BERLIN

THE CITY OF (IN)TOLERANCE

When you last saw me at Tempelhof on May 15, 1956, I was a youngish German woman who spoke good English. Now I guess you can say I am a suburban American lady, a high school teacher staring retirement right in the face, and my good Cedar Rapids neighbours say there isn’t a trace of German in my accent…. We all have to make our own arrangements with the past.

—Ian McEwan, The Innocent, 1989

Contemporary Berlin is perhaps one of the most amazing cities. Tourists come from all over the world, enjoying its spirit of freedom and democracy. For Germans, it is the capital, a growing and united city. For Berlin’s residents? Well, many of them would not mind if it were a bit quieter, despite their awareness of Berlin’s growing reputation as a center of art, culture, and freedom. In addition to becoming a cultural center, however, Berlin has been engaged in a fascinating project of learning from history, exposing its own residents as well as tourists to the city’s past, including the Nazi period and the totalitarian Communist regime in East Berlin. In this process, the city has become a center of tolerance. But if one looks at the city’s history, one can easily see that it has enjoyed such glorious periods in the past, and yet this history did not prevent the Nazis from gaining power. In this chapter we ponder how practical this process of learning from the past can be, and what people really learn from history. Is a new political culture enough, or is there a need for some institutional mechanisms to prevent Berlin from deteriorating into a new era of racism and violence?

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST: VICTIMIZER AND VICTIM

Berlin, February 2009. Daniel and Avner arrive at the hotel rather late. It is already freezing cold outside. They put their luggage in the room and rush outside to see the city at night. Where should they go? They do not know. There aren’t many people outside—Daniel says Europeans are not used to such weather; in Montreal, this would not be considered very cold. He teaches Avner how to “skate” on the frozen snow. For Avner, the visit to Berlin is personal and emotional. In the 1930s, his Jewish father-in-law, then named Freudental, was a student in Berlin. One day in 1933, when he came to work at the Supreme Court, he was stopped by a policeman who told him that Jews were not allowed in. He could not believe it. He asked to see the judge for whom he was working, a liberal person. The judge came out and said, apologetically, “You know this is the law now; I have no choice but to ask you to leave the place.” That same day, Mr. Freudental left Berlin and went to Palestine, where he became a kibbutz member. Since then, neither he nor his wife (a refugee from Vienna) had ever spoken German, either to each other or with others. Mr. Freudental changed his name to a Hebrew one and rarely, if ever, mentioned his past in Berlin. For many years, his two daughters and two sons did not know about his childhood or youth there, or about his studies at the university.

In 1989, the city of West Berlin decided to invite all Jews who had been born in Berlin and forced to flee the Nazis to visit the city as its official guests. This, from the perspective of the city, was Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. It was as if the city were saying, “We are facing and acknowledging the harm done in our past; we want to remedy it as much as we can, and the first thing we should do is reunite the refugees with the city.” Avner’s father- and mother-in-law went to Berlin. Interestingly, for Avner’s father-in-law, this gesture and visit were Vergangenheitsbewältigung as well. In many ways, Mr. Freudental was a stereotypical German Jew: rational, reserved, and restrained, never showing his emotions in public. But during this visit he surely was moved. The day he returned from Berlin, he started telling the family many stories about the city, his youth there, his academic studies, his friends who survived, the city’s culture, the Holocaust, and his friends who were murdered. He never forgave in a deep sense, and he felt that this invitation did not atone for what had happened; nevertheless, he was ready to accept that we were living in a new era, that Berlin had taken a long, hard look at its past and that the city had mended its ways. This ironed out the difficulties for him, at least superficially. Avner could feel that, deep in his heart, his father-in-law was happy to be able to long for that familiar city—to feel that it was legitimate, so to speak, to love and cherish his city again. But what do Berliners think about coming to terms with a past during which most of them were not yet born? Should they carry the burden now? Should they be reminded every day about it? Or is this “past being present” a kind of catharsis?

Places of Remembrance is a work of art permanently on view in Berlin’s Schöneberg district. Juliet Koss describes it thus: “The project consists of eighty rectangular street signs, each measuring fifty by eighty centimeters, showing an image on one side and a short text on the other. These were installed in 1993 on lampposts in the streets surrounding Bayerischer Platz, a neighborhood that eighty years ago was home to many upper middle-class assimilated Jews…. They consist of mostly anti-Semitic decrees from the years between 1933 and 1945, ranging from shockingly trivial curtailments of civil liberties to more famous draconian measures. Masquerading as traffic signs on residential streets or as shop signs in commercial areas, the signs flirt with camouflage, fading into their environment, and reappearing with unexpected force.”¹ The first sign Koss discusses reads, “Poles and Jews will not be heard in court against Germans.” Freudental’s experience comes to mind. Avner keeps asking himself: How could Freudental’s supervisor, the liberal judge, live with this? Outside a contemporary local market is a sign picturing a loaf of bread; the other side of the sign reads: “Jews in Berlin may buy groceries only in the afternoon between 4 and 5 PM.” And there are others: “Aryan and non-Aryan children are prohibited from playing together,” “Suspend Jewish teachers from schools in Berlin,” “Ban Jews from using public transportation.”

Tomorrow morning, Daniel and Avner will pass Ben-Gurion Street, which is named after Israel’s first prime minister. It is located in one of the main areas of the city, near the house of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and near the Sony Center. Ben-Gurion Street is continued by Yitzhak Rabin Street. Avner feels this gesture is touching: renaming main streets after leaders of your former victims; Daniel wonders if other cities have done this, too. Maybe, but at the moment they can’t think of any other examples.

Berlin decided to name the street after Rabin during a 2004 conference on anti-Semitism. Daniel and Avner imagine two Berliners saying, “Let’s meet at the junction of Rabin and Ben-Gurion streets and go to the opera.” But is this reconciliation? Coming to terms with the past? What is the difference between those two terms? Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir, following Lawrie Balfour and Paul Muldoon, suggest that there is an ambiguity in the talk about reconciliation. In its everyday meaning, they write, reconciliation involves the effort to restore a previous state of harmony or amity. They call this “restorative reconciliation.” Yet in many actual cases, the intention is not to restore any kind of relationship but rather to create the right relationship. In fact, the original relationship should not be restored, as it involved oppression, denial, and misrecognition.² Kymlicka and Bashir call this “transformative reconciliation.” It is meant to transform a society into a new, egalitarian one.

It seems that in the case of Berlin (which, surprisingly, Kymlicka and Bashir do not discuss in this otherwise most interesting and profound book), coming to terms with the past involves both restoring some kind of relationship and creating a new one. The relationships that are meant to be restored are that between non-Jew and Jew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and those that existed in Berlin prior to its division into Communist East and democratic West. Yet at the same time, a new relationship must be created: a new way for Jews and non-Jews, and East and West Berliners, to relate to one another. Although Jews and East Berliners did not at all suffer the same fate, what is common to both cases is that the trauma was too immense to overlook or ignore. Put differently, it is impossible to simply restore relationships—rather the city must carefully build new ones. Yet the new ones cannot be created in a vacuum; there is a context—the Holocaust in one case; the division of the city and the accompanying hostilities in the other—in other words, the past. Thus, the new relationships must keep the past in mind in order to avoid repeating it. Contemporary Berliners learn every day from the past. In Kymlicka and Bashir’s terms, the restorative dimension of reconciliation seeks to restore and heal a preexisting “we,” whereas the transformative dimension seeks to create a new “we,” which requires opening up new possibilities that did not previously exist. For contemporary Berliners, this implies that Jews and East Berliners are now part of what constitutes the new Berlin.

Is the aim of reconciliation to rebuild a different German nation? The answer is not clear. As argued later, what has happened in Berlin has not happened in other German cities such as Munich (or at least, this is what we have heard from local residents, Berliners), so this is how reconciliation is conceived by Berliners. Yet one could argue that Berlin is obsessed with redefining and rebuilding its distinctive citizenships, or with redefining what it is to be a Berliner. So perhaps what is happening in Berlin is aimed at city building rather than nation building. It is interesting to note that several reconciliation theorists have argued that reconciliation cannot substitute for the political process of nation building, and that the most it can offer is healing for a specific violation of human rights. This is an argument that reconciliation is nothing but a legal process aimed at recognizing people’s human rights, and that is what many Berliners seem to be interested in. So two goals exist side by side in Berlin: Berlin acknowledges the tremendous violation of human rights of Jews (and other groups such as homosexuals and Roma) during the Nazi regime and of citizens of East Berlin under Communist control. But they also wish to rebuild the city—perhaps not the nation, but the citizenship of the city.

