should react.  They clearly need briefing, since there are no explanatory notices or other signage (apart from the regulations for the use of the site).  But when the mini-lecture from their leader is over, although they initially disperse into the monument soberly, within a few minutes they are playing hide and seek, chasing each other, shouting out each others’ names.  And then they start taking selfies, posing for the camera as the leader (or the one with the most modern smart phone) turns their back on the monument – the main element in the picture will be the group.  Some small groups of adults nearby look at the monument for a minute or two and then spy a food shop diagonally opposite selling fast food and head off there.  At the northern side of the monument a lorry is finding it difficult to park to make a delivery to the 5 star hotel, because there is a row of taxis and limousines in the way: the traffic builds up and although there is no hooting there is clearly some frustration in the air.   On the far side of the monument a dual carriageway road  produces a continuous ribbon of traffic in both directions – visible from within the monument and from around it.  Many people pass by, but few engage fully with what they see.

It is a sunny afternoon.  I walk up the slope to Monument B, leaving behind the few shops and the groups of people who have just got off the S-Bahn train or the local buses.  When I look back from the top of the slope I can see no-one else, although I can hear some children’s’ voice in the gardens of the villas to my right.  I spend perhaps 30 minutes at the monument, during which time only 7 other people appear: 3 who come out of the station and stand quietly for a few minutes before returning the same way, a boy who seems to be taking a short cut home from school, a man who had parked his car on the ramp and drives to the top to turn round, and a woman with a dog who probably visits the site every day but who has a camera and takes pictures of one part of the monument – focusing on a specific element.  I wonder if she has some personal connection with it.  To the west of the monument, on the other side from the villas, are derelict railway sidings with birch trees growing alongside them and even within the tracks, and beyond I occasionally glimpse an S-Bahn train or  a regional express passing.  It is a very lonely spot, and even on a sunny day there is at atmosphere here that chills.

Those who know Berlin will already have realised that Monument A is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, dedicated in 2005 after a great deal of discussion and publicity.  Monument B is the ‘Platform 17’ (Gleis 17 – ‘Gleis’ means ‘platform’ in German) memorial at Grünewald Station, unveiled in its final form in 1998, although an earlier memorial dates back to 1991.

Much has been written about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman of New York, and it has become very well known.  It was commissioned as a result of a national debate and competition, with much controversy about the exact site and the nature of the message the memorial should convey.  It serves as the central German memorial to the Holocaust of the Jews.  The Gleis 17 memorial, by contrast, was commissioned rather quietly by the German Railways (the Deutsche Bahn) as a result of some research that had been carried out on the role their forerunners, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, played in the War.  The Gleis 17  memorial is by a lesser-known German architectural practice – Hirsch, Lorch und Wandel.

So why do I prefer the Grünewald monument?  Let me briefly describe it.  There is an overgrown railway siding – one end of which actually has birch trees growing through the sleepers.  The siding, which is perhaps 200 metres long, is lined on both sides by industrial metal plates, each perhaps 2 by 4 metres.  And along the edges of each of those plates, abutting the siding, are cast a few simple facts – a date, a number, and a destination.  Each plate represents the despatch from here of a group of Jews, sometimes a waggon-load, sometimes a whole train to the camps and extermination grounds of the east.   The first such departure was on 18 October 1941, of 1251 Jews to Łodz, with other early destinations including Minsk, Kowno, Lublin, Warsaw, Riga, and then from July 1942 to Theresienstadt (Terezin).  The first train to set out from here to Auschwitz left on 29 November 1942, taking 1000 Jews.  Reading the metal plates, the peak of departures came in early March 1943 when 6369 Jews were sent by train to Auschwitz in 4 days – a period that coincided with the decision to despatch certain Jewish individuals (such as Jewish husbands of ‘Aryan’ German wives) who had previously been spared.  Numbers dropped after that – but there were by then few Jews left in Berlin to be deported.  The last despatch to Auschwitz occurred on 12 October 1944, only a month before the dismantling of the extermination apparatus there started, on Himmler’s orders.  Later transports were to Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen and to Bergen-Belsen, as well as continuing to Theresienstadt.  The last waggon of Jews left on 27 March 1945, only a month before the downfall of the Nazi regime.

