Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  The early 20th century brought dramatic change to Berlin, which suffered a failed Communist revolution after the First World War, and remained economically highly divided between rich and poor. As the capital of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, it was notorious for its liberal modernist culture, but this succumbed to the National Socialists, who won power in 1933. Adolf Hitler, chancellor from 1933, used the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 as a showpiece to present his Nazi regime to the world.

  At the end of the Second World War, when the Red Army liberated Berlin in April 1945 the city was devastated and the population starving. The post-war settlement left Berlin, now deep in Soviet-controlled East Germany, divided between zones administered by each of the four Allied powers: the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France. Whereas the Western sectors gradually regained economic and cultural vitality, the Soviet sector of East Berlin did not. In 1961, the Soviets erected a wall to prevent a constant stream of defections from East to West; the wall remained until 1989. Since its fall, the eastern sector has been revitalized and Berlin has become a centre for radical youth.

  1803 CATHERINE WILMOT

  Irish-born Catherine Wilmot (1773–1824) travelled across Europe in 1801–3 in the party of the Irish Lord and Lady Mount Cashell, meeting Napoleon and the Pope; an account of her journeys was published in 1920, based on her diaries. She lived in Russia until 1808, and later moved to France, where she died.

  The drive from Potsdam to Berlin is highly cultivated and fine and the entrance into Berlin is perfectly magnificent. The new gate is like a grand triumphal arch, ornamented on the top by four bronze colossal horses, held in from bounding into the place beneath. The streets are extremely wide and delightfully planted with acacia trees, and a variety of others. We lodge in the most cheerful situation I ever saw; the public walk is immediately under our window, where we see all the ladies walking about with a little basket on their arms, instead of a reticule as in France.…

  Sunday we sallied forth in pursuit of churches and mounted up to the top of the highest to take a view of the town; to an amazing extent the country is perfectly flat. I think Berlin much prettier in detail, than looked at, at a coup d’oeil. I sat out most of the service at a Lutheran Church; the forms appeared pretty much like that of the Church of England.… In the evening we drove to Charlottenburg through beautifully planted avenues and woods which reach the extent of the way. The palace is handsome and in the midst of a paradise of a garden; this is the favourite royal residence, and the king, queen and their six little children with the brothers, and all the court, walked about during a great part of the evening.…

  The house in which the royal family lives is quite like a private gentleman’s, furnished comfortably enough. All the present House of Prussia are esteemed stingy and shabby to the greatest degree.… The king walks about and rides without attendants. The people hardly make way for him in the streets, but as he is not noble in his character, this freedom does not flatter, as it is assumed from convenience, and no proof of confidence in his subjects. He is reckoned selfish, and fond of money, and his ministers manage his kingdom for him entirely.

  1842 MARY SHELLEY

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Shelley (1797–1851) was the English author of Frankenstein and wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died in 1822. In the 1840s she undertook several journeys with her son Percy Florence, which were written into a book in which she freely expressed her political views as well as describing more conventional sightseeing.

  27 July We are here in the best street, which has a double avenue of lime trees in the middle, running its whole length. One way it leads to the Brandenburg gate, the other to a spot that forms the beauty of Berlin as a capital – a wide open space, graced by a beautiful fountain, and an immense basin of polished granite, made from one of those remarkable boulders found on the sandy plain, fifty miles from Berlin; adorned also by the colonnade of the New Museum, opposite to which stands the Guardhouse, the Italian Opera and the University. The building of the Arsenal is near and the whole forms a splendid assemblage of buildings. After dinner we have walked under the lime trees to the Brandenburg gate – a most beautiful portal built on the model of the Propylaeum at Athens, on a larger scale. Napoleon carried off the car of Victory which decorates the top; it was brought back after the battle of Waterloo. Before its capture it was placed as if leaving the city behind, to rush forward on the world; on its return, it was placed returning to and facing the city.…