It is clear that since the two processes—restorative and transformative reconciliation—are taking place side by side in Berlin, with the goals of city building and healing from human rights violations, what is happening in Berlin is much more complex than the process called “reconciliation” in many other places. If this is so, it is clear why Berlin needed the new term Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

TOLERANCE OR INDIFFERENCE?

It is still Daniel and Avner’s first night in Berlin, and it is very cold. They reach the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, built between 1891 and 1895. Severely damaged during World War II,³ it still looks like a wounded animal: dark, broken, and yet not ready to give up. Indeed, its main section serves as a memorial hall.

Churches and other places of worship should not be bombed. Why did human beings kill on behalf of God? How did they reach a point where they demolished in the name of eternity? The simple answer is that there was no other way; the churches were bombed as part of the effort to defeat the Nazis. This is doubtless true, yet when one looks at films showing Berlin immediately after the war,⁴ one cannot help but question whether the scope of the damage—70 percent of Berlin’s houses were demolished—was necessary. Perhaps it was (we do not want to be judgmental), but because of the massive bombing the entire city had to be rebuilt.

The worshippers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Church now hold services in a modern, round building, which is reminiscent of a bunker. Is this irony? Does it remind people who come to pray there that war could come at any minute if they do not do everything in their power to stop it? Peace and brotherhood, it seems, are like marriage: you have to work at them, give them sustenance so they don’t wither. Tolerance is fragile. If that is Berlin’s message—that tolerance must be sustained and nourished for it to live—then the essence of Berlin’s message is captured in that church with its torn roof.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a most moving place. It is very near the heart of Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate. This is no coincidence. A huge area is covered by 2,771 concrete stelae, most of which are taller than a human being. Daniel and Avner walk through this area. When they reach the place, it is covered in white snow, a hair-raising contrast with the black and grey stelae. As they walk, they immediately feel lost. When one walks among the stelae it is quite impossible to keep a sense of direction. They finally reach the entrance to the information center, designed like an underground bunker beneath the stelae. The center supplies personal information about victims of Nazism. Letters from victims; the life stories of Mr. and Mrs. Blaut, of Mr. and Mrs. Rado. The victims have faces and life stories; they become particular individuals. But the most astonishing moment comes when Daniel and Avner enter the second room. Slides of letters thrown from trains by Jews who were deported to the camps are shown on the floor. The room is dark, and when they enter, it takes them a minute or two to get used to the darkness. People move slowly from one slide to the other to read the letters; hence, at any given moment most visitors are standing in silence, their heads bowed as they read.⁵ It is as if the entire room and all the people in it are standing for a minute of silence in memory of the victims. When they leave, Avner and Daniel look again at the sign at the entrance to the information center, with Primo Levi’s famous aphorism: “It happened; therefore it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say.”

Tolerance is a tricky concept. It has been used in various ways, so we need to define what we mean by it. Sometimes tolerance refers to “the conditional acceptance of, or non-interference with beliefs, actions or practices that one considers to be wrong but still ‘tolerable,’ such that they should not be prohibited or constrained.”⁶ Notice that, accordingly, the values or behavior of the tolerated party are thought to be “wrong” or “bad.” This is not the kind of toleration we mean here. Although we focus on beliefs, values, norms, culture, and behavior (rather than on political views, for example) as the object of toleration, as well as on the people holding them, we do not assume that the beliefs or norms are thought to be “bad.” Suffice it for them to be substantially different from the ones held and practiced by the tolerant party. The relevant boundary, in our way of using the term here, is not between the values and norms one finds “good” and those one finds “bad,” but rather between the values and norms of the tolerant party and those of the tolerated party. It is therefore a concept closely related to identity.

Indeed, in the history of Berlin the issue of tolerance was a question of who was a genuine Berliner, or Prussian, or German.⁷ Thus, our use of the term goes hand in hand with what Michael Walzer calls the fourth and fifth attitudes of toleration: “openness to the others, curiosity; perhaps even respect, a willingness to listen and learn; and further along the continuum, there is the enthusiastic endorsement of difference; an aesthetic endorsement, if difference is taken to represent in cultural form the largeness and diversity of God’s creation or of the natural world; or a functional endorsement, if difference is viewed, as in the liberal multiculturalist argument, as a necessary condition for human flourishing.”⁸

The latter is therefore called “esteem toleration,” when people of different beliefs and cultures not only respect one another’s right to lead their lives as they want but also feel ethical esteem for those cultural forms.⁹ Apparently, this is how Berliners would like to see their tolerance today.

Daniel and Avner walk back to their hotel. To their surprise, opposite the church on Hardenberg Strasse they see a museum of pornography, the Erotik Museum. This could not happen in Jerusalem, Avner notes. There might be tolerance for pornography (or there might not be), but to put a museum of pornography next to the city’s most famous church? Is Berlin teaching us that tolerance has no limits? That you are either absolutely tolerant or not tolerant enough? Isn’t this going too far? Does this truly respect the sensibilities of religious people?

Prima facie, what is the problem? By placing the sex museum where they did, the city planners were showing that they were modern, progressive, lacking prejudices, or, if you like, liberal. A liberal city tolerates everything, including pornography. Yet, on second thought, whom was the city tolerating? Liberals? Consumers of pornography are not necessarily open-minded and liberal. On the contrary, they abuse women; they objectify them. So, is the act of placing the Erotik Museum next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church a sign of tolerance or of indifference? Does it imply that Berlin is at its peak of tolerance, or does it imply that Berlin is not sensitive enough?

Come to think of it, Berlin’s history is dialectic: peaks of tolerance and openness, followed by dark periods when the city accepted horrific behaviors, satanic activities, which rapidly lead to intolerance. To counter that, the city then opened itself to Jews, or Roma, or gays before slipping once more into intolerance.¹⁰

Two days later, Daniel and Avner interview Alex, a graduate student at Potsdam University and an East Berliner, in a café in the main quarter of Berlin, Mitte. “Berliners are not tolerant,” Alex says. “We are indifferent. We turn a blind eye. We do not mind other people’s business.”

Does tolerance blur into indifference? No doubt, the city wants people to be tolerant and open rather than indifferent. The city repeatedly reminds people of what happened here. The street signs it installed around Bayerischer Platz are just one, albeit controversial, example.¹¹ We hope that Berliners are not indifferent when they see these; we hope that they are not oblivious to their existence. But what does it mean when a city shows respect for pornography and puts a museum of eroticism next to a church, or (we now notice) opposite the main train station?

Indeed, while visiting Berlin and studying its history, you may be bothered by a particular question. It seems that Berlin has experienced fluctuations in its level of tolerance. At times it was the most tolerant city in Europe; yet it often declined into a center of intolerance. What is it that makes this city switch attitudes so radically? Reading the history of Berlin, one readily notices that the city has gained tremendously from its tolerant periods. Policies of tolerance brought cultural prosperity and affluence, whereas periods of intolerance were detrimental to its growth. For example, during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which was rooted in mutual intolerance between Protestants and Catholics, the Brandenburg region (of which Berlin was the capital) lost one-third of its citizens.

In fact, Berliners learned their lesson immediately. After the Thirty Years’ War, Friedrich Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg (1620–88), decided that free immigration would boost his economic policies. In 1661, he issued a number of edicts easing restrictions on immigration.¹² This led to a wave of newcomers: immigrants who had suffered from religious persecution in their native countries. Indeed, ten years later, a group of Jews exiled from Vienna settled in Berlin. Historians now refer to it as the first Jewish “community” in Berlin. This wave of openness continued: by the year 1700, there were 114 Jewish families and more than a thousand Jews in Berlin. In 1677, Berlin became home to more than seven hundred Huguenots, Protestant refugees from France. The Edict of Potsdam, issued in 1685, facilitated the immigration of twenty thousand Huguenots within three years, most of whom settled in Berlin. The Edict granted them ten years of tax-free status, allowed them to hold church services in French, and generally encouraged them to immigrate to Prussia. Before 1739, around twelve hundred Bohemians settled in Berlin to escape religious persecution. So tolerance and openness were perhaps instrumental for growth and had their roots in pragmatic considerations, but they were also promoted on moral grounds.¹³ These immigrants all had their impact: in 1740, Berlin became a center of the Enlightenment. Important new cultural buildings were built, such as the Opera Palace (1737), the Staatsoper Opera House (1742), and the Old Library (Alte Bibliothek, 1780). In 1764, the first German-language theater opened in Berlin on Behrenstrasse. Until then, plays had been performed only in foreign languages, usually French. With the support of Friedrich the Great (king of Prussia between 1740 and 1786), Berlin tried to develop into an intellectual center. Even Voltaire, the French philosopher of the Enlightenment, lived there between 1750 and 1753.¹⁴ This intellectual milieu attracted citizens interested in science and literature to Berlin. With the relaxation of censorship, new journals could be published.¹⁵ After the death of Friedrich the Great, however, his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm II, introduced heavy censorship rules and Berlin once again became a city of intolerance. Liberals were persecuted.