Walking along one side of the siding and back along the other, the cumulative effect of these simple factual statements of Jewish transports is overwhelmingly moving, made more so by the fact that these facts were played out in this very spot – and by the loneliness of the place.  A heavy and contemplative atmosphere hangs over the Gleis 17 memorial, inviting reflection.  The meaning of the site is immediately comprehensible, and it takes little imagination to conjure up an image of people of all ages being herded up the ramp that today the visitor uses to access the site.  The only slight jarring note on my recent visit was a banner at one end consisting of half a dozen Israeli flags tied together.  The Jews sent east from Grünewald were not Israelis (since Israel did not yet exist), nor do we know whether they were Zionists (the Israeli flag was first adopted by the World Zionist Organisation at its Basel congress in 1897).  They were first and foremost Germans who happened also to be Jewish.

Gleis 17 is a memorial in the ‘right place’.  It is simple, easily read and understood, and inviting full inspection and reflection.  While the documentation centre under the Eisenman monument in the centre of Berlin tells the poignant story of the Holocaust in an effective manner, the monument itself is not easily legible, is not in an especially relevant location, and has become too much of a quick stop and photo opportunity on the tour bus routes to provide any real air of melancholy or contemplation.  That’s why I prefer Gleis 17.

Berlin, Germany, March 2016 - Confronting the past in the present, and attitudes to migration

It is one of my lasting regrets that I didn't come to Berlin while it was partitioned by the Wall.  I was doing a lot of research in Paris in the 1980s, and somehow it seemed the Wall would always be there (at least, that's what the East German government said) and I always put a visit off until another year. Then from 1996 to 2008 I ran a series of 13 field classes  in Berlin, added to other independent visits to the city, starting 3 years earlier.  And I'm there now, on what will be the final field class of my career.

So I have witnessed the changes in Berlin over a period greater than 20 years.  And they have been huge.  When I first came Potsdamer Platz was a total ruin marked by the line of the Wall and the 'no-man's-land' alongside it: today it is a vibrant shopping centre.  The decaying Reichstag building lay on the edge of an urban wasteland: today it sits at the edge of the confident, and wonderfully transparent, buildings of the German federal administration - the ability to see what one's rulers are doing being a leitmotif of the development of this new government quarter.  It would fill a book to itemise all the changes Berlin has been through.  

I regret, on my early visits, not making detailed studies of individual streets or sites.  This afternoon I  walked down Oderberger Straße in the former East to the line of the Berlin Wall.  When I first did that, probably about 18 years ago, most of the houses were dilapidated with perilously decayed balconies, windows that scarcely closed, and derelict industrial premises visible in the courtyards behind.  Today I could only see one house that had not yet been renovated, whilst the commerce has become international, along with the cafés and restaurants - and the local clientele has clearly shifted down a couple of age groups and up a couple of social classes from the impoverished elderly I had seen inhabiting this neglected East Berlin inner suburb two decades ago.

One of the most striking developments in the new Berlin is the memorialisation of the past.  Some elements of history have certainly been swept away, most notably the East German 'Palace of the Republic' which many older East Berliners still refer to affectionately.  But there are a remarkable set of new museums dedicated to history, alongside monuments of many kinds.  Over the few days I have been here I have passed, amongst others, memorials to the persecution of Jews, Roma peoples, and homosexuals under Nazism, the Jewish Museum, the DDR Museum (on the history of East Germany), the Bebelplatz monument to the book-burning carried out in May 1933 by Nazi students from the Humboldt University, the 'missing house' in Grosser Hamburger Straße commemorating those who lived in a property destroyed during the Second World War, a memorial to the failed rising of East Berliners against the Communist regime in June 1953, and so on ...

