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City of dark memories
http://www.sina.com.cn 2003/04/22 09:30  上海英文星报

  WHEN an Austra-lian colleague found out I would be taking a brief vacation in Berlin, he recommended that I should not miss Berlin's stylish cafes and bars, some of the liveliest nightlife in Europe.

  But what loomed uppermost in my mind at that point was still a classic photo of World War II, featuring a Red Army soldier placing a Soviet Union flag on the top of the Reichstag (the old Imperial German Parliament) - the symbol of German power.

  I just could not immediately bridge the gap between a desolate city awfully flattened in furious battles and the vigorous nightlife only a cheerful, free-minded people are supposed to enjoy.

  With this puzzle, I stepped onto the soil of Berlin, and my sentiment was soon captured by the Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a World War II bombing relic, which instantly set the basic tone of my upcoming three-day tour: Berlin as a whole is an imperishable monument to the human suffering produced by hatred, which has multiple roots - in pride, envy, racial chauvinism and ideology.

  Pride and hatred

  My first impression of the Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church adjacent to the Zoological Garden Railway Station was ghastly.

  The burned black appearance of the ruins made them seem to be still sizzling. The ugly relic looked like a mortally wounded beast groaning with pain. From the carefully preserved ruin, I could still imagine how grand the original church was.

  Inside the relic's memorial hall, a gallery of 16 large photos recalled the terror of the bombing on the night of November 22, 1943. The cross of nails, brought from the cathedral in Coventry, England bombed by Germany on November 14, 1940, are a renowned symbol of worldwide efforts at reconciliation.

  Though the whole world understands perfectly why such pitiless punishment was imposed on German, it was still important for me to figure out how force-obsessed national pride triggered off evil hatred which leading to a horrible war and immense human suffering, as I visited landmark Berlin structures, including the Victory Column, Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag.

  With the statue of the victory goddess Victoria on its top, the 69-metre Victory Column, first built in 1873, now stands in the middle of the Grosser Stern traffic roundabout on Berlin's main east-west axis, intersecting June 17 Street, dedicated to the Prussian victories over Denmark, Austria and France, marking the emergence of Germany as a unified nation. Shell casings, a legacy of the Franco-Prussian War, were even used to decorate the body of the column.

  With the glory of wars dimmed out, the column is now appreciated more as a commanding point which provides a view over the surrounding Tiergarten, Berlin's famous zoological park.

  Gate of peace

  Undoubtedly, the Brandenburg Gate is the most famous Berlin landmark. Since 1990, the gate has become a symbol of the regained unity of the city.

  The time I visited Berlin earlier this year, the 26-metre gate had only re-emerged for six months after a two-year facelift, during which, 15,000 bullet holes, left in 1945 by the final climactic battles of World War II, had been removed.

  Though originally completed in 1791 as a gate of peace, the gate found itself more often celebrating force than peace in its ensuing history.

  The 5-metre quadriga of the goddess of victory on the roof of the gate was stolen by Napoleon and removed to Paris in 1806 after Prussia's defeat at Jena.

  In 1933, frenetic Nazis troops holding torches paraded underneath the gate to celebrate the birth of the Third Reich.

  Nowadays, still serving as the major rallying centre for Germans, the gate has witnessed more voices calling for peace.

  Steppingsintosthe Room of Silence in the gate, I was overwhelmed by the solemn atmosphere specially maintained as "a continuous invitation to tolerance, the brotherhood of man embracing all nationalities and ideologies, a continuous reminder against violence and xenophobia."

  The sincerity of Germans in creating such a non-denominational room could be better understood by tourists after visiting the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (SMM), a former concentration camp in the north of Berlin, which the SS architects conceived as the ideal setting.

  It was a cold and snowy afternoon. At the gate of the SMM I was mistaken for a Japanese by an old man who distributed a Japanese electronic interpreter to me.

  I explained to the old man that I hoped more Japanese would visit such memorials, but what I needed was a Chinese one.

  The old man smiled and told me Japanese visitors were not rare, which puzzled me why so many Japanese seemed still unable to learn anything from Germany, considering Japan's no less shameful and brutal past.

  For anyone seeking a better understanding of how Germany slidsintoswar and self-destruction, the Reichstag, only one block away from the Brandenburg Gate, is a must.

  A free tour of the impressive glass dome of the Reichstag building, the former Imperial Parliament, now the Parliament of the German Republic, is available to tourists almost everyday till 10:00pm. The newly added dome, designed by British architect Lord Foster, symbolizes the new transparency in German politics, a farewell to its ugly past.

  In the main hall of the dome, a huge round table picture gallery demonstrated to visitors the ups and downs of Berlin as German's capital and legends of the building which was heavily damaged in the fire in 1933 and in the Battle of Berlin.

  Climbing up the rotating path along the dome's glass wall, with ancient and new Berlin landmarks including the Brandenburg Gate, the 368-metre TV Tower built in the cold war East Berlin and the modern Federal Chancellor's Office newly opened in 2001 in sight, I found myself in the centre of Berlin, which is changing at breakneck speed.

  Following my colleague's advice, I visited a nightspot area near Berlin's major commercial street, the Kurfuerstendamm, the night before leaving. When I finally left one bar at around 2:00am, candle light was still seductively flickering on the excited faces of energetic Berliners, and my seat was immediately reoccupied.




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