ARCHITECTURE, TRANSPARENCY, DEMOCRACY, AND OPENNESS

Their first morning in Berlin, Daniel and Avner awaken early. Flakes of snow—or is it sleet?—dance gently outside the window. A beautiful “Welcome to Berlin” scene. Avner hurries outside to find an open café and comes across one that is part of a chain—or at least it seems so at first sight. The coffee is surprisingly good and the atmosphere very like many other cafés: soft international jazz, large pictures on the walls. Initially, the café reminds him of Starbucks, which makes him a bit uncomfortable. But then Avner notices something different: the armchairs are not placed around tables. Instead, they are placed in a large circle so you can face other people. It reminds him of coffeehouses seen in Arab cities, where it is all about discussion and meeting other people.

Theorists of “deliberative democracy”—who focus on processes of deliberation involving all citizens, usually before, but also after policies are designed, and who see the value of democracy in its openness and comprehensiveness rather than in the idea of majority rule—often claim that one of the advantages of deliberative democracy is its inclusivity. Deliberative democracy tends to embrace minorities, newcomers, immigrants, or groups (such as women, gays and lesbians, ethnic minorities, and poor people) that have been denied, whether by law or in practice, full rights of participation. Yet, argues Bashir Bashir, when serious historical injustice is involved, demands arise relating to the collective memory of exclusion and to taking responsibility for what happened as a precondition for any genuine sense of inclusiveness and deliberation. Deliberative democracy’s inclusiveness alone, therefore, may not work to achieve a sense of participation and democracy. Then the politics of reconciliation is in place, so that these minority groups may overcome the collective memory and strive to participate in the political process while those previously denying minorities’ rights change their attitude. But it should not simply be a policy; it should genuinely change people’s minds. It should transform racists into nonracists, chauvinists into egalitarians, and xenophobes into citizens of a “rainbow nation.”¹⁶

There is, then, a very optimistic assumption at stake: that this process of transforming people’s views, ideologies, and characters is possible and doable. It assumes, then, that people are racist, xenophobic, or prejudiced only because circumstances have led them to hold these views; and therefore if you change the circumstances and create the right environment, people’s behavior will improve as they adopt or develop different ideals. This somewhat Marxist theory is at the basis of Berlin’s “coming to terms with the past.”

Do Berliners like discussing and arguing about culture, art, and politics in cafés? This is a crucial question, because for Berliners really to be able to transform their city, they need this openness, this curiosity to listen to others. Many Berliners are famously proud of their Berliner Schnauze (endearing Berlin bluntness).¹⁷ They are notorious for “having it,” whatever it is. They don’t think they need to smile when serving you; they don’t think it’s a beautiful day (as the English often say when they greet you on the street), and the bus driver doesn’t think he ought to let you know where to get off. There is currently a campaign to persuade Berliners to improve their attitude, but they see Berliner Schnauze as authentic and frank. Then again, is Berliner Schnauze another form of insensitivity or indifference to others’ feelings, or is it just part of their tolerance? An Israeli Avner knows who visited Berlin just after visiting the United States said that it was good to experience people who were honest about what they felt rather than trying to pretend. Perhaps.

Daniel and Avner decide to check this out later and begin making their way by foot toward the city through the Tiergarten, a huge and by now snow-covered park.

The snow turns to rain and Daniel seems slightly disappointed. But when they enter the Sony Center, his mood lifts: it seems full of light and very hospitable. It is a huge complex combining different functions: residential, entertainment, business, food, art. Buildings are linked by a huge domed roof made of seven glass and steel structures. This creates a light-flooded floor. Its transparency allows in a lot of light even though it is a cloudy day. Although the cafés in this place are not cheap, there is the sense that the place is accessible. People pass through on their way to and from different parts of Berlin. It gives you a sense of success: fantastic original architecture, good restaurants, cinemas, culture, and prosperity. For a moment, Daniel and Avner forget about the hard economic times the world is experiencing. They have a friend with them: Qian Jiang, a brilliant and talented Chinese scientist and polymath. Having earned his PhD in physics at Harvard, he is now doing postdoctoral research in Munich. When Avner tells Daniel that the building appears responsible for his change in mood, Jiang expresses skepticism: we can design buildings to express certain moods and values, but can they really change our moods, perhaps even our values? Can they “educate” Berliners?

Perhaps proving the latter would be difficult. At most, we can rely on an aggregation of subjective feelings, people’s testimony about how they learned to behave or to hold certain values by living next to, or in, particular buildings. If buildings cannot educate us, then maybe, more plausibly, they can at least affect our moods. This is very intuitive and reasonable. If so, then Berlin’s efforts to design transparent buildings are only an attempt to promote “tolerance lite,” and the real key to changing values lies in the educational system or perhaps the family. Yet, it would not be far-fetched to argue that living in particular surroundings for a long time can influence people to adopt the values these buildings express.

The Sony Center is located in the heart of Potsdamer Platz, about one kilometer south of the Brandenburg Gate. When the central train station opened in 1838, this was one of the busiest urban traffic centers of Europe, becoming busier still after the Empire was formed in 1871 and with the growth in Berlin’s population between the two world wars. In the 1920s, Potsdamer Platz was the busiest square in Europe, with S-Bahn and U-Bahn urban railways, twenty-six tramlines, and five bus routes passing through it. Twenty thousand cars took this route every day, and eighty-three thousand travelers and commuters were counted at Potsdamer Railway Station on a single day.¹⁸ In fact, one of Europe’s first traffic lights was installed here in 1924. Speaking of which, Berliners are rather proud of their Ampelmännchen, the human figure icon designed by Peglau in 1961 to show pedestrians when to cross, which is now found throughout the city, though once it was seen only in East Berlin, in the former German Democratic Republic.¹⁹ It is striking that the one thing East Berlin bequeathed to the entire city involves behavior control: over traffic and especially pedestrians. Is this because control and order are important in this city?

A sign at the entrance to the newly built Academy of Arts, which prides itself on being open, democratic, and transparent, reads, “Please proceed in an orderly fashion.” Daniel and Avner find the sign’s request bizarre. With all of the Academy’s openness, democracy, and transparency, can’t it rid itself of the German admiration for order? But then they realize that the sign is deliberately provocative. The theme of the Academy’s exhibition is control and instilling fear. In a way, the Academy is playing with Berliners’ feelings, causing them to behave in a way that, it is now believed, led them astray seventy-five years ago.

To return to the Sony Center and the Potsdamer Platz: in World War II, the Platz was completely destroyed and remained abandoned and empty for many years. The Berlin Wall was built here, and the area became a symbol of the gap between the two systems, East and West. No wonder, then, that in 1990, following the reunification of Germany and Berlin, this place was chosen as one of the first sites to be rebuilt. It again functions as the heart of the city. It was perhaps the most rapidly and massively restructured neighborhood or plaza in the world. The nineteen buildings in this “district,” as it is called in official websites, were designed by an international team of architects. The fact that the design team that designed Berlin’s center, its heart, was international is emphasized repeatedly to demonstrate how far Berlin has come and how much it has changed. The lead architect, Renzo Piano, “wanted to create a European city district and gave the area a distinctive look with the terracotta frontages he developed specially for Potsdamer Platz.”²⁰ One cannot help but wonder at this dramatic change from being the center of German particularism and chauvinistic nationalism to being the most progressive city in the state, and arguably one of the most progressive and cosmopolitan cities in Europe.

