City of Ghosts

by Neil Matthews

There are three and a half million inhabitants, and still this is a city of ghosts. The walk around the Tiergarten, in the heart of the city, in a December dusk is a strange experience. There are sounds, but they are distant; there must be people, but they are elsewhere.

There are mitigating, reasonable explanations, of course - in part. I had arrived in Berlin on Boxing Day and most shops and offices were closed for the holidays. The city was snowbound, deadening sounds. Also, its traumatic history has ensured that Berlin’s most famous sights are in the west (such as the Charlottenburg Palace and the Olympiastadion) or in the east (such as the Pergamon Museum, Checkpoint Charlie and the television tower) - not in the nominal centre. But this leaves plenty of room for the ghosts.

Berlin will host the final of the football World Cup in July 2006, at the Olympiastadion (nearest underground station: Olympia-Stadion, line U2). If all goes to plan, 76,000 fans will be cheering on the world’s best two national football teams. Perhaps it is a better place to be when full, like most football stadia.

Olympiastadion, Berlin

Empty, it is too easy to recall the stadium’s origins as something created for the 1936 Olympics, planned as a showcase for the Nazi state but upstaged eloquently by Jesse Owens. There are brief explanatory display panels dotted around the site, pointing out the parade area and the swimming pool as well as the main stadium. But there is no permanent exhibition relating to the 1936 Games.

Walking round in the icy cold, the realisation set in that the stadium is its own exhibition. Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral in London famously has an inscription: “If you seek his monument, look around you.” In this case, the stadium is an expression of the will not of its architect Werner March, but of his client, Hitler. The Marathon Gates support the Olympic rings between two stone towers which bear an uncomfortable resemblance to sentry posts. Stark stone architecture is adorned with torches straight from the romantic feudal outlook which underlay Nazism. This is a chilling survivor of the Third Reich.

Berliners are doomed to remember. The most conspicuous recent example of this is the Holocaust memorial on Eberstrasse, within sight of the Brandenburg Gate. This uses 1500 concrete slabs of varying heights to remember the millions of victims. It took two competitions in the 1990s to identify the design of the memorial. The winning entry in the first competition, one huge tablet which would have named all 4.2 million named Holocaust victims, was rejected by Helmut Kohl, then Chancellor. The controversy has continued over issues such as whether Romany victims should be remembered with others such as Jews, or separately, and (more cynically) on whether the memorial is a waste of a lot of prime land in the centre of the city. The debate goes on, but the memorial is undoubtedly simple, striking and prominently placed.

In a generation, everyone still alive who remembers the Second World War will be in their 90s at least. There are, of course, more recent reminders of a dark past. The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse was created to commemorate the creation, history and ultimate demolition of the Berlin Wall. The museum was opened in 1962, just one year after the Wall went up, but soon had to move to larger premises. Its contents include displays relating to the Berlin Airlift of 1948-9, the final act in ensuring that Germany, and Berlin, would be split in two. There are mind boggling statistics, such as the 886 dogs which at one time patrolled the border between the two Berlins. Original objects from escape attempts, successful and unsuccessful, survive, such as the VW 1200 with which Kurt Wordel smuggled out 55 people (in the engine). Perhaps most amazing is the story of a 1979 escape by balloon, from 12 kilometres east of the border to 10 km west. The family who built the balloon learned the technical information needed from manuals.

Tucked away quietly in a little square just off Normannenstrasse (nearest station: Magdalenstrasse) is something less dramatic, but altogether more sinister. There are no helpful directions signs and it is easy to miss. But this unimpressive set of office blocks hosts the Research Centre and Memorial Site for East Germany’s former Ministry for State Security (MfS), better known as the Stasi.

The MfS was created in 1950 - one year after the formation of the German Democratic Republic. Estimates indicate that the MfS employed 1,000 staff in its first year. By 1989 this had grown to over 91,000. There were also well over 150,000 unofficial informers. The MfS was conceived as the “Sword and Shield” of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. It was a secret police, intelligence agency and investigative body rolled into one. Now Building 1 is open to the public.

The first floor houses the offices of the Ministers who oversaw the MfS’s work. Notes in the guidebook - a plain A5 booklet resembling a school prospectus - assure the visitor that the rooms have been left in their original condition. Oak panelling and comfortable chairs and sofas from the 1960s and 1970s lend the offices an air of smartness without extravagance. The solid square TV in the drivers’ and bodyguards’ lounge could have been a stalwart of any taxi driver’s office or any takeaway. The telex machines and typewriters in the secretarial offices are basic, partly for security reasons. Only when the door to the Minister’s office opens does an obvious clue emerge as to the identity of the occupants of these rooms. Even at Communism’s height, it was unlikely that many people kept a deathmask of Lenin on their desk, as Eric Meilke (Minister from 1957-89) did. The cafeteria which once hosted Stasi senior officers is still a cafeteria, but now the TV behind the panelling plays a Discovery Channel documentary about the Stasi. The narrator is Roger Moore, but any intended irony is swamped by the reality. Miniaturised listening devices were regularly attached to radiators to monitor conversations several floors above. 1,600 staff listened in on telephone calls. Funds for new product development were boosted by the “sale” of 33,000 prisoners from East to West Germany.

