Berlin über alles
whole generation has grown up taking a united Germany for granted. Furthermore, not everyone has been brought up with a graphic understanding of the Second World War. And yet everyone has heard of Hitler, and the fact that he ended his days in a bunker 700 metres from my hotel gives a sense of historical perspective to the weekend.
The Führerbunker, built in the gardens of the Old Reich Chancellery, was where Hitler was forced to spend the final weeks of the war. The Thousand Year Reich ended here. Just after midnight on April 30, 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva Braun in a simple ceremony inside the bunker. Berlin was completely surrounded. The Red Army had reached Potsdamer Platz and was preparing to move on the bunker. Later that day, Eva and Hitler took cyanide, and, for good measure, Hitler shot himself.
Today the site of the Führerbunker is a nondescript, gravel-surfaced parking lot, overlooked by a block of apartments, just a few paces from the mesmerising Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Apart from a very modest sign set in the corner, there is nothing to suggest the epic scenes that took place 8.5 metres beneath where I’m standing and which ended WW2. Kaffeestübchen, a charming little café on the corner, some 20 paces from the bunker, serves full breakfast and has tables outside for lunch in good weather.
The themes shared by Tosca and the city of Berlin are unavoidable – Puccini’s opera is set against the violence of the threatened invasion of Italy by Napoleon in 1800. In addition, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which is staging Tosca, is one of three opera houses in the city, the other two being the State Opera Unter den Linden and the Comic Opera. Under the Nazis, the Deutsche Oper, in the Charlottenburg district, was controlled by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, whilst the State Opera on Unter den Linden was controlled by Goebbels’ arch rival, Herman Göring. (Both buildings were destroyed during WW2. The Berlin State Opera has recently reopened after extensive renovations.)
In the same way that I only fully appreciated that Venice is a city built on water when I arrived there for the first time, the fact that Berlin was divided into East and West from the end of the WW2 to 1989 only really sinks in during this visit. The Russians sealed off the portion of Berlin, and of Germany, that they occupied. The Soviet puppet state of East Germany – the German Democratic Republic – was born. A 150 kilometres-long wall was erected in 1961. West Berlin became a free island city within the Soviet empire. The sprawling wasteland that lay on the East Berlin side of the wall is now
‘The wasteland of what was East Berlin is now thriving with shops’
a thriving commercial and shopping centre, centred on Potsdamer Platz. The famous crossover point between West and East, controlled by the Americans – Checkpoint Charlie – is today a major tourist destination.
More interestingly, ten minutes’ walk from Checkpoint Charlie, the Topography of Terror is a modern history museum with an extensive and uncompromising photographic exhibition that charts the rise and fall of the Nazis, from the early 1930s to 1945. Built on the site of the headquarters of the Gestapo and SS, the principal instruments of repression during the Nazi era, the museum’s outdoor space contains the longest surviving section of the outer Berlin Wall which separated the US and Soviet zones.
The main shopping street in central Berlin is Friedrichstrasse, an artery that connects the Mitte district with Kreuzberg. Nightlife is centred in the old Jewish quarter of Scheunenviertel, although I never got there because I was side-tracked on my second night into a jazz session in the Curtain Club of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Potsdamer Platz. Specialising in original cocktails created in the club, and based in particular on the sense of smell, each drink is served in its own container. With names like Blood & Sand, Moscow Mule, or Smoke for the Soul, these drinks are served in a wood-panelled room around which Duke Ellington’s A Train elegantly glides. The taxi ride from the Brandenburg Gate to the Deutsche Oper takes 15 minutes.
The opera house is packed. There’s a strong cast led by Ukrainian soprano, Liudmyla Monastryka, whose performance of Tosca’s signature aria, Vissi D’Arte, is greeted rapturously.
I have dinner that evening in Aigner, a relaxed Austrian-German bistro, where I go for the Wiener Schnitzel.
Later, as I stroll back to the Adlon, Puccini’s dark masterpiece still playing in my head, a threequarters moon is rising over Berlin. ÷Peter Cunningham’s new novel, Acts of Allegiance (Sandstone Press) is out now. €14.99 online at www.eason.com