The construction time allocated to the project was four years. When one looks at the photos from that period, one can imagine the sense of a “new era” of hope that passersby must have felt upon seeing the number (we counted fourteen!) of cranes.²¹ A city can retell itself, can reshape its own narrative when such huge sums are invested and when such positive energy is expressed.²² And in terms of positive energy, the city is very proud of the ecofriendly building. Even its roofs are used to collect rainwater.²³

This building is a surprise. It is as modern, perhaps postmodern, as buildings can get. Most Berliners are conservative in their taste. Not in their political opinions—before World War II, the socialists and communists had the majority of Berliners’ votes and the city hosted revolutionary figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, members of the underground Spartacus League—but in terms of their lifestyle. Or so they tell Daniel and Avner of themselves. They sit in the same café or bar they did yesterday and tend to dislike it when their habits are disrupted. One interviewee told Daniel and Avner that in 1994, as a child from East Berlin, he moved to a school in West Berlin but the children wouldn’t accept him. They bullied him because he was from the East. An architecture student suggested that Berliners are conformists. A third young interviewee from neither Berlin nor Germany told Avner and Daniel the following story: He regularly went to a café on Oranien Strasse in Kreuzberg that served a large clientele of immigrants and foreign students. The waitress kept addressing him in German, to which he replied in his (at the time) broken German. Some days later, she suddenly addressed him in perfect English. Astonished, he asked her why she hadn’t spoken in English earlier. She replied that she hadn’t thought of it, but the day before the café owner had told her that because so many foreigners came to the café, perhaps she should speak to them in English. This, he says, is typical of Berliners: they are not necessarily conformists, but they do accept the order of things unquestioningly until they are advised to do something else.

Of course, one should qualify this generalization, because in Berlin you can also find anarchists and people with “alternative” lifestyles. Daniel and Avner also learned that this generalization doesn’t apply to all Berliners. For example, social science students at Humboldt University are highly skeptical; they doubt what their books say, raise questions, and challenge the theories they study. All the same, Berliners in general, interviewees reported, tend to lack self-confidence. Does this lead to an acceptance of things as they are? Or maybe to radical innovation and openness? Or maybe to both?

RETELLING HISTORY

Daniel and Avner walk east on Leipziger Strasse. They reach the site of the former headquarters of the Soviet occupying forces. Here for the first time they encounter Berlin retelling its history.

We ought to say something about “retelling” history. Retelling history is completely different from “rewriting” history. The latter often has negative connotations of manipulation, whereas to us the concept of “retelling” has positive connotations. It is not a manipulative practice; on the contrary, it is very straightforward. Rewriting can cover up, hide, and deceive. It aims to prevent the younger generation from learning the ugly stories and discovering the facts. Retelling, on the other hand, is about exposing the younger generation to the stories even if they show the storyteller, or a body associated with the storyteller, in a terrifying light. Thus retelling history is about mending one’s ways, atoning for the commission of past evils, making redress. It therefore starts with asking questions, exposing the reader and listener to the naked truth. In that sense it is about transparency, like Berlin’s contemporary architecture.

If contemporary architecture in Berlin is about transparency, the Soviet headquarters building is the opposite: it is massive and has an abiding sense of power. Don’t get us wrong: those who view it do not sense their own power; they sense that the building has power over them, and they are powerless. On one wall you can still see the 1950 mural by Wolfgang Ruppel, who used realism to depict the workers as joyful and loyal to the Communist Party. But next to the building the municipality shows an exhibition to educate the younger generation about the events of June 16 and 17, 1953.

The events in question took place in East Berlin following discontent with the East German regime, especially its demands for increased “production quotas,” already a much-hated practice. The campaign was only possible because of Stalin’s death. A strike—an illegal political act then, involving thirty-six thousand workers—was announced, but when the strike turned into a march and a demonstration, Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s leader, called for Soviet assistance. And it came, with tanks. Demonstrators were shot, forty were killed, and thousands were arrested.²⁴

Daniel and Avner stand, looking at the photographs and reading the retelling of history: “The workers were increasingly prepared to strike for their demands…. The party and state leadership responded to the growing dissatisfaction with a brutal campaign of political persecution…. [The authorities] exercised dictatorial power.” The demonstration, which certainly was very brave, is described as spontaneous, popular, and just. Their demand is described as a demand for freedom. Was it just about freedom, or were there other considerations? Did they have a clear idea of what freedom means?

Transparent walls as a symbol. Parliament building, Berlin. Photograph © Cardaf. Courtesy of Shutterstock.

Two days later, Daniel and Avner pass the Soviet Memorial site, west of the Brandenburg Gate. Although it is covered with snow, it is visited by dozens of tourists, Germans included. Someone has laid flowers at the entrance. The retelling of history here is straightforward. Showing respect to those who were killed violently as well as keeping alive the memory of the break with civilization represented by Nazi rule is important for the way Germany views itself historically.

We have called this “retelling” rather than rewriting history, and we have said that it is about transparency, knowledge, and empowering the younger generation to ask questions. Yet something in the language bothers us. Perhaps it is because those who are retelling are using the same language and adjectives, very dramatic and pompous, that were used in the past—only this time, it is for a good cause. We also consider the dozens of explanations in museums and on street corners, or near the houses of Jews who were deported to Auschwitz: as explanations, they are very detailed and pedagogic. But they are polemical and blunt, allowing the reader no space to reflect independently on what she has seen. A note in the German History Museum describes the eighteenth century as follows: “The time had come to think critically and rid oneself of authoritarian beliefs and all forms of prejudices.” Daniel calls this a “totalizing critique of authoritarianism.” In other words, Berliners often seem to have a habit of replacing one extreme ideology with its opposite. One wonders whether this really constitutes critical thinking and the quest for liberation from prejudice.²⁵

Now, this habit could serve an obvious purpose. Coming to terms with the past, like any process of reconciliation, must involve creating a new collective memory. The problem of divided memory, with different sections of society having different memories from the past or different images of what happened, either because they interpret it differently or because they focus on different topics, themes or even events, must be an obstacle to a city (as a whole) in coming to terms with its past.²⁶ Thus, the city seeks a collective and unambiguous ideology in order to bring about a new ethos. At the same time, however, the particular ethos they are interested in—tolerance and coming to terms with the past—requires pluralism and maybe even ambiguity. In places where liberalism and democracy were burned, literally, shouldn’t citizens work to defend them by all means, including encouraging pluralism, self-reflection, and criticism, rather than imposing clear-cut ideologies? We return to the issue of pluralism later.

Opposite Humboldt University, the first university built in Berlin, there is a square known as Bebel Platz. It was so named in 1947, after August Bebel, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party. Here, Daniel and Avner imagine the many demonstrations, gatherings, and debates that took place in the Platz in the 1870s.

In 1875, the Socialist Workers Party of Germany was founded here in Berlin. This is the party that later renamed itself the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD). Three years after the party was founded, it was outlawed. This marked the beginning of intolerance toward socialists and supporters of workers’ rights. All SPD publications and meetings were outlawed as well, and party members were named “enemies of the German Reich.” This lasted for twelve years, after which the pendulum swung, workers regained their rights, and the party was legalized once more. As always in Berlin when tolerance and openness replace intolerance, this was marked by enthusiasm, and the workers felt on top of the world. In 1890, Berlin celebrated its first May Day celebration and an absolute majority of Berliners voted for the Social Democrats in the Reichstag elections. Another swing of the pendulum, and on May 10, 1933, in this very Platz, the Nazis burned twenty thousand books by socialist and Jewish authors.

When Daniel and Avner reach Bebel Platz, it is covered in snow and there is a strong wind. Few people cross the Platz. The trees look naked and shivering with cold on the other side of the street. The atmosphere is sad. In the middle of the square is a memorial. Daniel and Avner stand there: under their feet, on the very site of the Nazi book burning, is a conceptual artwork, an understatement designed by Michael Ulman, an Israeli artist. What they first see is a heavy glass plate underfoot, a transparent panel covering an underground room with bookshelves large enough for twenty thousand books. The books are missing.²⁷ The snow makes it hard to see; the room is blurred. Avner recalls another visit to the place, when he together with other visitors looked at the glass and what they saw first was a reflection of their own faces, as if the artist was saying, “Please, do not forget: it was human beings who burned the books.” Less than a meter away from the glass plate, this window in the floor, is a plaque with the words of the poet Heinrich Heine from 1820, “Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned.” But in this place books are not burned anymore. In the center of the square, in the snow, stands a group of people from all over the world, remembering the awful event. Daniel and Avner counted seven different languages being spoken around them in the first five minutes they stood there: Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, Hebrew, and Japanese. The place legitimizes all these languages, all these nationalities and identities. The very place in which xenophobes and fascists burned the idea of Enlightenment is today cosmopolitan and international. But everybody standing there shivers in the cold, and they smile to one another before going in search of a café or restaurant to escape the icy weather.