Between the ground and first floors is a special exhibition “Surveillance - Repression - Espionage”. Before entering the rooms, the visitor passes a row of small jars. At first glance they seem to contain preserved fruits or vegetables, but in fact the contents are cloths. The Stasi would use a sterile cloth to wipe something touched recently by a “suspect”, such as a car seat. The cloth captured body odour and was then preserved in a jar, sometimes for up to 20-30 years - often growing stronger over that time. Trained dogs could then track individuals by their odour.

Watering can with a secret, Stasi Museum

There are two other main features in the special exhibition. Two rooms display examples of surveillance technology, such as a Trabant car door fitted with infrared beams for night photography and miniature cameras hidden in neckties, watering cans and birds’ nesting boxes. Other rooms show various gifts and trophies which Stasi members gave to each other and to members of ‘sister organisations’. These included beermats with the insignia of BFC Dynamo, the Stasi football team.

A further exhibition on the second floor is a more general overview of repression in the GDR, up to the dramatic night of 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. From then on, any GDR citizen with a valid passport and visa could visit West Germany. Three million did so within a week. The Stasi did not survive long after that. On 15 January 1990, thousands of demonstrators swarmed onto MfS premises to see what had been kept on file. There is apparently some evidence that Stasi operatives connived to keep the demonstrators away from the most sensitive materials. Shortly afterwards, a coalition of local citizens’ committees and civil rights activists created the Research Centre and Memorial Site, which opened on 7 November 1990. The Stasi Museum is open 11am-6pm Mon-Fri, 2pm-6pm weekends. Admission €3.50. For more information, see www.stasimuseum.de where there is a link to an English speaking section on the work of the Research Centre.

Many are alive to remember the Nazis; but the Stasi were operating less than twenty years ago. Hannah Arendt, a New York reporter who covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, wrote that “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer...was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” Arendt’s famous reference to “the banality of evil” could never be better demonstrated than in the Stasi Museum.
Not all the ghosts are as chilling as this. The Film Museum on Potsdammer Platz (www.filmmuseum-berlin.de) is an entertaining romp through film history: from the pioneering years, to silent-film divas and the films of the Weimar Republic; from cinema under Nazism and exile in Hollywood to the post-war years and contemporary cinema; and at the heart of the exhibition, a section on Marlene Dietrich. Once the disconcerting effects of the multiple mirrors and wall screens die down, there is much to enjoy here including some fascinating information on Fritz Lang’s ground breaking Metropolis, arguably the first modern science fiction film. At the time of my visit, the special exhibitions included a tribute to Ray Harryhausen, the special effects master behind The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years BC and other masterpieces. A new museum of German television is promised for 2006.

The Story of Berlin, just off Kurfurstendamm, takes you through the city’s history, from its 13th century origins, the rise of Prussia in the 18th and 19th centuries, revolution, Berlin salons, religion and much else. Nazism has its place here, in the cellar of a multi-storey exhibition. More unsubtle symbolism is at work with the display of two living rooms side by side, one in east and one in west Berlin after the split. For a slick, interactive modern show, the most touching exhibit is oddly a floor comprising books, to mark the book burnings of 1933.

For those who like their battles to be of the ancient variety, the Pergamon Museum on “Museum Island” at the end of Unter den Linden should not be missed. The displays of the Altar of Zeus from Pergamon (now in Turkey), and material from Babylon (now in Iraq) including the Ishtar Gate, are stunning. The Egyptian Museum is close at hand, having moved from its old home in the Charlottenburg Palace. The Charlottenburg itself houses as much 18th century Baroque architecture as one could wish for, as well as some impressive silver and porcelain collections from that period. On the west wing of the Palace is an understated but impressive museum of pre-history and early history.

Berlin has overcome unimaginable horrors in its past, to reach its current position as a key European capital (and, from a traveller’s perspective, a fascinating destination). The 2006 World Cup Final is already celebrated by the installation of a large table football game outside a cafe in Alexanderplatz, with a team of German bears taking on bears of assorted national colours. As I arrived, the multinational team scored a spectacular own goal [insert your own political metaphor here]. But the city has not forgotten its ghosts. They are still there, and always will be.

First published in VISA issue 67 (June 2006)