I Made it to Germany

I Made it to Germany

Wailing helps, sometimes.

In my last newsletter, I shared my woes about having my Schengen visa application rejected, which meant I would miss a week with my son and wife, who were to meet in Berlin. On the following Tuesday, friends and colleagues rallied round and made a few phone calls. By Wednesday, one European embassy phoned back and said they would issue a Schengen visa, even though I had no plans to visit their land on this trip. I’m not sure the helpful diplomat would like to be named, but your help was deeply appreciated, and allowed for much family bonding. Thanks, also, for the empathy and proactive help, Ankur and others at Teamwork.

I learned the German language at Delhi’s Max Mueller Bhavan in the early 70s, and I was struck by the sense of guilt my teacher carried about the Holocaust, especially since would have been but a lad in the 1940s. Fifty years later, we visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a site of nearly 5 acres in central Berlin, walking distance from both the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Tower, which celebrates Prussian victories over Denmark and France.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews Alexander Blum - Wikipedia

Memorials to victory are standard practice for nations and regimes, but when you memorialise the most vile moments in your history, display your collective guilt in a square in the very heart of your nation, you encourage reflection, remembrance and a determination to learn from the past. For this, I salute the German Volk.

Not two kilometers away, a glass dome designed by Sir Norman Foster stands atop the German Parliament, the Reichstag. The dome is open to the public - though you have to book well in advance, we learned - who can view the workings of the chamber of parliament. Like the Jewish memorial, the dome is deeply symbolic, proclaiming that the people, stand above the government.

Reichstag Dome Fernando Pascullo - Wikipedia

We returned to the Brandenburg Gate on our last day in Berlin, joining 300,000 people braving the heat to attend a techno parade, dedicated to disarmament and peace for all, including, the organisers underlined, those of fluid gender. 200 DJ trucks rolled down the 

Peace, Freedom and Free Love

one kilometer stretch between the Brandenburg gate and the Victory Tower, Berliners greeted the music with wild costumes, dancing enervated by the heat, and growing piles of beer and wine bottles. The police looked indulgently on, as did a statue in the middle of the avenue. 

“Probably a religious figure”, I thought, “…wonder what he makes of this pagan fest of free love and bacchanalia”. 

I danced through the crowds to the plaque, and read that this was a depiction of the Greek philosopher, Plutarch. 

Plutarch among the pagans (Brandenburg Gate, right)

As a moralist, I suspect Plutarch might have taken objection to the events of that hot July afternoon, but I prefer to see Berlin, and Germany, as trying to live by his words:

“To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.”

Our son returned to Chicago the morning after the lovefest, and we took a train out to Bremen, to meet old friends, Dieter and Geeta, and explore the countryside of northern Germany. In my German textbooks, Bremen was depicted by the Bremen city musicians, a band of retired farm animals from the Grimms’ fairy tales, who escaped from impending slaughter and set out to seek a living as musicians in the thriving town of Bremen. Their bronze statue in the city square was much smaller than I had pictured, and my eye was drawn, instead, to a large quote on the frontage of a medieval building:

Bremen city square

“Thoughts to our brethren, who bear the fate of our partition” 

These words by Willy Brandt (roughly translated by me), I found deeply touching. German Chancellor, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Willy Brandt was a youth activist against the Nazi regime, escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to Norway, and was at the forefront of European unification. In 1959, he prophesied, 

“The day will come when the Brandenburg Gate will no longer stand at the border (between East and West)”

Enough of German politics! For the next 5 days, we escaped into the German countryside. Dieter drove us to a farmstay in the middle of the Lueneberger Heide, where a large nature reserve has set up 235 km of walks through rolling heaths, and along bogs that were once hacked for their peat to heat the farmsteads at their edge. 

Then into the Harz mountains - rolling hills, really - where we based ourselves in the UNESCO heritage town of Quedlinburg. While Geeta walked the cobbled streets of Q-burg, between the crooked wooden frames of 16th century homes, Dieter, Premila and I braved the strong sun and 30 degree heat of the German summer to trace the Teufel’s Mauer, the Devil’s Wall, a natural formation of dark basaltic rocks that ranges some 30 km up and down the contours of the low hills. Over one delectable stretch, thoughtful conservators had planted an avenue of plum trees that sprouted from among brambles of berries, cornflowers, and ripening wheat that spilled out from vast fields. The fruit was just beginning to ripen in the sun, and as he ate yet another juicy plum, Dieter proclaimed, “This is like the Garden of Eden”.

The environs of Quedlinburg were not always paradisical. That morning, we had stopped at the Tourist Information Office, to check on driving routes and parking spots. Following up on something my wife had read* the previous evening, I asked the Tourist Officer about the connection between Quedlinburg and Heinrich Himmler, a powerful Hitler aide, and prime architect of the Holocaust. Apparently, Himmler had used the Quedlinburg cathedral to indulge his interest in the occult, and his belief that the Catholic church was not native to Germany. The august church was declared desanctified, religious iconography taken down, and candle-lit ceremonies were held in the presence of flags and banners with Nazi symbols. 

The unbridled power of an absolutist regime allows shallow men to indulge their quirks, and Himmler decided that he was an incarnation of King Heinrich der Vogler (876 to 936 A.D.), the founder of the Saxon dynasty, widely considered the father of a unified Germany. Himmler declared that the 10th centenary of Heinrich’s death would be a Heinrichsfeier, a festival for Heinrich, and was severely disappointed to discover that the remains of the other Heinrich, the King, were not to be found in the crypt. The SS were tasked with finding the remains in time for the 1937 Heinrichsfeier. 

In our Tourist Officer’s telling, his grandfather, Principal of the Quedlinburg High School, and a renowned historian, was a key member of this task force. Months of frantic digging up abbey floors and desecration of cemeteries yielded nothing, and with Himmler’s wrath looming over them, the task force decided to fake it. Just in time for the 1937 event, the task force declared that they had found a decorated royal corpse which they were certain was that of King Heinrich’s. 

“Now King Heinrich has his eternal peace”, a Nazi newlsetter declared. Said grandfather was felicitated by Himmler, and even introduced to the great Fuehrer. It later turned out that the much celebrated remains were those of a woman!

The congregation was dispossessed of the Cathedral, its keys formally handed over to the SS. A new, Nazi, history of the cathedral was written, and peddled to tourists by uniformed SS officers.  A Swastika flag was hoisted from the cathedral tower, and bodies of concentration camp prisoners ferried to Quedlinburg for disposal in its crematorium. It was not till the fall of the Third Reich that the church was able to reclaim its precincts.

But these are happier times. By 6 a.m. farmers had begun to roll their trucks into the market square, and we bought farm-fresh apricots and home-baked cakes for our little expedition into the Harz mountains. It was a scorcher of a day, and even though we climbed into the cool of the forest, high above a reservoir, the cakes had turned squidgy in my backpack. But the raspberries were ripe and sweet among the brambles that lined the forest path, and on our last day in Germany, we partook of a moving feast, an unending breakfast.

In a recent podcast with Amit Varma on the Ukraine war, Ajay Shah commented that, after the seminal year of 1945, France and Germany have emerged as fine examples of civil society. In Berlin, I had made similar observations about Germany to Max Rodenbeck, who moved there a year ago, after several years heading The Economist’s Delhi bureau. 

“It’s not without its flaws”, Max reminded me. Of course, and it took the trauma of a World War to set it on the path of healing, but in my lay view of political history, there is much to be admired, and emulated, about Germany’s evolution as a transparent, democratic society, with an informed and considered discourse about the conduct of their own affairs, and their obligations to the larger community of nations.

* https://www.historynet.com/ss-cathedral/