Daniel and Avner enter Café Einstein on Markgrafen Street. It is not the original one; the original one—which Avner visited on another trip to Berlin and enjoyed very much—was at 58 Kurfirsten Street. That was the place for artists, bohemians, students, and intellectuals craving good, strong continental coffee. The café Daniel and Avner enter, a tiny place on a street corner, is vivid and full of joy. A woman comes in with her small son, who climbs up on a chair and points to the cake he desires, and gets some hot chocolate as well. The place is warm and cozy, pleasant and relaxing.

TRANSPARENCY AND COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST

“Few buildings, if any, can match the transparent architecture of the new glass-fronted building, designed by Behnisch & Partner with Werner Durth, for its defiant demonstration of openness, motivated not least by the willingness of the country’s foremost association of artists to argue its case and stand its ground.” This assertion opens the little booklet on the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Art).²⁸ This astonishing building is transparent, “granting [pedestrians] a view into the inside of the building.”²⁹ The transparency is not without reason. The building stands on Pariser Platz, a glaring contrast with the many buildings around it: the U.S. embassy, the British embassy, a bank, all are closed to the public or restrict entrance. This building stands out “like a truculent exclamation mark proclaiming the freedom of the arts,” the booklet continues. “While most people do not have access to the bank and embassies that line the square, they do to the Academy; it is bent on being part of public life. It deliberately extends an invitation to people to come in and look around the interior of the building, with its passageway, bistro, bookshop, reading room, and exhibition rooms.” When the Berlin Wall fell, the city decided to redesign the Platz. Obviously, respect had to be paid to the Brandenburg Gate, yet those designing the Academy building wished it to stand out from the rest.

Daniel and Avner enter the building on a gloomy morning; it is drizzling and gray outside. Once again they notice how this transparent architecture affects their mood: transparent architecture and light make people feel more optimistic. There is time before the organized tour of the exhibition, so they climb to the first floor, which is above the cafeteria. The smells of coffee and cakes are cheerful, but the art on the walls is very pessimistic. One picture shows a group of shapes reminiscent of cages. One cage has a door to something that looks like a lighter room, but when they look at it closely they see that it is more like another, bigger, cage. Another picture shows the Pariser Platz, where the Akademie der Künste stands. There are six pieces of art floating outside the building, but each is held like a flag by a person—perhaps an artist?—who stands in the midst of a huge crowd. One of these flags or pieces of art depicts the same door mentioned above. The hundreds of people in the crowd all look exactly the same. Conformism? Although a brave few unfurl the works of art, at the end of the day the general public remains conformist. The booklet goes on, “[The building] does not put up any barriers, nor does it try to hide anything. It is intent on sharing its treasures with others … generating openness, … [a] highly communicative atmosphere that can be sensed everywhere … a breath of fresh air in the heart of the city.”

Daniel and Avner join the tour. Their guide, dressed as a bodyguard and carrying what seems to be a gun and several earphones, takes them in an elevator to a cellar, and then to another. The exhibition on control and fear is in the very cellars the Stasi used.

Nearly all public buildings built after 1990 are transparent or consist of several transparent elements, as if the city is declaring: I have nothing to hide. Daniel’s mind springs to a comparison: there is nothing similar in Tokyo. In the center of Tokyo lies the Imperial Palace, which is inaccessible at all times to commoners. In Berlin, transparency seems to be the city’s way of acknowledging that the past has become part of its future, that it will always be there and there is no way to hide from it or cover it up. This acknowledgment, which is part of the idea of “coming to terms with the past,” is a matter of soul-searching, taking a long, hard look at the past, through architecture. Although this seems to many quite a burden for the residents of Berlin—constantly being reminded of their ancestors’ past—transparency and coming to terms with the past can also help one function in a place where evil has been committed.

Now, if “coming to terms with the past” is motivated by Berliners’ wish to sit around the campfire singing “Kumbaya,” as it were—by their wish to feel less guilt and shame—then the claim that Berliners are more indifferent than tolerant may be accurate. The words of Heiner Müller, the well-known poet, dramatist, and theater director, come to mind: “In order to get rid of the nightmares of history, one must first acknowledge the history, one must know history; otherwise it many haunt you in a very old fashioned way, as a nightmare. One must first realize it, then one can denounce it, and get rid of it.”³⁰

Did Müller mean literally “getting rid” of the haunting past? It seems more likely that he meant getting rid of the nightmares rather than the past; that is, rather than using denial, Berliners need to learn how to look at the mirror and know who they are and where they come from.

Müller himself was a victim of intolerance. In 1947, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Socialist Unity Party, the governing party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and enjoyed star status in East Berlin as perhaps East Germany’s most important dramatist. In 1959 he won the Heinrich Mann Prize, East Germany’s most distinguished literary award. Yet, once he began criticizing the regime he became persona non grata. His play The Resettler Woman was censored, a first sign of change in the regime’s attitude toward him. After the reunification of Berlin, he regained his status as a leading artist and author until his death in 1995. But he never forgot the time he was boycotted. It also seems that he never forgot the time when he was part of the system. He experienced “coming to terms with the past” not only from the perspective of the victim but equally from the perspective of one who enjoyed and benefited from the system.

Did Heiner Müller realize the evil taking place under the Communist regime? Presumably he was a genuine socialist, devoted to the goal of creating a truly egalitarian society. It seems he did believe that capitalism was the enemy of mankind. That thought does not seem far-fetched when one looks at the contemporary world and the misery in many developing societies, or considers the prevalence of poverty in the developed world. Yet, was he aware of the cost of “actually existing socialism”? The cost, we know, was not just the denial of civil and political freedoms, but also relative poverty compared to capitalist Germany. Did he know about the way the party ruled, about its secret police surveillance, and did he not care about the lack of freedom? Suppose he did. Could it be that the very fact that he was in Berlin made him feel secure, in the sense that in this place evil cannot happen? Could it be that this was the thought that made most Jewish Berliners decide to stay rather than flee, despite the scenes of Nazis marching about the city? Could it be that Mr. Freudental, Avner’s father-in-law, was an exception because he did see through the smokescreen, he was able to understand that a city can be the epitome of tolerance but can still very quickly sink into intolerance and hatred? Presumably, Heiner Müller believed that, since he lived in a city that had just experienced Nazism and risen from the ashes of war to become a center of art and literature, Berlin was a cultured and civilized place, just as it had been in the eighteenth century.

The historian of German culture Matt Erlin argues that the experience of living in Berlin in the eighteenth century provided the model and inspiration for Moses Mendelssohn’s idea of “the vocation of man,” the individual who experiences “balanced development of all one’s physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual capacities in the appropriate measure…. Such development becomes possible through social interaction and reaches its highest degree of perfection in a highly developed society,” such as Berlin. Erlin calls this “the philosophy of the city.”³¹ Mendelssohn, who is known to have been one of the most liberal and progressive minds in eighteenth-century Jewish philosophy, argued that Judaism did not try to coerce belief but rather to stipulate codes of behaviors; but he extrapolated from this to a more general argument about freedom of belief in general, a position that was progressive even among German Enlightenment scholars of that time. Erlin believes that Mendelssohn’s position grew organically from his experience in Berlin. For example, people in Berlin believed that urbane communication was possible in urban centers such as Berlin, but not in provincial towns. Berliners experienced the city as thrilling and believed the city offered many advantages, including “urban sociability,” the various connections and relationships one has in the city that support individuals’ development. Interestingly, Erlin claims that Mendelssohn’s defense of sociability often took the form of refuting Rousseau’s attack on the decadence of urban life. Civilization, in its urban form, Mendelssohn thought, allowed new cognitive capacities to emerge. “There is every reason to think that [Mendelssohn’s] arguments were written with contemporary urban experience in mind.”³²

Daniel and Avner meet Ortal, a Jewish Israeli student of architecture at the Technische Universität Berlin, and Ido, a Jewish Israeli student who has been living in Berlin for two years, studying German and working with the SPD. Both these students’ grandfathers were born in Berlin and escaped before World War II. Ido’s grandfather is, actually, Mr. Freudental, Avner’s father-in-law. Daniel and Avner ask the students whether they feel strange in Berlin, and when they answer no, Daniel and Avner push hard: do you feel insecure or threatened in any way because you are Jewish? Ortal’s answer is surprising: though she does feel like a stranger from time to time, when she visited her grandfather he asked her to tell him about Berlin, saying that he felt great nostalgia for life there before the Nazis. Jews had been full citizens, and during the Weimar Republic they enjoyed full citizenship rights. Once again, a period of complete tolerance deteriorated into horrific anti-Semitism and intolerance toward Jews, the Roma, and homosexuals. Berlin was the city most tolerant of homosexuals and the first to have an open gay community in the early twentieth century. Yet thousands of Berlin homosexuals were murdered during the war. When Daniel and Avner visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, they recalled the oft-cited saying of Friedrich II (1712–86), also known as Friedrich the Great: “Religions must be tolerated and the state must be vigilant that no one does anyone harm because every man must get to heaven in his own way.”

