After the Wall - situation in Berlin

National Review, March 19, 1990 by James P. Pinkerton

WEST BERLIN--This is the Big Apple of Germany--the biggest city, the most cosmopolitan, the city most soaked in myth and history. Images swirled in my mind: Hitler, "Cabaret," Le Carre; and, of course, the Wall, now knocked down. Were we finally awakening from these nightmares? Life in the capital of a reunited Germany would surely be brighter than the dystopic Brave New City imagined by Fritz Lang in Metropolis, the bleak Expressionist silent classic filmed in 1926 at Berlin's old UFA studio. What city did Lang have in mind--Berlin? New York? Or some Bladerunner synthesis of the supermodern urban future we all faced?

Berlin has just celebrated its 750th birthday. In my New World naivete, I expected to see Gothic spires, perhaps a medieval procession or two. I knew Berlin had been bombed, but did not really appreciate the power of non-nuclear ordnance until I saw a city where everything standing was about the same age as me. Riding in a cab to the hotel, all I saw was undistinguished International Style office buildings, suspiciously derivative of Montreal's Expo '67 Habitat. That's what happens when everything is rebuilt all at once. The fad of the moment is preserved, mile after mile, in architectural amber.

As for the hulking metal sculptures that one sees everywhere, my theory is that some unscrupulous American modern art dealer dumped everything he couldn't sell stateside on West Berlin for the tax write-off. These pieces are so ugly that the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn't finance them. Unfortunately for small children, these writhing pieces of stainless steel--twisted, dimpled, mottled monuments to man's inhumanity to metal--are everywhere.

The Wall runs a few yards behind the pocked landmark of the Reichstag, symbol of Weimar Germany. I'm not used to seeing public buildings with bullet holes. Built in the 1980s, it epitomizes "Prussian Classicism," the art of the Kaisers: lots of statues, only the cherubim and statesmen are missing fingers and toes and heads.

Having been among the billions of global villagers who watched the Wall's Jericho-ization on live TV, I felt MacLuhanesque deja vu when I saw it "live." Either way, the Wall is Warhol: a pop-art masterpiece, an above-ground subway, an electric spray-paint samizdat of familiar things. The peace symbols, hammers and sickles superimposed on swastikas, brand logos, rock-group insignia all add up to a semiotic wonderland of transnational hieroglyphs.

Frankly, I was expecting a lot more activity. I saw no People Power, only locals and tourists out for a weekend stroll at this bittersweet national shrine. Debris from a Big Event--crowd barriers, porta-potties, derelict scaffolding from the International Brigade of Television--was scattered like Carolina driftwood. I couldn't blame Dan, Tom, and Peter for leaving. No chanting demonstrators meant no anchor-quality "news." Contended people don't resort to mediagenic mass hysteria. Contrast Berlin with Teheran, where ten years after the revolution the masses still have nothing better to do than shake their fists for the remaining cameras. Give people life and liberty, and the result is boring. So it goes with liberal democracies. Friedrich Hayek identified the "spontaneous order" of manners and markets that free people instinctively create. The Germans, like others across Eastern Europe, demonstrated Minuteman courage in securing the blessings of liberty. Now they are anxious to get on with their lives. The pursuit of happiness doesn't make for good TV, but considering the alternative, the low Nielsens of complacency are a hit.

BUT AS WITH a free lunch, there's no such thing as a free Wall. I tried to extract a piece with my hotel key and bloodied my knuckles. Berliners equipped with hammers and chisels worked hard and got mostly chips. I was offered a coaster-sized chunk for ten Deutschemarks. It looked good--lots of day-glo paint on it, the stamp of authenticity. While I hesitated over six dollars, another American accepted. Obviously a seller's market. The next time a good piece came loose, I went for it. Then another Wall capitalist confronted me with an offer I couldn't refuse: Wall jewelry--Why didn't I think of that? Take a gravel-sized piece of the Wall, affix a safety pin on the back, and glue a worthless East German coin on the front, and sell it to tourists for 15 DM!

The West German authorities, conscious of the dicey international situation, kept a lid on the deconstructionists. Every few minutes the Polizei came strolling by. The anvil chorus stuffed its tools and trophies into its collective bosom. The unspoken rule was this: Do what you can with elbow grease, but power tools and strip mining are Verboten.

I passed a somber memorial that the rush of good news had overlooked; little white crosses for those killed trying to go over the Wall. The most affecting had just one word in Gothic script: Unbekannt.

Back "downtown," I found myself on the Kurfurstendamm, the 42nd Street of West Berlin. Called the Ku'damm, it's the only known example of the Germans actually shortening a word. Amidst the very ventricles of the thumping heart of West German commerce, I was moved to silence by the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, standing today as the B-17s left it in 1945. The historical suffering of the Germans is only exceeded by the suffering they caused; but after awhile the big-picture fatalism of the ancient Continent osmosed into my thinking. I asked a girl whose name had the aristocratic "von" prefix the whereabouts of the town her ancestors once ruled. She told me matter-of-factly that it was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War.