And then there is the Wall itself, and the history of Berlin as a partitioned city.  I have spent this afternoon at Bernauer Straße, where a whole section of the former Wall lay unused and ruined last time I was here but which has now been developed into a fascinating linear memorial site of around 1 kilometre in length fully explaining the history and operation of the Wall along a thoroughfare where the road itself lay in West Berlin but the houses on one side lay in the East, with their doorsteps marking the inner-city district boundary - and thus, then, the Wall once the houses were demolished after East Berliners escaped by jumping from upper windows, or by tunnelling into the West from the basements of the properties.

This afternoon I also visited the 'Tränenpalast' (or 'Palace of Tears') next to Friedrichstraße Station - a building created by the East German authorities as the processing centre for anyone being allowed to leave for the West during the 28 years the Wall stood.  Many of those leaving were old people being allowed to depart to be looked after by their offspring living in the West (and thus no longer a charge on the East German social services) and their remaining relatives and friends knew they would probably never be allowed to return again, so that the Tränenpalast was a place of permanent good-byes.  It has only recently been transformed into a museum, and I found it very moving - the stories of individuals caught up in a geopolitics that had little to do with their everyday lives but which put them in impossible and heartbreaking circumstances.

I remember the Berlin Wall being built.  I was 11 years old at the time.  I remember seeing the pictures of people jumping from the upper floors of the houses in Bernauer Straße.  I remember the stories of failed escapes and the picture of a young man bleeding to death because although he had managed to get over the Wall, despite being shot at, he had still fallen on East Berlin soil and the nearby Western troops had taken advice at the most senior level that they should not provoke the Soviet authorities by rescuing him.  (I passed the monument to him - Peter Fechter - as well the other evening.)  And above all I remember the confrontation of Soviet and American tanks a hundred metres apart at Checkpoint Charlie - one of two occasions when (according to my schoolteachers) we came closest to nuclear war (the other being the Cuba Missile Crisis).  We lived in London and knew that if there was to be a nuclear attack our city would be an obvious target.

And I of course remember the Berlin Wall coming down in November 1989.  I was lecturing a course on contemporary Europe on Friday mornings, so the events of the previous evening led me to dispense completely with my prepared lecture and talk ad lib about what I thought had brought the fall of the Wall about.  And one thing that I talked about was the role of migration, and of the desire of people to seek a better life elsewhere.  My decision to do so was echoed a few months later when the then German ambassador in London, Hermann von Richthofen, came to give a lecture at the University of Sheffield.  In it he said that in his opinion it had been the migration pressure of East Germans in the summer and autumn of 1989, flooding into the West German embassies in cities such as Budapest and Warwaw, that had given an unstoppable momentum to the forces of change that led, via the mass protests in Leipzig in October of that year, to the opening of the Wall on 9 November.

Today Berlin, and indeed Germany, is facing a new migration wave, but it seems to me that some of the mentalities being shown now have their antecedents in previous patterns of movement.  Four episodes seem to me of importance.

1. The mass migration of German refugees into the newly shrunk post-war Germany (both what became the East and the West) after defeat in the Second World War and the shifting of boundaries - particularly with the elimination of East Prussia and what was in effect the moving of the borders of Poland 200 kilometres to the west.  Many Germans today have grown up with the family stories of those 10 million migrants.  I remember a colleague telling me how his mother pushed a pram containing him as a baby, with all their possessions, from East Prussia to Hamburg (his father had disappeared in the last days of the conflict) to start a new life.  Only a few days ago a German friend was talking about her family's loss of its settled base in what had been German Silesia and which now became Polish.  The West German Basic Law (the Grundgesetz) of 1949, setting up the Federal Republic, pays special attention to the rights of refugees.  And many people, faced with today's fourth wave of migration, remember that law and their family history that gave rise to it.

