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August 15, 2007

A few days ago, while chatting about how I had spent my weekends in Berlin, my boss asked a question that I thought very simple.

"And have you been out to Wannsee?"

"Oh, of course," I answered, remembering the walk I had taken around that lake as well as the Harvard Club event I had attended on its shores on one of my first days here. "It's gorgeous."

"And did you go to the memorial?"

"Memorial?" I replied, puzzled. Memorial to what?

"The Wannsee Conference memorial," she answered. And that was when everything came together. Of course I knew about the Wannsee Conference, the notorious 1942 meeting where Third Reich leaders came up with the Endlösung der Judenfrage—the final solution to the Jewish question. But somehow I  hadn't connected it to the tranquil forest I visited at the end of June.

To live in Berlin is to have a strange relationship to history. In one way, it's impossible to ignore. For me the situation is particularly intense since much of the research I'm doing for my internship right now focuses on the German resistance during World War II, which forms the background of a film my boss is working on. I spend hours reading about the reasons that different individuals decided to turn against Hitler, and the almost always disastrous consequences of such decisions. Yet even outside work, not a day goes by when I don't see something about the horror of the Nazi regime or the damage done to Berlin by allied bombing or the crippling anxiety of living in a city at the crux of the Cold War—usually all three. The key phrase in many of these representations—not only regarding the victims of Nazism, but also with reference those of the war and of the authoritarian Communism that followed in the East—is that "we" can never forget.

And yet in another way it's all too easy to forget. The scars are so ubiquitous that no one would be able to lead his life if he didn't ignore them sometimes. And so Germans cross from East to West without thinking about the fact that thousands were once shot trying to do so, and walk through the center of the city without picturing the rubble that was once there, and go hiking and swimming in Wannsee without considering that, only meters away, a cadre of government officials once decided to send 6 million people to their deaths.

If they're are anything like me, it's only occasionally that Germans have these sudden and unexpected encounters with history, these revelations that present life in such a city is always bound up with the past. You can read pages of historical scholarship and see plaque after plaque and still understand it all as existing in some other world, and then, without warning, something reminds you that it was all here, this city, that even though Berlin today is different from Berlin then, something continues and endures. It's a remarkable experience.