PLURALISM BETWEEN AND WITHIN PERSONS

Daniel and Avner go to see the remains of the Berlin Wall at Niederkirchner Strasse. Here, not far from Checkpoint Charlie, one can still see the remains of the popular symbolic “attack” on the wall, when people started hitting it with hammers.³³ While walking along the wall, Avner receives a text message from someone he and Daniel were supposed to meet the next day.

When the wall was built, it enforced a total separation that could not be repeated today with mobile phones, email, and other contemporary communications technology. But back then, all telephone lines between the two sections of the city were cut in the early 1950s, and people could phone only via operator-controlled connections through Frankfurt.³⁴ This improved during the “detente” period, when direct dialing was reintroduced, though East Berliners were conscious of the possibility that their calls were being listened to. Today, the remains of the wall are part of everyday life in Berlin. Some tourists come to see the wall’s remains, but very few Germans pay attention: the fall of the wall is already a fact. So Berliners know that walls can be knocked down. Alex, the Potsdam University graduate student we interviewed, told us that when he went to Israel for a year, he liked traveling between Ramallah, in the Palestinian-controlled territories, and Israel. He would sit in Ramallah and tell his Palestinian friends that he had been in Tel Aviv an hour earlier, and then have coffee with Israeli friends in Tel Aviv and tell them he’d been with Palestinians in Ramallah that morning. “It was about telling them that walls can be torn to pieces,” he told us.³⁵ But it was also about having both Palestinians and Israeli friends. In East Berlin, one had to be totally East Berliner: Communist, anti-American, and loyal to the party; in West Berlin, one had to be totally West Berliner: pro-American and liberal-minded. Now one can be German and Berliner and what have you: socialist, liberal, Communist. There is pluralism among people, but also within them: one can be German and socialist at the same time. Indeed, once again one can be Jewish and German, like Moses Mendelssohn.

The Jewish Museum was designed by Daniel Libeskind. He is a Jewish expatriot Israeli professor of architecture who won the museum design competition. The choice of Libeskind was quite controversial. Rolf Schneider, the author of the museum guide, writes, “Libeskind has called his Jewish Museum project ‘Between the Lines.’ Visitors to the museum will need to try and follow his train of thought here, even though they might find it confusing and exasperating at times.”³⁶ Edward Rothstein of the New York Times was less courteous: “There may be worse Jewish museums in the world than the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, which opened in 2001. But it is difficult to imagine that any could be as uninspiring and banal.”³⁷

When Daniel and Avner visit the Jewish Museum Berlin, they immediately become disoriented and, instead of paying attention to the exhibition, they focus on the claustrophobic feelings it induces. The many documents and objects on display do not attract them. They feel uncomfortable. All they want to do is to leave. But presumably the museum does enlighten people who come better prepared for the experience. Indeed, an interesting thing happens there. Daniel and Avner enter the learning center. Avner looks under “Alleged Ritual Murders” to learn about places and events involving allegations against Jews such as the old myth that Jews murder Christian children and use their blood for their Passover matzos. Jiang, who has joined them, tells Avner that in nineteenth-century China it was quite common to tell such stories about Catholics. Catholics would often save children whose parents had abandoned them, and since some of the children were extremely debilitated, they often died. This led to rumors that Catholics exploited and killed Chinese babies.

This implies that minorities are too often seen as very different, and stories are told about them. But why such horrific stories? Why demonize minorities? Obviously, some people in the majority group feel so threatened and insecure about their identity that they make up these stories. John Locke taught us that in order to be more tolerant, we need to be more relaxed about our identities and reject the idea that different identities challenge our own. In fact, Locke was suggesting that pluralism is not a threat, but rather the way the world works. Indeed, both contemporary Berlin and Montreal teach us that incorporating minorities and other cultures, rather than considering them threats to our identity, produces a much more inspiring story and, in fact, sustains our own identity.

That evening, over dinner at Max und Moritz, a restaurant well known to locals in the more multiethnic, multicultural quarter of Kreuzberg, Daniel and Avner reflect about the museum. Avner mentions a Jewish philosopher who was religious. Jiang is skeptical. This cannot be, he argues. A philosopher must be ready to question everything and thus cannot be religious, since being religious means accepting certain dogmas as truth.

Although Jiang’s argument may sound intuitive to many, we believe that one can be both a good philosopher and a religious person. This becomes clear when we realize that the self can be multiple and can accommodate itself to different circumstances. This notion of the self can be found in liberalism, but also in Confucian role ethics—the idea that we should treat people differently according to their roles and the circumstances. It is relevant to this visit to Berlin because acknowledging this internal, intrapersonal (as opposed to external, interpersonal) pluralism is a precondition for tolerance. In fact, when we tolerate somebody, we tolerate not only this person but also the very idea of pluralism—the idea that two or more ideas can coexist simultaneously side by side.

One could challenge this view: isn’t somebody who holds two or more possibly contradictory worldviews simply inconsistent? This is often so, and often people are inconsistent because we are only human. It is important to remember this here in Berlin. We are not perfect, and the idea of the perfectibility of mankind was one of the most horrific and dangerous ideas of Nazism. Now, the philosopher’s philosophy should be consistent and coherent, and indeed consistency and coherence are the parameters by which the philosopher’s philosophy is judged; and yet the philosopher herself, as a person, does not have to be consistent and coherent, and, arguably, it is not reasonable and human to expect her to be so. Berlin had a history of trying to achieve unity and consistency in the person rather than in ideas, and perhaps the clearest manifestation of this tradition was Hitler’s slogan “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.” This slogan was the basis for the Nazis’ intolerance of pluralism, which led to the Holocaust, and, among other things, forced thirteen hundred German writers and artists, many of them Berliners, to leave Germany for foreign countries: Brecht, Schoenberg, and Weill, to name just a few.³⁸

Berlin today teaches us that we must accept not only that the world is imperfect in the sense that there are different people with different identities and different beliefs, but also that people themselves are not, and cannot be, perfect.

The Kreuzberg neighborhood gives the impression of a multiethnic, multicultural area, though Avner and Daniel notice the “multi” is somewhat limited compared, say, to London or New York.³⁹ Perhaps a better description is “alternative,” minus actual alternative people. Still, Kreuzberg is younger, noisier, more colorful, and no doubt more relaxed about its present: there is a feeling of “live and let live”—gays, lesbians, immigrants, a lot of artists, students, and few tourists. The atmosphere in Max und Moritz is charming. The owner welcomes us and leads us to the inner room since all tables in the first room are taken, even at this early hour. An unfinished wooden floor; dark wooden tables, long and heavy; and soft, dim lightening. This is surprising, contradicting, in a way, the image of the two troublemakers, Max and Moritz.⁴⁰ Daniel and Avner are led to a table, and they request German red wine, innocently inquiring whether the wine is dry. The owner gives them a look and replies, “The only sweet thing in this restaurant is the owner, and that’s me.”

Wry, self-directed humor is perhaps a key factor when a society wishes to cure itself of its past.⁴¹ Knowing how to laugh at yourself seems to be a precondition for coming to terms with the past and acknowledging that you were wrong. Laughing at yourself is admitting that you are not, and cannot be, perfect; admitting, conceivably, that nobody can be perfect. This is the first step toward admitting that you (as a collective) did wrong, especially that you did something terribly wrong. Self-directed humor is quite typical of Berliners. It is part of their casual dress, their pessimism, their attitude never to think an event was just great. There is always a fly in the ointment. When asked what distinguishes them from other Germans, Berliners immediately say: we are never fully satisfied; that’s why Berlin will never be a rich city. Or, as the mayor said: Berlin is poor but sexy. We’ll come back to this later; however, it should be explained here that not taking oneself seriously, and never feeling that things are absolutely fine, is, in a way, acknowledging pluralism: that life can be good and bad, that it can have different aspects that might not go hand in hand.

