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.
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.
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