When I first saw the mirrored cone inside the Reichstag dome, I didn't think of ice cream. I thought of Doner.
The Doner Kebab, to all who have never experienced the joy of this sandwich, ubiquitous on Berlin's streets, is the main product of almost every Middle Eastern restaurant in the city (or at least every Middle Eastern restaurant cheap enough for me to eat on my college-student budget). A shop generally advertises its doners through the presence of a dondurmek in the window. The Reichstag's rain cone looks to me just like the meat on a dondurmek:
Doner kebab is, by now, one of the most popular foods in Germany. It's also common in the rest of Europe (the first dondurmek I ever saw was in Paris.) But as Turkish as doner kebab looks and tastes, it's as German as the Reichstag, invented by a Berlin fast food vendor in 1971. Since that time, doner kebab had migrated across Europe back to Istanbul, where it's almost as popular as it is in Berlin, proving once again that the world is far stranger than we could ever hope to imagine.
Next week: a slightly more serious look at the Reichstag building.
The two pictures in the post below are of Tyn Church, which stands taller than anything else around Prague's Old Town Square (for a quick reminder of how old Prague is, realize that New Town was built in the fourteenth century.) N. and I spent 2 of our three days in Prague wandering through Old Town, so we spent a while looking up at the spires of Tyn Church.
The golden image on the front is the Virgin Mary, but it used to be a chalice. That's because Tyn Church was once a center of the Hussites, whose main break with the Catholic Church was over whether lay-people should receive Communion wine as well as wafer.
The Hussites, so named for their support of Jan Hus, split from Catholicism more than a century before Luther did. And they didn't simply disappear either. Tyn Church was held by Hussites until 1626, and today's Moravian Church claims direct descent from Jan Hus.
2009 has been a year of important anniversaries in much of Eastern Europe. For Poland, June 4th marked 20 years since the first free elections since World War Two.
The Czech Republic will have a similar anniversary in late December.
And twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell-- or at least became irrelevant.
It was two years before my birth, and therefore six years before my memory-- but it is well within the memory of much of the world, and certainly deeply ingrained in the national memory of Germany.
Needless to say, my time in Berlin was filled with reminders of the Berlin Wall.
My hostel was on what would have been the Eastern side, not far from the New Synagogue, and within easy walking distance of the Brandenburg Gate.
From 1961 to 1989, the Gate, dedicated to peace, stood in an uneasy no man's land, referred to by West and East Berliners alike as "the Death Zone".
The common history is that the Berlin Wall went up overnight-- it actually went up over three nights, with barbed wire laid in the streets one day, and guards posted at the perimeter, and a concrete wall two days later. According to Robert Frost "something there is that doesn't love a wall" and there were a lot of people, among them many of the divided Berliners, who certainly didn't love the Berlin Wall, but there was a dominant political situation which did love such a Wall. There were people on both sides perfectly eager to divide the world into Two Camps. A wall made for a convenient dividing line. "Good fences make good neighbors."
This was not so convenient for those who died trying to cross the wall, or those who had family on the other side, those who had crossed over for the night to visit a friend and woke up in the morning to find half their world cut off...
But nothing is forever, or at least few things are, and walls tend to be among the more ephemeral things in this world (even more ephemeral than flowers, for when a wall falls down it doesn't grow back the next spring).
And so the wall is gone... but the Germans haven't let the grass grow over it quite yet. Some things need to be remembered.
Work on Berlin's New Synagogue began in 1859. The dedication in 1866 was a major event: Otto von Bismark, the Chancellor of Germany, was in attendance.
The New Synagogue was one of many in a city which at the time had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, but it was new sort of synagogue in a few very important ways. Most synagogues were hidden in courtyards or alleyways. The New Synagogue was on a major street, just a short walk away from Unter Den Linden, which was (and is) to Berlin as the Champs Elysee was (and is) to Paris.
The New Synagogue was a clear statement that Jews, who had been in Germany for more than a thousand years already, were there to stay. This was not only a challenge to the various limitations on Jewish life which had existed throughout Europe since the Middle Ages, it was a challenge to the traditional Jewish view that life in Europe was life in exile.
The New Synagogue was part of the Reform movement. It had a choir, a sermon, and a seminary-educated rabbi, which all made it more like a German Protestant Church and less like a traditional synagogue. Those who attended saw themselves as fully Jewish, fully German, and thoroughly modern.
Things were never without complication, and walking the tightrope between being a part of society as a whole and maintaining existence as a people was never an easy task, but the 3,000 seats in the synagogue's main hall were filled every Shabbos.
Not even Kristallnacht could change that. The Nazi mob which came to burn the synagogue as it had burned others that night found itself face to face with a policeman who swore to protect the history of his city and nation. The fascists, used to having police egging them on or standing aside, were so surprised by his action that they actually dispersed.
The building survived the Nazis, but it would not survive the war. British bombs destroyed the main hall, and after the war everything but the facade was demolished. Most of it was rubble already. And the Jews who had built it and filled it each week were never coming home.
For years only the front stood, a partial ruin. Not until the Berlin Wall fell was it restored, and it was six years before the building would hold a synagogue once more. But it does now, it's the only Reform synagogue in Berlin, and so the old New Synagogue is new once more.
My grad-student brother recently went to a conference on Jewish American and Holocaust literature. One of the major discussions among practitioners and critics in the form is about how to be a witness to the holocaust, how to stand as a witness of one of the most horrendous atrocities of history, how to speak of the murder of more than six million men, women, children.
The strongest witness, all agree, is the witness who is no longer here. Who witnesses exactly by not being here.
Berlin, it is said, is a city of memorials. There are many, but the most haunting for me is a witness of absence. It stands in the Bebelplatz, across from Humboldt University, on the spot where, in 1933, the Nazis encouraged students to burn more than 20,ooo books.
And so now there is, under the earth, this empty room, lined with empty bookshelves: A reminder of what was, and now is gone.
Just outside of Darmstadt in Germany is a medieval ruin which would have little to distinguish it from any of the other hundreds of medieval ruins in Germany except for a short story contest held in Switzerland by a few friends staying in a cabin for the summer.
The friends were Lord Byron and the Shelleys (Percy, known for Ozymandias, among other poems, and Mary, who is the heroine of this tale). To pass the time, Byron apparently suggested that they each write a ghost story-- his and Percy's have been lost (they were probably no good anyhow) but Mary's has been remembered.
If you're wondering what all of this has to do with the aforementioned medieval ruin in Germany, you're asking the right question.
The reason this lonely castle has not been completely forgotten (although it has been almost completely forgotten) is that the tale Mary Shelley wrote that night borrows its name: Frankenstein. And thus Frankenstein Castle, un-notable in its own right, became the namesake of a great work. And thus, Frankenstein, the name of a small German noble family, became a name synonymous with terrifying monstrosities-- not perhaps the way Konrad Reiz von Breuberg wanted to be remembered, but a way to be remembered (or forgotten while your name is remembered and completely divorced from you and your history) nonetheless.
