On King’s day, respecting past & present Germany

Shortly before his murder, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to have been to the mountain top and seen the promised land on the other side. This time of year, we take stock of how close we have come to his sighting of a just and peaceful world.

Reflecting on the matter, my thoughts turn to a family visit to Berlin, a city haunted by a time in which human freedom and dignity were thoroughly denied.

In Berlin, Track 17 at the Grunewald station is where Jews were sent to the death camps. We ate dinner nearby with relatives in the yard of their apartment house under the shade of high, lush boughs.

The landlord recently renovated another unit. In the process, workers found a false wall. Behind it was a small secret room with a mattress, a jar of food, and a few newspapers from the Nazi era. Someone must have been hiding someone there, but who, and his or her fate, is unknown.

We spent nearly a week running into the war’s legacy. We started like most tourists at the old Reichstag. Beneath its gleaming new rooftop dome is information about the 1933 fire that served as a pretext for the Nazi consolidation of power. From there, our totalitarian tour took us from the tragedy of Hitler to the tyranny of Honecker. For our last day, Anna suggested that we do as the Berliners do and go to the Wannsee, a lake within city limits with a beach. We did.

We soaked up the sun and watched sail boats glide by. In the distance, directly across, was a mansion. We decided to visit that too and there we found more ghosts.

In that grand old house, the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference, where they determined the final solution. Now it is a museum. It is absolutely chilling. The exhibits detail not only the meeting, but the full scope of the Holocaust from eugenics to genocide.

Today, Berlin is a cosmopolitan and progressive city in many ways. Rainbow flags flew for Pride Month while we were there. The city is growing and diversifying with people from all over the globe, but you cannot be in the city and forget the past. That is intentional and to the country’s credit.

However, standing in the Wannsee museum I wondered if it is enough to never forget. Could the exhibit and all the other markers and monuments across the city have a different effect on a neoNazi? Could someone stand in front of these naked facts and feel awe and pride instead of horror and regret?

At dinner in Grunewald, we talked about family a lot. We are family born of the war’s displaced persons, but in different countries on different continents. The war and its aftermath colored our conversation like it does the city.

“I can’t stand this Alternative für Deutschland,” my cousin said at one point of Germany’s rising racist political party.

In Berlin, you see that people must not only never forget the prejudice and violence of the past but work hard to make a free and inclusive world or we will never reach that promised land. Much service and dedication are still necessary everywhere.

“The city is growing and diversifying with people from all over the globe, but you cannot be in the city and forget the past. That is intentional and to the country’s credit.”

— Janis Chakars