2. Although the East German version does not say so (I have some East German books that give their side of the story) it is clear to other commentators that the Berlin Wall was built precisely to stop the haemorrhaging of population out of East Berlin, and East Germany, in the summer of 1961. Departures amounted to 30,000 in July 1961 alone, and accelerated to 2,000 per day in the first 12 days of August. It was a desire for migration that led to the creation of the barrier to stop such movement - not just within Berlin but along the whole of the border between East and West Germany.

3. And it was migration pressure that led to the downfall of the Wall in November 1989 - although such pressure, which had doubtless been bubbling idea for many years, was only able to be released when other countries in the then Soviet Bloc started to liberalise their regimes and their own border vigilance during the summer of that year.

4. And now we come to the situation today.  Germany has so far 'welcomed' or 'accepted' over 800,000 refugees, mostly from the Middle East and predominantly rom Syria.  There are, according to local sources I have talked to in the last few days, 80,000 in Berlin itself - of whom 8,000 are housed at the former Tempelhof Airport, with the remainder scattered around the city in vacant social housing, old industrial premises and other transitory accommodation.  I fully accept that there is opposition to this influx, but the general mentality seems to be accepting but concerned.  The headline in the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost has been concern that many refugee children are not currently receiving education - rather than (as might be the case in other countries) how they are putting pressure on school resources to the disadvantage of 'native' children.  The Berlin public transport authority has introduced special low price ticketing for asylum seekers. Media coverage of the migrants' plight further back along the refugee trail is of the danger they are facing in their desire for a better life - stories couched in sympathetic terms.  And the other day I visited the superb fine art museum (the Gemäldegalerie) where they have mounted a temporary exhibition bringing together a number of paintings and etchings of the subject generally known as 'The Holy Family's Flight into Egypt' - the New Testament story of how Christ became a refugee as an infant:  the staging of this exhibition now is not a coincidence, but something intended to have  particular meaning today.

There is certainly concern about how Berlin is going to manage to integrate a new migrant population that is following earlier groups who remain to some extent apart from local German society - something I observed today in a walk through the Neukölln district of the city with its arabic populations.   But the mentality of many residents in the city seems to be still inflected with a historical sense that mass migration is written into the biographies of many Germans and Berliners, and into the post-war history of the city itself.

With its new monuments Berlin has certainly confronted its past in an extraordinarily honest fashion. But that past has not been put to bed, memorialised and then forgotten.  Mentalities from the past seem to influence responses to today's migrant and refugee arrivals.  The past is ever-present in Berlin, and not just in physical spaces but also in attitudes.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne Quayside, March 2016 - Revitalisation and the ghosts of the past

I guess that to many people arrival by train in Newcastle from the south is first heralded by catching sight of Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ sculpture on a hillside to the east of the track.  To me the crucial entry point is further on: when the train edges its way onto the King Edward Bridge and the vista opens up of the Tyne gorge with its five further magnificent and distinctive bridges to the right, and the skyline of the city – the castle, the cathedral with its (for England) unusual ‘lantern spire’, a number of other churches, the cupola on top of the civic centre, and a number of distinguished commercial and public buildings from Newcastle’s golden age.  (I shall gloss over the way that St James’s Park, the ground of Newcastle United, looms threateningly over part of the city centre in this view from the bridge. Perhaps it’s only fitting that it should do so in a city that is as football mad as Newcastle.)

There is another, personal, reason why to me the King Edward Bridge is such a fitting entry point.  Whilst helping to build it, my grandfather lost all the fingers on his left hand when a girder crashed down on them.  Every time I cross it I remember the way he held a fork between his thumb and the stumps, and how my grandmother helped him with buttons.  She knew what she was taking on – they were married in 1907, the year after the bridge was finished.