  28 July Our first visit in the morning was to the museum. It is at some little distance from the hotel, and the walk led us through the best part of Berlin. The building itself is beautiful; the grand circular hall by which you reach the statue gallery, and which again you look down upon from the open gallery that leads to the pictures, surpasses in elegance and space anything I have ever seen, except in the Vatican. At once we rushed among the pictures – our only inducement, except curiosity to see a renowned capital city, to visit Berlin. The gallery is admirably arranged in schools, and the pictures have an excellent light on them; and in each room is hung up a list of pictures and their painters contained in it.…

  The gallery is open from ten till three. Unfortunately, the fatigue of the journey made me very ill able to endure much toil; and you know – who knows not? – that visiting galleries produces extreme weariness. I went back to the hotel several times to repose, and then returned to the gallery. I desired to learn by heart – to imbibe – to make all I saw a part of myself, so that never more I may forget it. In some sort I shall succeed. Some of the forms of beauty on which I gazed, must last in my memory as long as it endures; but this will be at the expense of others, which even now are fading and about to disappear from my mind.… The gallery of Berlin will, I fear, become a vague, though glorious dream, for the most part, leaving distinct only a few images that can never be effaced.

  29 July Today, we have been doing our duty in sightseeing; though I grudged every minute spent away from the gallery…. I desired to visit some of the manufactures of Berlin steel, and expected to see beautiful specimens. It is a curious fact, how difficult it is to find out where you ought to go, and how to see any sight, unless it be a regular lion, or you have an exact address. We took a drosky [open carriage] and drove to a shop; it was closed: to another; there was no such thing. We returned to our hotel and learnt that we had been spending many useless groschen by not taking the drosky by the hour instead of the course. Having reformed this oversight, we set off again in search of the manufactory.…

  At length…we reached the Eisengieserei, or iron foundry, just outside the Oranienburg gate.… The men were at work making moulds in sand. At length a vast cauldron of molten metal was brought from the furnace and poured into a mould. There is something singular in boiling metal, the sight of which gives a new idea to the mind, a new sensation to the soul. Boiling water or other liquid presents only an inanimate element changed to the touch, not to the eye; but molten metal, red and fiery, takes a new appearance and seems to have life – the heat appears to give it voluntary action, and the sense of its power of injury adds to the emotion with which it is regarded; as well as the fact that it takes and preserves the form into which it flows.… Certainly, seeing the diminutive Cyclops pour the glowing living liquid from their cauldron, viewing it run fiercely into the various portions of the mould, and then grow tranquil and dark as its task was fulfilled, imparted, I know not why or how, a thrill to the frame.

  After this we were taken to an outhouse in which there were articles for sale – no bracelets, nor chains nor necklaces; chiefly small statuettes of Napoleon and Frederick the Great.

  1936 THOMAS WOLFE

  In his posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) described the city he had loved during Hitler’s 1936 Olympics.

  The organizing genius of the German people, which has been used so often to such noble purpose, was now more thrillingly displayed
than he had ever seen it before. The sheer pageantry of the occasion was overwhelming, so much so that he began to feel oppressed by it. There seemed to be something ominous in it. One sensed a stupendous concentration of effort, a tremendous drawing together and ordering in the vast collective power of the whole land. And the thing that made it seem ominous was that it so evidently went beyond what the games themselves demanded. The games were overshadowed, and were no longer merely sporting competitions to which other nations had sent their chosen teams. They became, day after day, an orderly and overwhelming demonstration in which the whole of Germany had been schooled and disciplined. It was as if the games had been chosen as a symbol of the new collective might, a means of showing to the world in concrete terms what this new power had come to be.

  With no past experience in such affairs, the Germans had constructed a mighty stadium which was the most beautiful and most perfect in its design that had ever been built. And all the accessories of this monstrous plant – the swimming pools, the enormous halls, the lesser stadia – had been laid out and designed with this same cohesion of beauty and of use. The organization was superb. Not only were the events themselves, down to the minutest detail of each competition, staged and run off like clockwork, but the crowds – such crowds as no other great city has ever had to cope with, and the like of which would certainly have snarled and maddened the traffic of New York beyond hope of untangling – were handled with a quietness, order and speed that was astounding.