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST: THE COST

Looking at Humboldt University—a very impressive building on Unter den Linden—Avner and Daniel discuss the wholesale sacking of university professors in East Germany during the reunification after the fall of Communism. Daniel has discussed this point with a journalist from Leipzig, in the former East Germany, where this journalist grew up. The journalist said that many scholars in the former East Germany had been “passive collaborators”—chemistry professors, for example, who reluctantly sat through lessons on Marxist theory, which had nothing to do with their real interests and research. His own supervisor is a well-known professor of Chinese who kept his job after the wall fell because there were few who could teach the language, but, as at Humboldt University, most East German professors were sacked, in what the journalist described as a “witch hunt,” and replaced by less-than-qualified professors from West Germany.

Humboldt University, Berlin’s first university, founded in 1810, was completely restructured in the early 1990s. Although its status as the “shining star of East German higher education” made many believe that the university’s restructuring would not affect its faculty, when the Stasi files were opened it became clear that at least 20 percent of the university professors had “conspirational” contacts with the Stasi.⁴² As noted earlier, Berlin’s way of coping with the need to come to terms with its past is through transparency. We see this in the buildings erected after 1990. But we also see this in the way Berlin has decided to cope with the Stasi files. There were three options: One was to get rid of the files, as a way of forgiving the people who collaborated; the second way was to transfer them to some archive in West Germany, where they would be kept secret or not, but certainly kept away from Berliners; and the third option (the one chosen) was to open the files to the public in Berlin so everyone could see what the files said about them, who the collaborators were, and so on.⁴³ This is the irony of transparency: it is often cruel. Perhaps Berlin could have allowed people the option to tell half-truths, to sort of lie, in order to avoid public disgrace and dishonor. Perhaps one could say that on some occasions, like this one, not telling the whole truth is part of civilized behavior. But Berliners did not think this was an option with regard to the Stasi files; they thought that secrets and lies led to evil. This is interesting if we bear in mind what Berliners say about themselves, namely, that perhaps they tend to turn a blind eye and ignore things, perhaps they tend to embrace half truths. Nonetheless, transparency as a policy was chosen and given strong public support.

Opening the files revealed what happened at Humboldt University, and the picture was rather gloomy. Hanna Labrenz-Weiss, who studied this case, summarized what it meant for the university: (1) anyone could find out who and what had interfered with their academic careers and personal lives; (2) university employees could be checked for collaboration with the Stasi (a commission of inquiry was set up, which reported its findings to the university, without making any recommendations); and (3) the university’s Stasi documents were the first to be made available for historic research. People learned that the Stasi had had a web of organizations and individuals active in the university; it was revealed that some members of the faculty at Humboldt University had been used by the Stasi to monitor and track U.S. citizens living in Western Europe; biotechnologists, microbiologists, chemists, and journalists working in Western Europe; business consultants; students in West and East Berlin; and many other bodies, such as “industrial and research institutions of operative interest” in West Germany. The Stasi had access to all reports and decisions of the university: it checked the ideological and political positions and doings of the scholars to make sure they were toeing the party line. Thus, in the early 1990s, all professors were automatically fired and had to reapply for their professorships, and many of them who had been Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) members were disqualified and therefore in practice sacked. As mentioned above, only 20 percent of the staff had directly cooperated with the Stasi, but it was known that many more had turned a blind eye to what they saw and heard; moreover, since the Stasi had time to dispose of many documents, there was an atmosphere of suspicion, and hence everybody became a suspect. There was some justification for this atmosphere; for example, most of the university faculty did not take part in the democratic campaigns of 1989 and they had elected the SED member and former Stasi member Heinrich Fink as their director. And yet, what happened after 1990 was clearly a witch hunt.

Daniel and Avner discuss whether the sacking was justified and whether it was time to replace the entire staff of this university where G.W.F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein had all studied or taught. In Berlin, the Society for Sciences was founded in 1700 and Gottfried Leibniz was its first president.⁴⁴ In 1911, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Promotion of Science (now the Max Planck Society) was founded in Berlin. But under the Communist regime, the party decided who could attend the university based, among other things, on conformity to party orthodoxy. Lecturers knew this and yet kept silent.

But could they have behaved differently? Isn’t it being insensitive, not to mention unreasonable, to expect them to clash with the regime? Can we really understand what courage it took to confront the authorities? Timothy Garton Ash, who lived in East Berlin for nearly a year under the Communist regime, reported from East Berlin about the voting experience:

In an East German polling station, a voter presents himself before a board of two or three officials, shows his ID card, and collects a ballot paper. To vote for the National Front [the party that included puppet parties and the ruling Socialist Unity party—AdS and DB] he folds his ballot paper once and drops it, unmarked, into the box. To vote any other way, he has to walk across the room to mark his ballot paper in a voting booth, beside which sits a vopo. A vopo is a “people’s policeman.” The moment the voter steps toward the booth, his name is noted. The consequences may include demotion at work, or, for a student, expulsion from the university.⁴⁵

Ash also discusses this dilemma apropos of the film The Lives of Others.⁴⁶ He himself lived in East Berlin and years later found out that he had a “minute-by-minute record of my past life: 325 pages of poisoned madeleine.” He tracked down the acquaintances who had informed on him. He writes: “All but one agreed to talk. They told me their life stories, and explained how they had come to do what they had done. In every case, the story was understandable, all too understandable; human, all too human.” One could argue that 1990s German society had a right to sack all these lecturers, since parents did not want people who had cooperated with the Stasi to teach their children. The assumption is that a university lecturer is expected to be a model of intellectual courage, an Educator with a capital E, even when he or she teaches math or chemistry. The fact that a person could turn a blind eye to the lack of academic freedom and to dogmatic research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences implies that this person can no longer serve as an educator. Moreover, in order to prevent totalitarian policies, a state must regulate, and often it must regulate in a way that appears, prima facie, illiberal. This view can be challenged, however: such firings would be justified only if the lecturers’ collaboration harmed people or the lecturers lacked decent academic credentials.

Avner discusses this matter with Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli professor and one of the world’s leading scholars on Marx and Hegel, who visited East Berlin in the 1980s and lectured at Humboldt University. Avineri is no fan of the Communist regime, but he tells Avner a story that sheds new light on this dilemma. When he visits Berlin today, he sometimes meets with his pre-1989 acquaintances, members of the GDR Academy of Sciences or the Marx-Engels Institute at the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party. Some of them, as old Communists, spent years in Buchenwald, and in several cases the people who “purged” them after 1989 were minor officials in the Third Reich.

Alex, the Potsdam University graduate student mentioned earlier, has no strong opinions about the sacking, but he does emphasize that Humboldt University recently became, at least in the social sciences, a truly Western, liberal institute of higher education, by which he means that it is radically critical.

Alex shows Avner and Daniel a building called Tacheles. Tacheles means “down to earth” or “in practice.” Formerly a big department store, it was abandoned until the early 1990s, when artists and bohemians took it over.

Indeed, Berlin has been an attractive place for artists, especially for alternative ones, perhaps because Berlin art is about challenging frameworks and borderlines. Thus, Berlin artists have dared to do what many artists in other cities did not dare. Bertolt Brecht’s provocative and critical plays were performed at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Mitte; the theatrical company that produced his plays was named the Berliner Ensemble. The first DJ–live music show took place in Berlin. Berlin painters felt that their art was not going to be commercial anyway, so they were authentic and devoted themselves to artistic expression. When we interviewed residents, they proudly told us that Berlin’s artists were not commercial. While we were in Berlin, the city was preparing for the 2009 International Art Forum, which would showcase experimental and avant-garde art.⁴⁷ The reasons for Berlin’s appeal to alternative, more daring artists were institutional, as well: in fact, already by the 1970s, West Berlin had become a center for those wishing to experiment with alternative lifestyles, living in communes, running left-wing theatrical troupes, and so on.⁴⁸ Why? Berliners tell us that one reason for this was that the military draft did not apply to West Berliners until the 1990s (when this West German exemption was canceled with reunification). Before 1990, therefore, young leftists and people seeking alternative lifestyles came to live in Berlin in order to avoid the draft.

Daniel and Avner sit with Alex and Ido at Strandbad Mitte Café.⁴⁹ Alex loves Berlin. He says that the city is dynamic, full of culture, the place to be. When asked about Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, saying that Berlin is poor but sexy,⁵⁰ Ido laughs and says that perhaps Berlin is sexy, but Berliners cannot be sexy because they behave informally and dress casually. They are not like residents of Munich, laughs Alex. There, if you see you are out of bread in the morning, you put on makeup and only then go outside to get a loaf of bread. In Berlin, you just go out and do what you need to do. But the really good thing, Daniel and Avner suggest, is that this reflects the fact that Berliners accept everything; they accept you as you are, no need to fake anything, no need for makeup. But Alex insists: Berliners do not accept; we are indifferent.

