My month in Vilnius was followed by a few touristic days in Berlin. For American children in the 1950s, this may have been the first non-U.S. city to enter our consciousness, via newsreels, cartoons and the general sense that WWII was still very much with us. For Jewish children, moreover, this was Mordor – the seat of evil in the world, never to be named without actually or subconsciously invoking a curse. And from the 1960s on Berlin was center ice for the Cold War, the line across which the US and USSR faced off.

I don’t think I could have gone there while my parents were alive; my father couldn’t talk about Germany without a shudder, and my mother never entirely forgave me for buying a VW. It’s a shame that the tragedies there have kept many of us from experiencing the place, because not only it beautiful and fascinating for all the obvious reasons, but it also feels familiar in a way that Paris, say, does not. I’d guess this has do with the enormous role German culture played shaping America, which most of us don’t appreciate or understand, but which can be seen from Lancaster County Pa. to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Anyway, here are some photos and impressions.

I stayed in the Charlottenburg district, near the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church. Unlike a great many other old Berlin buildings, the church’s main steeple was left in its bombed out state after 1945. Inside, much of the gilded mosaic tile ceiling is still intact, showing the iconography of the Second Reich:

Memorials, inevitably, are what a first-time visitor to Berlin spends the most time looking at. I doubt you can go a block in any direction without coming across some kind of conscious reminder of the city’s horrific past century. The memorials come in all sizes and kinds, from grandiose and grotesque to modest and artistically eloquent. In the former category are the Soviet-built monuments, like this cemetery near the Brandenburg Gate:

The latter include these tiny brass plaques, found embedded in the sidewalks around the old city center, outside houses and apartment buildings where Jews used to live:

Even more surprising are simple memorials like “The Deserted Room,” a sculpture commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1998. It’s located on the Koppenplatz, a small park near the city center. Around this bronze chair and table are engraved verses from a poem by Berliner Nelly Sachs.

Lara Daemmig showed me the memorial. She’s a native East Berliner who’s been active in preserving and advocating for the remnant Berlin Jewish community. For an afternoon she graciously walked me around the neighborhood, pointing out sites and recounting events from the war that I had been ignorant of. Here, for instance, is a monument to the so-called Rosenstrasse Rebellion, perhaps the only known example of a public demonstration against the Nazi deportations of German Jews. The words in the stone say, in part:  “The power of love overcomes the violence of dictatorship.”