A Rift as Perspective
Repetition
By Danny Kahl
December 26th, 2018, Berlin, Germany. I was alone, as I usually was, but unlike so many of the other cities I visited, I wasn’t afraid of this one. I’ve wanted to go to Berlin since I was a child, I wanted to understand what had happened there.
Anyone who’s traveled will tell you that all of the best places are haunted, but this felt different. From the moment I stepped off the train, I could feel that the ghosts in this city weren’t merely afterthoughts, not occasional, fleeting reminders of the things that had occurred there. They were in the stark greys of the highrise buildings, their faces mirrored in the graffiti spray painted in the alleyways, in the way people spoke, and, more importantly, in the things that they didn’t say.
I didn’t know what it was that was about Berlin that was so haunting; yes, horrible things had happened here, but it had been nearly 75 years. I was, in my mind, comparing it to New York City after 9/11: a place changed forever, but not broken in spirit. I realized how wrong I was when I got to the place that I had wanted to go all along: the Holocaust Memorial.
It was cold and rainy when I got there, and I realized that the rest of the city was haunted by guilt, but you could see the ghosts here, walking just an arm’s length away. The grey concrete rectangles rose up around me as I entered, and I began to understand, actually comprehend, the enormity of what had happened here.
History is a strange thing, because, in theory, it is so easy to understand. Just names and dates, people and the things that they did, the things that we choose to remember. Watching the mist curl around the stark grey blocks, I couldn’t help feeling as though I was walking through a twisted mockery of a graveyard, and I realized that that was what the people of Berlin had to live with every day. The knowledge of what people can do to one another, what people are willing to sit back and allow to happen, rather than risking upsetting the status quo.
Berlin is a city trapped in the past, strangled by its history, and frozen in time, in its worst moment. The city has developed with time, of course. There are people texting while they walk, shopping malls crowded with shrieking teenagers, and wild parties that are the stories that will shock our grandchildren about our youth. But under all of that, beyond that veneer, there is a hard sense of responsibility, determination.
There is no pride in Berlin, but there is an unshakable memorialization of what has occurred. No glorification, no explanation, just a determination to never let it happen again.
December 26th, 2018. I walked out of the Holocaust Memorial, hoping that the things in progress will be stopped before Washington DC feels like Berlin.
The Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, Germany