Berlin here and now

I discovered a really interesting blog a couple of days ago called the Berlin Memory Blog that captures places around the city and gives a snapshot of that place in time.

I always say that Berlin has a real vibe like the parents are away and the kids are out to play - the street festivals, graffiti art, and the general easygoing happy atmosphere. A lot of people also say that Berlin today is a lot like New York of the 80s.

Anyway, this blogger talks about how years down the line today's Berlin will be remembered for the mass influx of creativity, "like Vienna in 1905, New York in the fifties, and Paris in the sixties".

As a journalist in Berlin, I've been gathering interviews with interesting and very normal people who have lived through incredible things and live to tell the tale. It seems pretty unbelievable that there are still people wandering around who have lived through both fascism and communism and experienced extraordinary hardships but still remain to tell their stories...

I interviewed a guy who gives tours of the former stasi prison Hoenschonhausen. As a former prisoner he described being snatched off the street and bundled into a fresh fish van. Inside the van - which turned out to be a disguised stasi police van - he was driven around for hours until he was fully disorientated and taken to the notorious secret prison. His crime? An application for a travel permit.

"We've lived through two dictatorships in the past few years," he told me. "Communism and fascism... and I think that's quite enough now," he said.

Going further back in time, I am reminded of an old guy in his 90s who I met on a trip out to the former east Germany with my parents. He lived near to my granddad's old house and invited us in for coffee. Shaking his head he told us about the terrible aches and pains he had when he came back from the war - as if the war ended only last month.

I kind of wanted to run up to him and say, 'but darling, the war ended a long, long time ago. You are safe now and everything is going to be okay'. It just felt like such a bizarre experience to meet someone who was talking about the second world war like it happened just a few days ago - and for people who lived through such an ordeal, I guess it could well feel that way.

Well with all these people walking around who have experienced such hardships, you can well and truly realise why Berlin has such a jubilant 'we're free at last!' kind of atmosphere. It's taken a century of struggle but democracy finally rules the roost.

Anyway, here's a link to The Berlin Memory Blog.

This is how he describes his blog:

The beginning of the 21st Century in Berlin may well be remembered for its outpouring of creativity –like Vienna in 1905, New York in the fifties, and Paris in the sixties. The years following the destruction of the Berlin Wall were times of jubilation, the beginning of great urban projects to bring the divided city together.

Creative youth from around the world are arriving en masse to a city that seems to be constantly changing. The feeling that nothing is fixed, that everything could be different tomorrow, brings with it a sense of freedom. The claustrophobia of the European museum city, with its social codes and bourgeois expectations, is largely absent here for those who have already defeated that narrowing of perspective in their own heads.

It may be that the stability of those expectations was thoroughly dislodged, during the years of National Socialism, WW2 destruction, and Cold War division. Like with Benjamin's Angel of History, it is the accumulation of detritus from the past, a world destroyed by a 'wind from paradise', that propels us ever more into the future. We cannot help but stare with embarassment, disgust and amazement at all that was lost. And from that loss, there is also the possibility, and necessity, of creative renewal.

This blog is about places in Berlin that record what has been lost, and gained.