Seeing Berlin from a distance

Buy this book online from Amazon.co.uk

Hitler's thugs beat up their enemies in a range of improvised torture chambers across Berlin - including a water tower in the district of Prenzlauer Berg.

According to David Clay Large, this building "now bears a plaque attesting to its former function, blithely ignored by the patrons of the hip cafés that have sprouted up around the tower since the fall of the Berlin Wall".

How the devil does Professor Large know the plaque is "blithely ignored"? I have often been drinking, and breakfasting, in the hip cafés near the water tower, and cannot think of a single companion, German or foreign, who ignored the local history. The armed policeman guarding the Synagogue just round the corner is quite superfluous as a reminder of the recent past. It is an inescapable presence, a far heavier burden for young Germans than any we British have to bear. I think of my friend Otfried, a bearded giant whose local pub, the Seeblick, is a short way up the Rykestrasse from the water tower. Otfried's whole life can be seen as a response to the horrors of the Nazi period. His early studies in theology gave way to passionate involvement in the peace movement, and he is now one of Germany's leading experts on defence.

His moral seriousness and penetrating intellect are accompanied by a gift for laughter and a profound enjoyment of beer, but never for one moment could one imagine that he overlooks the descent into barbarism which took place in Berlin in 1933.

Professor Large teaches history at Montana State University. In his acknowledgments, he thanks a friend who for the past 20 years has introduced him to "the best and worst" pubs in Berlin, and who "kept me supplied with printed materials on the city when I could not be there to gather them myself". The great trouble with the history of Berlin since Bismarck, which the professor has at length completed, is that it relies far too heavily on these "printed materials" and far too little on any conversations he may have had in the pub. There are still a few East Berliners around who can tell you what it was like to live under the Kaiser (forced to abdicate in November 1918), the Weimar Republic, Hitler, Stalin's troops who stormed the city in 1945, the East German communists and, from 1990-98, the leadership of the mighty Helmut Kohl, a man somewhat discredited since his secret network of party bank accounts started to come to light in November 1999.

The outcome of the professor's immense labours is an account of Berlin without the people. There is no sense of history as something still alive in the minds of Berliners. Like many German scholars, including many who believe themselves to be impeccable democrats, he cannot really be bothered to listen to the people. Professor Large's 650 pages of text instead contain digests of innumerable books, but his manner is such that even the eye-witness testimony he cites comes to sound laboured and second-hand. "I have attempted to be as comprehensive as possible without overtaxing the reader's endurance," the poor man writes, but what this means is that he will never use one piece of evidence to support an obvious point when he fancies he has room for three or four. It is barely imaginable that anyone who begins this history will read it to the end.

The absence of any real feeling for the character of the Berliners themselves is all the more frustrating given the distrust, faithfully recorded by Professor Large, which most of Germany's rulers, and the majority of the German people, have always felt for the city's inhabitants. The Kaiser preferred Potsdam, while the Nazis preferred Munich. The present generation of German politicians decided, by a narrow margin, to restore the capital to Berlin, but many of them are no keener on meeting the Berliners than their predecessors were: as Professor Large remarks, MPs can move from their offices to the new parliament chamber, in the shell of the old Reichstag, through a system of tunnels "without ever having to face the elements, or, for that matter, the public".

This book has value as a reference work, if you wish for some brief indication of who Karl Liebknecht or Fritz Lang or Max Lieber-mann were. It also contains a few examples of Berliners' sense of humour, though it is all too indicative of the professor's sense of priori-ties that the following passage is confined to brackets: "The lack of bananas inspired one of the many jokes with which East Berliners tried to laugh off the iniquities of life in the Honecker era. To wit: An East Berlin kid and a West Berlin kid face each other across the Wall. 'Ha,' says the western kid, 'I have bananas and you don't.' 'Phooey,' says the eastern kid, 'I have socialism and you don't.' 'So what?' counters the western kid, 'we'll get socialism too.' 'Then you won't have bananas any more,' responds the boy from the East."