Europe @ 2.4 km/h (28 page)

To which Stephan has added his own jot of wisdom:

But in heaven there is no beer,

And so we drink it here!

Another quotation from his table talk, observations gathered by his students, goes, ‘He who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long’.
²³

Luther’s keen sense of humour is further demonstrated by a statement he uttered at the first Evangelical (Protestant) service ever held, when he said of his wedding to Katharina, ‘That a former monk should marry an absconded nun is a rare event’. Quite so. It is not exactly an everyday one even now.

The tourist information bureau sells many Luther-related items. My favourite is the pair of socks monogrammed with Luther’s statement defying Rome, ‘I stand here: I can do no other.’

The hostel I am staying in is next to the church where legend has it that he nailed his famous 95 theses against corruption in the Catholic Church. Luther is said to have written in a note dated 31 October 1517, ‘I posted my theses about indulgences on the doorway of the Castle Church’. The bronze door we see there today was installed in 1858, a century after Luther’s wooden door
²⁴
was destroyed by fire in the Seven Years War bombardment. A plaque on the youth hostel wall records that the building I am sleeping in was struck by that bombardment on 13 October 1760. From 1885-1892 the church was redesigned in neo-Gothic style as the Memorial Church of the Reformation, and in 1996 it was designated part of the World Heritage.

While transfixed by the Castle Church dome, a 19th-century structural addition, many tourists are liable to miss the tasty, if not tasteful, offering in the window of the New York Bagels eatery directly across the street. The Elvis Sandwich is on special. And what is this historical delicacy, which stands a bit apart from the thematic unity of the town, filled with? Why, peanut butter and banana, of course, at least one of which can be blamed for the heart attack that carried the King away in his early 40s. Just €2.20 buys you a real-life — or perhaps a real-death — experience, without the need to go all the way to Graceland.

A visit to Luther House is
de rigueur
, if only to see how every century Luther has been reinterpreted in a new light. By 1817, the 300th anniversary of the Reformation, he was viewed as rational and disputatious, a German national archetype. By 1917 he was a nationalist symbol who had ‘consecrated Germany’s sword’, a useful adjunct to the war effort. By 1967 East Germany was calling him ‘a bourgeois revolutionary’ while West Germans were embarrassed by his stridency.

Back at St Mary’s, I watch as the faithful kindle candles from ones already lit. If the Great Schisms are ever healed, I can confidently predict candle lighting will be as central to the unified faith as it is to Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant Christians today and millions of subscribers to other beliefs, such as Judaism and Hinduism.

811-813 km

Since the 1920s Berlin has been synonymous throughout the world with a sharp-witted, acerbic, intellectually challenging, irreverent take on life. You can take power away from Berlin but somehow it recharges itself. It is Germany’s New York and Washington rolled into one. When I mentioned to a friend, journalist Mark Bowling, that I was going there, he sent warmly nostalgic emails about the city in the late 1980s when he lived there, and especially about Kreuzberg — a then fashionable, now rather seedy but still edgy southern suburb near the old Cold War front line.

My first night in Berlin, after finding my way to Kreuzberg and tracking down my chosen hostel — reachable only via the sort of darkened courtyard where you don’t see the shiv until it’s thrust between your shoulder blades — the lift I’m told to get into as the only way up to hostel reception gets stuck. I spend the next fifteen minutes warding off panic at the thought that, because the staff double as bartenders and cannot hear me above the din of their Friday night rave party, I might well be spending the whole night in this unventilated goods lift.

At five minutes past midnight my rapping on the lift’s steel doors rouses the curiosity of two young drunks in the courtyard — there for what reason I don’t know, but it can’t have been legal — who prise the doors open and win my liberation.

813-819 km

Rested by a night’s sleep in a bed rather than a goods lift, I am keen to get out and see Kreuzberg on this rare sunny day. It doesn’t take long to find a typical Berlin pub, a
Kneipe
, as Mark had alerted me to look for: the All-Berliner Bierlokal on Lausitzerplatz.

Girls on in-line skates take their puppies for a roll, living up to Berlin’s avant-garde reputation. From what I have seen of it, Kreuzberg is a mishmash of florists’ stalls and Mideastern eateries: the Baghdad Cafe brings a smile to my lips.

