Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

When I went over into eastern Berlin Sunday night to cover a premiere at the grand old State Opera on Berlin’s showpiece boulevard named Unter den Linden (because of the quadruple columns of trees marching down the center separator green strip, I had to take the subterranean U-Bahn because yesterday I got a call from a thoughtful lady in the Press Office there, cautioning me that today a children’s marathon would have the entire Unter den Linden completely closed even to bus traffic.  The shortest walk from the Französische Strasse U-Bahnhof takes me diagonally across the spacious square on the western side of the Staatsoper originally called the Opernplatz (click on this aerial view to enlarge it; you can see the opera house on the near side of the Platz, with the Unter den Linden running from upper left to lower right) but renamed by the Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic in honor of August Bebel (1840-1913), a hero of the German labor movement as co-founder of the Social-Democratic party of Germany, from which the radical wing broke off to form Germany’s Communist Party; Bebel’s books include one called Woman and Socialism, making him a pioneer in the still exotic area, at that time, of women’s liberation and rights.

Quite an uproar arose several years ago when plans became known for the construction of a vast, sorely needed underground parking garage underneath that square, but plans for an unorthodox subterranean book-burning memorial poured oil on those troubled waters.  See here, then here [Ha - some illiterate's misspelled Brecht's given name here, correctly Bertolt], here, and finally here.

On May 10th, 1933, only about four months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor (contrary to a worldwide misconception, Germans did not elect the Nazis, let alone Hitler: a forerunner of Sen. Joe McCarthy named Paul von Hindenburg, a World War I hero who’d become President, also a victim of similar hysterical fear of the political left, chose to instal Hitler as Chancellor in preference over a representative of Germany’s two healthy, but suicidally internecine, left-wing parties, the Socialists and Communists … but I’ll try to get back to that at some later point), Der Führer’s villainous Minister “for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda”, the ineffable Dr. phil. Joseph Goebbels, organized the most widely known of all history’s fairly numerous ritualistic book-burnings, almost certainly the most orgiastic, in which students from Berlin’s top-flight Humboldt University directly across the Unter den Linden, aided and abetted by the Nazi “élite” SS and the Gestapo (a characteristically German abbreviation, of GEheimeSTAatsPOlizei, secret state police), consigned to the flames of a gigantic bonfire more than 25,000 books written by some of world history’s greatest artists and thinkers.

On April 6, 1933, the main office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Association proclaimed a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit” it perceived in Germany, to build up to a splendid climax with a ritualistic literary purge - a “cleansing” - by fire.  Regional chapters got the assignment to supply the press with releases, commissioned articles, sponsored well-known Nazi figures as speakers at public gatherings, and negotiated for live radio time.  On April 8, 1933 the students’ association also drew up its own twelve “theses”— a term deliberately evocative of the anti-Vatican theses Martin Luther nailed to his local church’s door, launching Germany’s historical religious reformation.

Preparations for the book-burning itself included inspirational declarations and demands for a “pure” national language and culture. Big Nazi placards publicized those theses, attacking “Jewish intellectualism,” asserting the need to “purify” the German language and literature, and demanding that universities become centers of rightist German nationalism.  The students described their “action” as a response to what they denounced as a worldwide Jewish “smear campaign” against Germany, and an affirmation of “traditional” German values.

On that May 10th such pro-Nazi students burned all those thousands of “un-German” books, launching Goebbels’ era of state censorship and control of all of Germany’s rich Kultur - a word which in German usage comprises far more than does the English word culture.  Similar book-burnings and torchlight parades - by long tradition a feature of German student life - took place that same night in most of the many predominantly university towns throughout scholarly Germany, “against the un-German spirit” opposing Hitler and his Nazis.  The scripted rituals the participants received from Goebbels’ ministry called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to exhort the participants and spectators.  Students assembled at the appointed spots, to throw the pillaged and unwanted books into the bonfires with vivacious ceremony, band music, songs, “fire oaths,” and incantations.  Radio broadcast the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations directly from the site to countless listeners.

The authors thus given an additional boost towards immortality - far from all of them such Jewish intellectuals as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud - included the writers Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger, the legendary Berlin theater critic Alfred Kerr, and many another German intellectual light, plus foreigners including Ernest Hemingway and - don’t ask me why - Helen Keller, who had overcame both blindness and deafness from birth to become a worldwide celebrity.

I can’t tell you who designed this Berlin memorial to that hideous book-burning on the Opernplatz, but I humbly doff my hat to that person.  Flush with the surrounding ground level, a sizable expanse of Plexiglass makes it possible for the viewer above ground to look down into a spacious room with library-style bookshelves on all four sides - but empty of books.  A bronze tablet, also flush with the ground, succinctly and factually tells the story of what happened there the night of May 10th seventy-four years ago.

Today’s Philharmonie, the architecturally brilliant home of our perhaps nonpareil Berlin Philharmonic, today occupies the ground where a meanwhile bombed-out building housed the headquarters of the Nazis’ flagitiously misnamed “euthanasia” action - to exterminate such “useless eaters” as the mentally and physically handicapped of no matter what age.  A big bronze tablet set into the sidewalk bears an admirably apt summary of what happened there.  Whenever I have a bit of time to spare on the numerous evenings I spend in the Philharmonie, I sometimes go out there for yet another look at that tablet, perhaps unconsciously to remind myself of the most horrible of all chapters in the history of the country and people I recently, through naturalization, adopted as my own.  More often than not I’ll see some bouquet or other floral tribute placed upon that tablet, usually with a ribbon identifying the organization responsible for that memorial gesture.

Sunday night, when I crossed the August-Bebel-Platz on my way across it to the Staatsoper, there lay upon that sheet of Plexiglass a single beautiful long-stemmed red rose … and when I saw it I felt my eyes begin to well up.  German tradition has it that red roses specifically convey the emotion of love.  Especially such long-stemmed roses do not grow in city-dwellers’ little gardens, and at florists’ they do not come cheap; whoever laid that one there had not only gone to some trouble to obtain it but had also paid generously to prepare for that sweet, silent gesture of remembrance and tribute. I have no way of knowing who had placed that beautiful red rose there; I do know that that person, presumably German, typifies and represents the numerous Germans who populate - who always have populated - my Germany.