  The daily spectacle was breathtaking in its beauty and magnificence. The stadium was a tournament of colour that caught the throat; the massed splendour of the banners made the gaudy decorations of America’s great parades, presidential inaugurations and World’s Fairs seem like shoddy carnivals in comparison. And for the duration of the Olympics, Berlin itself was transformed into a kind of annex to the stadium. From one end of the city to the other, from the Lustgarten to the Brandenburger Tor, along the whole broad sweep of Unter den Linden, through the vast avenues of the faery Tiergarten, and out through the western part of Berlin to the very portals of the stadium, the whole town was a thrilling pageantry of royal banners – not merely endless miles of looped-up bunting, but banners fifty feet in height, such as might have graced the battle tent of some great emperor.

  And all through the day, from morning on, Berlin became a mighty Ear, attuned, attentive, focused on the stadium. Everywhere the air was filled with a single voice. The green trees along the Kurfürstendamm began to talk: from loud-speakers concealed in their branches an announcer in the stadium spoke to the whole city – and for George Webber it was a strange experience to hear the familiar terms of track and field translated into the tongue that Goethe used. He would be informed now that the Vorlauf was about to be run – and then the Zwischenlauf – and at length the Endlauf – and the winner: ‘Owens – Oo Ess Ah!’

  Meanwhile, through those tremendous banner-laden ways, the crowds thronged ceaselessly all day long. The wide promenade of Unter den Linden was solid with patient, tramping German feet. Fathers, mothers, children, young folks, old – the whole material of the nation was there, from every corner of the land. From morn to night they trudged, wide-eyed, full of wonder, past the marvel of those banner-laden ways. And among them one saw the bright stabs of colour of Olympic jackets and the glint of foreign faces: the dark features of Frenchmen and Italians, the ivory grimace of the Japanese, the straw hair and blue eyes of the Swedes, and the big Americans, natty in straw hats, white flannels and blue coats crested with the Olympic seal.

  And there were great displays of marching men, sometimes ungunned but rhythmic as regiments of brown shirts went swinging through the streets. By noon each day all the main approaches to the games, the embannered streets and avenues of the route which the Leader would take to the stadium, miles away, were walled in by the troops. They stood at ease, young men, laughing and talking with each other – the Leader’s bodyguards, the Schutz Staffel units, the Storm Troopers, all the ranks and divisions in their different uniforms – and they stretched in two unbroken lines from the Wilhelmstrasse up to the arches of the Brandenburger Tor. Then, suddenly, the sharp command, and instantly there would be the solid smack of ten thousand leather boots as they came together with the sound of war.

  It seemed as if everything had been planned for this moment, shaped to this triumphant purpose. But the people – they had not been planned. Day after day, behind the unbroken wall of soldiers, they stood and waited in a dense and patient throng. These were the masses of the nation, the poor ones of the earth, the humble ones of life, the workers and the wives, the mothers and the children – and day after day they came and stood and waited. They were there because they did not have money enough to buy the little cardboard squares that would have given them places within the magic ring. From noon till night they waited for just two brief and golden moments of the day: the moment when the Leader went out to the stadium, and the moment when he returned.

  At last he came – and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land. The Leader came by slowly in a shining car, a little dark man with a comic-opera moustache, erect and standing, moveless and unsmiling, with his hand upraised, palm outward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.

  1960 GEORGE KENNAN

  George Kennan (1904–2005) was an American diplomat who did much to define the way the West thought about the Cold War. He had studied in Berlin in the late 1920s, and visited again in 1960. His impressions of the ‘new Berlin’ are recorded in his memoir Sketches from a Life (1989).