As I push past the rail flyover at Schlesische Tor, off to my right is a blown-up photo of soccer star Ronaldo, eight storeys tall, pointing the way to East Berlin. Following Ronaldo’s directions I come to Oberbaumbrucke, a bridge over the River Spree and one of eight inner-city checkpoints that became chokepoints overnight in 1961. My eyes involuntarily brim with tears as I visualise how wrenching it must have been to see the buildings across that bridge every day, in sight but out of reach. Westerners with persistence, clout or bribery money could go east for a limited time but easterners were choked off from their city for 28 years. Man’s inhumanity to man …

At the end of the bridge I turn sharp left to see a preserved section of Berlin Wall, now known as the East Side Gallery. The oldest graffiti here date from 2005, mostly puerile, but such is its fame graffitists come from all over the world to have their spray.

Triumphal declaration from the True North

15 September 6.21 am AEST

Subject. And the winner is

Hi Ken,

The winner of the local election is me!!!

The Labour Party got 60 per cent of the vote so we won with great margins.

I will writhe later because there is a lot to do just now. I hope your journey is going well.

Marius.

Berlin’s new Jewish Museum is the most comprehensive imaginable presentation of Jews’ role in European history, from the First Crusade in 1095 down to the present day. However familiar the headlines, the full import of their story and what it says about Europe resides in the details, and the personal biographies, set out here.

The persecution unleashed by Christian euphoria at the declaration of war against the Muslims hit the European, or Ashkenazi, Jews hard. Along the established trade routes — principally in Mainz, Worms and the Rhineland — they became victims of ‘violence against “the infidels”’ even though they were the original People of the Book. After the Plague swept across Europe in 1347, Jews were accused of poisoning wells. Several thousand, in more than 300 cities and towns across the Continent, were killed.

In the Middle Ages, Jews in Europe were barred from many professions and, not being subject to Christian laws on charging interest (usury), many became moneylenders, which put them on the same social level as debt collectors and profiteers. How things have changed, I reflect. Would any Christian these days subscribe to a prohibition on charging interest?

In 1871, with the founding of Germany, Jews were given equal rights in theory that were often withheld in practice. Many Jews helped to shape Berlin’s golden age, including Alfred Kerr, the most influential German theatre critic of his day, whose books were later burned, and the tenor Richard Tauber. But, when the economy collapsed, Germany as a whole began seeking out scapegoats. Anti-Semitism fuelled the rise of Zionism, yet as late as 1933 most Jews felt evidently themselves to be part of Germany.

As usual, the little things move you most. Such as home movies, from the late 1920s, of a Jewish family, the Aschers. We don’t know what became of them but can be sure that, if they lived, they did so under the threat or actual experience of persecution.

There’s a particularly sad display, a grand piano bought in Berlin in 1930 and donated to the museum in 2004 by the daughter of Helga Bassel, the purchaser. The Nazis expelled her from the Reich Music Chamber in 1936, whereupon she emigrated to South Africa. Her daughter Tessa only found out her mother was Jewish long after Helga’s death in 1969.

The museum insists that Jews in Germany did not passively accept their treatment, citing the 276,000 who emigrated with the help of their community from 1933 to 1941. In February 1940 came the first deportations of Jews to Poland. The following year brought the yellow star and the year after that the Wannsee Conference which called for the mass extermination of eleven million European Jews. In January 1943 Goebbels declared Berlin ‘Jew-free’. By the end of war in Europe on 8 May 1945 some six million Jews had been murdered, of whom about 200,000 were German. President Richard von Weizsacker’s ‘famous speech of collective shame’ delivered on the 40th anniversary of war’s end in Europe is there for all who can read German to see. Sadly, it’s not in English as well.

824-838 km

Today I spend a few hours in East Berlin, not just to look at an odd fragment of the Wall but to discover whether life in the city’s east ‘feels’ different. On Alexanderplatz I get talking to Ingo. In his late 40s, he recently returned to his hometown after eight years in Paris, where he worked for a time ‘as a messenger’ for a radio station.

Here he is unemployed. He tells me, ‘I’ve spent the day begging’ and adds, ‘not very successfully’. I remark that his bag seems to be weighing him down. Slinging it off his shoulder, Ingo takes out — well, I’ll be — a copy
of Das Kapital
, the
Finnegans Wake
of communism. So is Ingo a communist, I ask. ‘It depends what you mean …’ he parries. Well, does he support Marx’s propositions? On this point he is unequivocal. ‘Yes. It is an excellent analysis of capitalism. This remains true, whatever has happened, and will always remain true.’

Nothing against Kreuzberg, and I’m sure Mark will understand, but most of Berlin’s attractions are in the district they now call Mitte, so I move to a hostel in Johannisstrasse, just over the bridge near Friedrichstrasse Station.