Newcastle is a proud city, and I am proud of my connections to it, through my mother.  She was born in a little rented house on the Scotswood Road (a thoroughfare immortalised in the song ‘The Blaydon Races’) and moved with her parents and five siblings, when she was about 10, to a new council house to the east of the city centre.  Her generation have all died, and their offspring have dispersed, but I have just had lunch with two of my cousins.

I have been staying, as I often do in Newcastle, in a hotel on the quayside – in a building of some architectural importance built of ferro-concrete, originally as a warehouse for the ‘Co-operative Wholesale Society’  and dating from a year or two before the King Edward Bridge.  It stands next to what was once a wharf where ships unloaded produce that would make its way into Co-op shops all over the country.  The ships are now gone, and the building is a hotel, but the name of its first owner cannot be eradicated since it was built into the stonework.

None of my relatives was a miner (although one branch of the family were coal merchants) but my grandfather, his sons and several of their male offspring all worked in ship-building, in heavy engineering or in the metal industries.  Most of those occupations have now gone.  And it’s along the Newcastle quayside that some of the most profound changes have taken place.  I was often taken there as a child – to see the ships unload, to watch the swing bridge rotate for a sea-going vessel to pass, to be part of the bustle of a working port with stacks of wood being swung onto boats, sacks of grain coming back the other way, and noise everywhere.  One day after my grandfather retired, and already suffering the severe bronchitis that his outdoor working environment had left him with, he took me for a walk down the Ouseburn valley, still with small factories belching  noxious smoke, and then along the quay.  And I remember the pride I felt in him when many of the stevedores and quay workers greeted him with a ‘Haway Charlie’ and doffed their caps to him (he had retired as an ‘Inspector of Rivets’ from Swan Hunters, the shipbuilders, a step up from an ordinary riveter).  He introduced me as ‘the little fella’  (I’m not sure he could ever remember my name, but I was the youngest of his seven grandchildren.)

I took the same walk this morning, along the quayside and up the path along the Ouseburn.  The past of the whole area has not been forgotten.  Indeed, various authorities have provided a fuller set than I recall seeing anywhere else of monuments, street signs and explanatory boards to record the historical and ordinary sites of the area.  And some of the newly commissioned monuments are thoughtful pieces of work, begging for a moment’s reflection on what used to be hereabouts.  But with the exception of the hotel I have been staying in, the old warehouses have all gone.  Only the names of some of the new office and apartment blocks (for example ‘Rotterdam House’) are reminders of the web of global connections of the old port.  I asked a taxi driver if ‘Paddy’s Market’ still takes place on the quayside every Sunday morning – my grandmother (a strict Methodist) could never bring herself to go shopping there on the Sabbath, but it had a fine reputation for second hand clothing and other hand-me-downs.  But now it is the ‘Quayside Market’ with a range of produce for discerning contemporary middle-class customers.

The Newcastle Quayside has seen the full process of deindustrialisation, the death of the port, dereliction of the original properties, modern planning, office development, gentrification and what is sometimes called, in a rather ugly word, ‘leisurefication.’  It has passed through a phase as an eyesore and become a revitalised modern urban landscape.  But it no longer produces anything, or moves goods around.  It is a microcosm of changes that have occurred throughout industrial and port cities around the United Kingdom – and to my mind the transformation has been handled more imaginatively here than in a number of other places.

I wonder what my grandfather would make of it all?  He died, of chronic bronchitis, exactly 50 years ago, at about the time when the process of change was just starting.  One thing I think he’d notice.  Gone are those Geordie accents of the stevedores and dockers of the past.  On my quayside walk early this morning I passed innumerable joggers, chatting to each other as they pounded the new cobbles of the quay outside the apartments they own.  Not one of them had any of the traditional intonation of Geordie speech patterns in their voice – I guess most of them were from elsewhere in the country, and probably with middle class occupations to go to on Monday morning.   And so I wonder to what extent the working-class population of Newcastle benefits from the new Quayside?