When German Memorials to an Awful Past Grow Tired and Ambivalent

The Checkpoint Charlie Museum seems suited for tourists, and the air-raid ruins of a church convey memory exhaustion and mixed signals. 

K ing Charles and Queen Camilla were in Berlin this week for the first state visit of the new king’s rule. He’s half-German, and his grandfather, George VI, had barely a drop of English blood. Elizabeth II’s mother was Scottish, Princess Diana was, of course, English, as is the current Princess of Wales, so, over time, unless some new German walks up the aisle with a British heir, the monarchy’s German heritage will gradually ebb.

Charles speaks German, and his aunts married German aristocrats, one or two a Nazi. The Germans, chronically depressed and more so now, are delighted to see him. When you look to Charles for a good buck-up, you’re really in trouble.

A few weeks ago, I was in Berlin for a couple of days, on a less illustrious visit, and, dour Vermonter that I am, of no use in cheering a nation. I hadn’t been there since 1990, only months after the reunification of Germany and a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I know — 33 years is a long time between visits. This round, I had just been to Dresden for a week and felt saturated in porcelain, Old Master paintings, and Wagner operas, and then there was pound upon pound of ivory tchotchkes in the Green Vault. In Berlin, I craved something different.

So much of the history of our epoch happened in Berlin. The Second World War made our world today, as did the Iron Curtain and the collapse of communism starting in 1989. A new class of Brownshirts has coalesced in the U.S. and the U.K., using strategies and tactics developed in Germany in the ’20s and ’30s and, since despots will be despots, that continued in full bloom during the communist era.

Here in the U.S., we’ve got a Baby Stasi in every elite college and university, in most big corporations, and here and there in Washington. So, in Berlin, I focused on history, specifically on German views of the Nazi and East German tyrannies. I visited history museums and, since the weather was nice, monuments.

It’s a mixed bag. Not that I ever dwell on the past, but, in my humble though informed opinion, Germans are to be watched closely. Over the past 100 years or so, they’ve caused more mischief and mayhem than anyone, anywhere, anytime. Today I’ll focus on the two most famous spots in Berlin for reflection.

I liked the Checkpoint Charlie Museum when I visited in 1990 for its impromptu, mishmash quality. Checkpoint C was one of three single-lane and militarized crossings between East Berlin and West Berlin after the construction of the Berlin Wall starting in 1961. In NATO-speak, “C” became Charlie. Until the wall was built, the border between East and West Berlin was porous. Securing it was, for East Germany, essential. In Berlin, an international flashpoint, the wall showed power and control. Thousands of educated East Germans and their families were simply leaving, creating a massive brain drain. The wall allowed stringent control over the border of the entire country and kept people trapped.

The crossing became notorious during a 1961 standoff between American and Soviet tanks and, in 1962, when an East German teenager was shot by communist police while he was trying to run from east to west. He died entangled in barbed wire in a thin strip of No Man’s Land. Checkpoint Charlie figures in John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Octopussy, the James Bond movie.

I considered the museum years ago as a political center, a makeshift memorial, and a current-events and material-culture museum. Rather than having “It,” since German women other than Marlene Dietrich tend to lack “It,” it had, better still, “Now.” Production values weren’t great. As a museum, it showed ephemera rather than art. It was heavy on human-interest stories. My sense was that an object, often a photograph or a bit of the wall, could be brought to the museum in the morning and displayed by lunchtime.

The museum, first called the Checkpoint Charlie House, opened in 1962 in a tiny apartment in West Berlin near Checkpoint Charlie. Rainer Hildebrandt (1914–2004), trained as a psychologist, developed it from scratch as a venue for publicizing atrocities surrounding the wall and East German border control, and for researching the cases of East Germans who had disappeared thanks to the Stasi. Hildebrandt was an anti-Nazi resister who spent time in prison during the Hitler era.

The place moved to a bigger building a few years later and still feels like a house museum, though expanded and with a curated look and fancy graphics. The mission has expanded, too. There’s plenty of history focused on the wall and escapes from the East to the West. That’s history, though, and ancient history as the Cold War becomes more and more remote. The museum has sections on nonviolent protest and human-rights abuses happening today or in recent years beyond Germany’s borders. This comes at the cost of focus.