Alex’s point is important. We recall the career of Erich Kästner. After his studies, he moved to Berlin between the two world wars and became a well-known novelist, especially of books for children. His book Emil and the Detectives (1929), which was made into a film in 1931, was set in Berlin, as were most of his other books and stories. In 1933, he was in Zurich when the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag; he could have stayed in Zurich, but he returned to Berlin, his beloved city, “in order to be an eyewitness,” as he put it.⁵¹ Since his books expressed egalitarian sentiments and he had expressed sympathy for socialism, the Gestapo interrogated him several times, yet released him. Highly respected in Germany, he enjoyed special status, and was allowed to publish his books outside the country. Yet, in 1941 he wrote a screenplay about Baron Münchhausen, which was rumored to have been ordered by the Nazi regime. Kästner’s rumored cooperation with Nazi authorities made many people very critical of him after the war. He saw what was being done to the Jews, yet betrayed his own beliefs; he did not criticize the Nazi regime openly. Perhaps it is easy to judge him today—it was harder to survive then if you were a socialist and a pacifist. Nonetheless, he had opportunities to leave Berlin and Germany, but declined to do so.

More recently, the film The Lives of Others⁵² explores the Stasi’s impact on people’s lives in East Berlin. “There was a mentality of I-knew-nothing, I-didn’t-see,” says Alex. Daniel and Avner recall their visit to the Stasi Museum: they approached a group of four teenagers there. Avner told them about their project and asked if the teens would mind answering a few questions. Daniel and Avner wanted to ask them what they felt in this museum, why they had come, where they were from. They politely refused, saying they were not from Germany, although their accents and the fact that they spoke German among themselves suggested they were. “The Lives of Others was produced in 2006 or so,” notes Alex. “It took East Germans seventeen years to openly reflect on what happened here. East German films after World War II did not discuss the Nazis until the 1990s. It was like they didn’t notice the Nazis had been here. We Berliners do not look outside ourselves. In Bavaria there is a carnival every year; people dress up. We in Berlin do not celebrate with carnivals—we look inside.”⁵³

Is indifference a way of being tolerant? In reality, it could lead to the appearance of acceptance but not genuine acceptance. But the main problem is that indifference may lead to acceptance of intolerance. Berliners did not really see what happened to the Jews, the Roma, the Communists. To really see this, one has to be aware of what one sees; one has to care about it.

Come to think of it, it may be true that in several periods Berliners have been indifferent. After the reunification, people were thrilled for the East Berliners: they now had freedom; there would be growth, they would get good jobs, they would be rich. But the figures show that in the first years after the fall of the wall, unemployment rose dramatically in East Berlin. Berlin’s labor force declined from 1.88 million in 1991 to 1.73 million in 2002; employment fell from 1.69 million in 1991 to 1.42 million in 2002. In East Berlin, the drop in employment was 9 percent in the 1990s, particularly in the early 1990s.⁵⁴ When one crosses the former border between the eastern and western parts of the city, one does not notice immediately that these were two different cities, but when one walks further to the east, one can indeed see the dissimilarity.

As Daniel and Avner walk about the neighborhoods, they observe this dissimilarity. They read the street signs near Unter den Linden, informing Berliners about the buildings that were there before the war and how East Berlin decided to rebuild the area and erect “more luxurious” buildings. Daniel and Avner stare at the buildings: they are dull and look more or less identical. Were people in West Berlin indifferent to the poorer population of East Berlin that was looking for jobs, perhaps losing jobs, perhaps paying the price for the reunification? Was indifference the subtext of the celebrations following reunification?

Yet, the people Daniel and Avner meet are not indifferent at all. In fact, they are passionate about their city. To celebrate the end of their visit and perhaps also to escape the rain, Daniel and Avner enter a cozy little restaurant called Malete, on Chaussee Street. The sign advertises “Anatolische Küche” (Turkish cuisine). They start chatting with the waitress, who is Kurdish; the restaurant is Kurdish-Turkish. She tells them about the various dishes, which ones are “cool,” as she puts it, which ones the “locals” (Germans, that is) like, which ones are the chef’s specialties. Daniel and Avner are the only guests, apart from one other person who just wants coffee, so they can spend time talking with her. She likes the city and she has been here for quite a while. She proudly shows Daniel and Avner pictures that the chef painted.

Earlier on Sunday morning, Avner went looking for a café near the hotel and found a tiny coffeeshop that was open. It had only one table, but a lot of freshly baked cakes, and the coffee was nice and strong. Avner knew: it was Turkish-style coffee. “Are you from Turkey?” he asked the owner, and they started talking. She has been here several years; her daughter was born here. She likes it here. People here are kind and respectful.

FREE ME FROM FREEDOM

Daniel and Avner observe the Bundestag from the memorial site to the Soviet soldiers. Its transparent new dome dominates the building. They imagine what it was like when the Reichstag was in flames, set by the Nazis. They think of the film, shot after 1945, of bombed-out Berlin, with 70 percent of its buildings demolished.⁵⁵ The city seems like a victim of violence that tries time and again to rebuild itself. However, the city is not trying to renew its buildings from the past; it is as if Berlin is reminding itself that, unlike many cities in Europe, it lacks old, premodern buildings—and that there is a reason for this. But building new buildings is about constructing a new era. Human optimism has no limits, a feeling surely sensed by the thousands daily who visit the new Reichstag’s dome and enjoy this amazing architecture. Daniel and Avner are standing before a memorial site commemorating thousands who died; they think of World War II, in which millions were killed; they see the building that symbolizes and practices sovereignty and was attacked by its own people; they think of March 20, 1933, when all Communist members of parliament were removed, and the next day, when the first concentration camp in the Berlin area was opened, just outside the city, for regime opponents who had been arrested; they think of the campaign “Against the Un-German Spirit,” during which boycotts of Jewish businesses, doctors, and lawyers were organized; they imagine the theatrical marches that took place a few hundred meters from here, near the Brandenburg Gate and in the Pariser Platz in 1933. The famous impressionist artist Max Liebermann, a Jewish Berliner, remarked when he saw them from his home nearby, “I couldn’t even begin to eat as much as I’d like to be able to throw up.”⁵⁶ They think how optimistic humans are. Perhaps for a good reason. On the very place where these Nazis marched, carrying evil and hatred in their hearts, now stands the newly built Akademie der Künste, the Academy of Art. This is the same organization whose president for twelve years was Max Liebermann, before he resigned in May 1933, in protest against the way the Academy gave the cold shoulder to liberal forces and betrayed its mission when it expelled many of its members for political or “racial” reasons. Today’s building is open, accessible, and transparent. Perhaps, then, there is good reason for optimism. Tolerance will win.

And yet, if you think about Hegel,⁵⁷ Fichte, and Schopenhauer and then think of the Nazi marches, and look around you at the memorial site for the Soviet soldiers, or remember the pogrom of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), in which the Nazi paramilitaries SA and SS set fire to nine Berlin synagogues and arrested twelve hundred Jews, taking most of them to the concentration camp opened only eight months earlier—if you consider it all, side by side, perhaps there is cause for pessimism. Intolerance might win. How do we know that the cycles are over? How do we know that the end of history—Berlin’s history of cycles of tolerance and intolerance—has arrived? How can we be sure that the city is planning and building itself so that an ethos of tolerance and coming to terms with the past will remain dominant?

In the Akademie der Künste there is a poster titled Free Me from Freedom.⁵⁸ Is freedom a burden too heavy to bear? Will Berliners know how to handle freedom and not ask to be freed from it? The question that has been haunting us since we walked around in Berlin is this: now that it is clear to us that Berlin has known peaks of tolerance and times of radical intolerance, and now that it is clear that contemporary Berlin is a city of acceptance, tolerance, and flexibility, aren’t we simply in an era that is just like that of the Weimar Republic? Suppose, for example, that the current economic crisis gets worse: will it encourage more extremism, as was the case during the 1920s and 1930s? Won’t we wake up in ten or twenty years’ time and see that intolerance is once again dominant in Berlin? Recall Primo Levi’s statement, shown at the entrance to the information center beneath the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe: “It happened; therefore it can happen again. This is the core of what we have to say.” The Berliners we interviewed thought this was plausible, but they also characterized themselves (that is, Berliners) as pessimists, people who never think things are fine. Perhaps they are just too pessimistic about themselves.