  16–22 June Berlin was bright, open, sprawling – with its characteristic energetic air, in which one burns one’s self out (at least I do) with the sheer output of energy, on first arrival.… For the first time, one had the impression of a wholly new Berlin, with a quite different arrangement of functions arising – or, better, superimposed – on the skeleton of the old one, the street pattern being largely unchanged. It was a shock to reflect how much of the old city, particularly the parts of it that had once been so central and so imposing, so seemingly timeless and indestructible – the great, teeming business center between Potsdamer Platz and the Friedrichstrasse and the old residential Tiergartenviertel – had passed utterly into history, so that coming generations, in fact even today’s young people, would not even know that those quarters had ever been there, and would be unable to picture them even if told. Five years ago the old Berlin, if only in the form of its ruins and rubble, had still prevailed: the new life had only camped, tentatively and almost apologetically, on what was left of it. Today the new Berlin has taken over. The old one, the scene of such vitality, such pretensions, such horrors and such hopes, is being thrust down into the oblivion of history, before the eyes of those of us who knew it.…

  On Monday evening I went to the theater, over in the Communist eastern sector of the city with M. It was the former Theater am Schiffbauerdamm – the theater where, until his recent death, Brecht had directed. The area around the theater, once the very teeming center of this entire city, was now empty, silent, almost deserted.…

  The play was a dramatization of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don – translated, obviously, from the Russian. The acting was good. The house was not full. In the corridors people whispered and glanced furtively at one another. One had suddenly the feeling that we – the actors and the little band of spectators – were the only living people in the great, ruined and deserted area that stretched for miles around, that we were going through a ceremony of sorts in the midst of this great void, as in a dream, as though some menacing spirit were mocking us, putting us through our paces.…

  M and I sat, in stony silence, in the second row, behind two silent figures in some sort of Communist officer’s uniform. Even when the curtain was drawn, there was not a sound among the audience. A whi
sper would have been heard all over the hall. It was clear: I was back in Russia – not the Russia of today, but Stalin’s Russia. The dreadful, furtive spirit which Khrushchev had largely exorcized among his own people had found refuge here in this distant Russian protectorate and it now presided, like a posthumous curse of the dead Stalin on the ‘faithless’ Germans, over the ruins of the ‘eastern sector’.… We left during the intermission.…

  We drove across the bridge and turned left along the river, behind the university, heading toward one of the great squares that fronted on the one-time (now-destroyed) Imperial Palace. Suddenly, we emerged onto this vast open area from the little park in front of the ruins of the old Zeughaus. We got out of the car, walked out onto the deserted square, and were suddenly overwhelmed – but utterly, profoundly, as I have not been in many years – by what we saw and felt around us.

  It was now late twilight – the long-drawn twilight of the northern night. Under the trees it was dark, but the sky was still partly bright. There was a touch of gold in the air. Before us there was only the great square confronting the ruins of the enormous Wilhelminian Romanesque cathedral. The entire area was unbelievably silent and empty. Only one pair of lovers, standing under the trees by the Zeughaus, moved uneasily away at our approach. All about us were the ruins of the great old buildings, semi-silhouetted against the bright sky. And what ruins! In their original state, they had seemed slightly imitative and pretentious. Now they suddenly had a grandeur I had never seen even in Rome. We both became aware that this was, somehow, a moment like no other. There was a stillness, a beauty, a sense of infinite, elegiac sadness and timelessness such as I have never experienced. Death, obviously, was near, and in the air: hushed, august, brooding Death – nothing else. Here all the measureless tragedy of the Second World War – the millions of dead, the endless seas of bereavement and sorrow, the extinction of a whole great complex of life and belief and hope – had its perpetuation. So overpowering was the impression that we spoke only in whispers, as though we were in a cathedral, instead of standing in the open before the ruins of one. Not a soul was now in sight. But no – far up, at the top of an enormous flight of steps leading up to what was left of the cathedral, on the pedestal of one of the huge marble columns, we saw half-hidden in the shadows three adolescent boys – motionless, themselves like statues, themselves silent, endlessly alone and abandoned; and their lost, defiant figures burned themselves into my vision to the point where I see them still today – elbows on the knees, chins resting on the palms of their hands – the embodiment of man’s lost and purposeless state, his loneliness, his helplessness, his wistfulness and his inability to understand.