How a circle was completed in Berlin
IMAGINE BERLIN. Imagine a city of fragments and ghosts. Imagine a metropolis that inspired countless artists and witnessed uncountable murders. Imagine a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history’s most bloody century. Imagine the most arrogant capital of Europe devastated by Allied bombs then divided. Imagine it reunited and reborn as one of the creative centres of the world. In my lifetime I have known three Berlins: West Berlin where I made movies with David Bowie, East Berlin where I researched my first book, the UK bestseller Stalin’s Nose, and now the unified capital. Over the years I have visited so often that today, if the notion took me, I could find my younger self in almost any corner of the city.
If I waited long enough at Bahnhof Zoo, the old West Berlin central railway station, I would see myself, aged 19, fall from the Hoek van Holland train and into waiting arms. At night on Savignyplatz I would catch sight of myself, four years older, cycling home in the summer rain, soaked to the skin, my companion and I throwing off our clothes as we rode; shirts in the Tiergarten, skirt in the Spree.
Along Friedrichstrasse I’d watch myself – over 30 by 1989 and losing my hair — run between East German ministries, applying for travel permits for a country that might no longer exist (none of the bureaucrats knew for sure).
Later in the Grunewald, the dense urban forest which hugs the city’s western fringe, I’d linger until I spotted myself – with notebook in hand – bow my head in the forest cemetery. In the black earth at my feet the stones were engraved Unbekannter, Unbekannte, Unbekannt. Unknown man, unknown woman, unknown. Some victims of the Allied bombing were so disfigured that their sex could not be determined.
Finally, today, I see myself lost in the memorial to the Jews murdered in the Second World War. The vast, undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths rises and falls away into the darkness beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I stumble between its hard-edged, disorientating stellae, built on top of sealed Nazi bunkers, spooked by dusky sounds and shadows, moved by the echo of children’s voices and footsteps.
Five years ago I moved to Berlin to write a history of the city. I decided to tell its story through portraits of two dozen Berliners, from the wild medieval balladeer whose suffering might explain the Nazis’ rise to power, to an ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a royal princess, from a Scottish mercenary who fought in the Thirty Years War to the fearful Communist Party functionary who helped to build the Wall.
But soon after my arrival the tap-tap of hammers pulled me away from my desk. Beneath my apartment window, workmen were re-laying cobblestones, levelling them by hand in sand. I went outside to investigate and a glint of brass caught my eye. I stopped, as had a dozen other passers-by, and read:
Next to it were more new, brass-capped stones, recording the names of seven other Jewish residents who had been pulled from their homes in this leafy and peaceful neighbourhood, and murdered in the camps. Hugo Philips, Flora’s husband. Their neighbour Regina Edel. Selma Schnee. Doris Warwar. Dr Kurt Jacobsohn, his wife Liesbeth and little Hans Adolf who was six years old when he was gassed to death.
Some 42,500 of these brass “stumble stones” have been planted across Germany, engraved with the names of Nazism’s victims, paid for by the residents of the deceaseds’ former home. The idea of the Stolperstein so moved me that I wrote a blog about them which was spotted by Flora Philips’ surviving family.
SIX MONTHS later Flora’s daughter Ilse stood at the doorway that she had last walked through 72 years before. With tears in their eyes, the building’s residents welcomed her, along with four generations of her now-British family. The Berliners spoke – in English and German — of the need to “commemorate the unbearable fate of our fellow citizens”. They said that as one stumbled upon the brass stones, and stopped to read them, one had to bow – in respect for those who were so cruelly and needlessly killed. One by one, today’s residents read aloud the names of their Jewish predecessors, and the dates and places of their murder. Their voices, wracked with emotion, echoed down the street where the deceased had once walked, talked, laughed ... and wept.
Then it was time for Ilse’s family to speak. Her daughter Miriam told the gathering that her grandparents had been ordinary German citizens who happened to be Jewish. Hugo had served the Reich in the trenches during the First World War. Their forefathers had lived in Germany for centuries. Saving their children – Ilse’s late brother had also been sent to England on the last Kindertransport in 1939 – “had been the only light in the last years of Hugo and Flora’s lives”. As Miriam held her mother’s hand, the men donned kippot, and the family recited kaddish. Finally Ilse – white-haired, stooped and silent – laid two white pebbles onto the Stolpersteine.
Later that day in the apartment which had once been Ilse’s family home, Miriam said that her mother — after reading my blog — had decided to return to Berlin to be a part of the act of remembrance. Miriam said: “We have a huge sense of a circle completed.”
As we spoke a neighbour joined us, introducing