Europe’s 9/11

This is one of my favourite photographs (click to enlarge). It is a very ordinary snapshot of tourists at a major European tourist attraction. Why do I like it? Because I remember the days when …

… the Brandenburg Gate looked like this, till the Wall came down on 9 November 1989.

The Gate was in the East with the main boulevard of Unter den Linden behind it. It could be seen from the West, behind the Wall, but it was not easy to get to it.

I first went to Berlin in 1966 as part of a school trip to Germany, which I repeated in 1968. I took this panoramic photo of Potsdamer Platz from an observation platform in the West overlooking the Wall

Now the Wall has come down, and its course through the city, following municipal district boundaries, is almost lost and unknown except on old maps. Potsdamer Platz now contains the Holocaust Memorial, an eerie, close-set collection of concrete slabs, not quite vertical, that instil a powerful sense of uncertainty and oppression in the visitor.

This was a strange area, close to the border where it followed the course of the river Spree for part of its path, deserted by man except for border guards. Now the Reichstag, which was largely disused in 1980 when I took this photo, …

 

… has been rehabilitated as the German Parliament building.

The dedication ‘To the German People’ (just visible in the 1980 photo above) dates from 1916. The bronzesmith who cast the letters was Jewish and was last heard of in a camp in Lithuania.

Nearby is the new Museum of German History – a significant step in Germany's progress to becoming a normal country. And what was the derelict area near the river is now the smart new government area.

Berlin has always been one of my favourite cities. Quite enough tonnes of ink have been used and heaven knows how many megapixels have been illuminated on the subject of German reunification. Let me just say that I grew up in a continent that was divided; I always assumed that I would never see it united and that the USSR would last for ever. The fall of the Wall, followed by the collapse of the USSR, was a stunning event – and not least because it was peaceful. Fortunately, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush Snr were up to the challenge. As we now know, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand were not. Kohl is on record as saying that the only ally that stood firmly beside him from the beginning was the Spanish prime minister Felipe González.

Anyone looking for a readable and reliable potted history of Germany from 1899 – 1945, and especially of how the Nazis came to power, could do a lot worse than the novel Winter by Len Deighton, followed by his Bernard Samson series (Hook, Line, Sinker, etc.)