I was happy to see — still in a place of pride — the homemade hot-air balloon used for a 1979 escape near Berlin as well as the mini-submarine — really an underwater scooter — used to flee Rostock on the Baltic Sea for Mon, a Danish island. There’s an armored getaway car, too. East German border guards look like killers-in-waiting in photographs, as they should.

The Checkpoint Charlie Museum gets lots of tourist visitors and makes lots of money. It’s a private museum. I wonder how effective it is. To visitors under, say, 40, it must feel and look like a period piece, like a museum about medieval torture instruments. It’s a proper museum now, which dulls the story.

It still seemed a history-in-the-making museum in 1990, with the wall, guard towers, and barbed wire still encircling West Berlin. Absorbing a traumatized, impoverished East Germany seemed a massive job. Now, the wall has been gone for a generation. What used to be East Germany isn’t rich but isn’t poor, either.

Still, Germany’s tripolar. It’s got a sclerotic ruling class personified by the frumpy and mediocre Mutti and a midwit named Olaf. It’s got an itch to rule Europe’s finances, hegemony making German hearts go pitter-pat. And it’s got a penchant for extremes such as the climate cult. Indeed, it’s to be watched closely. Germany invented nihilism, the crudest, bluntest form of which was Nazi socialism. The place should ooze anxiety, but it doesn’t. It’s too tidy and proper.

President Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech in 1987 is rightly given a close look at the museum, but the party atmosphere surrounding the wall’s breach two years later is misleading. The East German government had applauded the murderous Tiananmen Square crackdown and desperately tried to rally a similar response at home. In a near-run thing, it couldn’t. The museum doesn’t convey the drama and personalities of the time. It doesn’t convey the sense of urgency or inspire empowerment.

The Gedächtniskirche — the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church — is a church on the Kurfürstendamm, still Berlin’s main shopping drag. The Romanesque Revival church opened in 1895 and was commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II, he of the First World War debacle, in memory of his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Prussian autocrat who ruled the newly unified Germany.

A 1943 Allied air raid destroyed most of the church, save the tower through which visitors entered the nave. In the ’50s, West German authorities decided to keep the tower, which they consider a war ruin, intact. Next to the tower, spiffy for a ruin, is an octagonal concrete-and-glass church completed in 1963.

As a rebuke to warmongers, a monument from one Hohenzollern despot to another seems inapt and more like a hint to keep those hobnail jackboots handy.

Germans would say the new church was not about contrition, for or against, but, rather, signaled Berlin’s determination to rebuild after the Nazi debacle. During the air raid, the tower’s spire collapsed. In the ’50s it was replaced by an ugly, modern belfry. Over the past few years, the tower has needed lots of expensive repairs to keep it standing in its ruined state. It’s reached the point of make-believe. Berliners today probably edit it out whenever they pass it.

Now, the new church is lovely. Its walls are almost entirely azure-stained glass, about 20,000 panels, with intermittent splashes of emerald green, ruby red, and butter yellow. The blues in the stained-glass windows in the cathedral in Chartres inspired them. I’m not sure this compensates entirely for Kaiser Wilhelm church’s bells, made from French cannons seized when Prussians sacked Paris in 1871.

In 2016, an Islamist terrorist drove a truck into a crowd at a Christmas market in front of the tower, killing eleven. I’m not the canceling kind of guy, but the old church tower has a whammy bad enough to make Evil-Eye Fleegle blush, and if anyone’s up to be canceled, it’s Wilhelm II.

I’m not sure what message it sends. Over the past few weeks, I watched Judgment at Nuremberg, A Foreign Affair, The Search, and Germany, Year Zero, all movies with footage of bombed-out Berlin. It’s one apocalyptic scene after another. The church tower does nothing to evoke the devastation. I’d tear the thing down.

Next week I’ll write about monuments to the war and its aftermath that I think are far more edifying and relevant. These include the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is Germany’s anchor Holocaust monument, and the Soviet World War II memorial in Treptower Park. The Places of Remembrance memorial in the Old Bavarian Quarter, once the home of thousands of Berlin Jews, is unique. It’s 80 word-and-image placards fixed on lampposts, each depicting a different Nazi rule governing Jewish life. Micha Ullman’s Empty Library, from 1995, remembers the mass book burning by Nazis on May 10, 1933. Given the Twitter Files and the recent riot by Stanford law-school students over Judge Duncan’s speech there, a look at Nazi censorship is a good idea.