Germany

Ah, Germany. Today is Germany Unity Day—I expect most people remember the days of East Germany and West Germany? The Berlin Wall? Ja? Today we’re celebrating the reunification of Germany in 1990. I was pretty young when the Berlin wall came down (though there are still segments standing—I was in Berlin a few years ago, and stayed on the East Side, near the section known as the “East Side Gallery”). I have the types of strange memories that come from witnessing something half a world away that you know, as a child, is momentous—but you don’t fully understand. I remember the concert mounted in Berlin. I watched it on television with my brothers. Cyndi Lauper performed a song, and at one moment she was lying on the stage, prompting my brother to ask “Who says you can’t sing lying down?” I realise this seems a little frivolous—and I really do not want to downplay the significance of the event. What I want to say is that, as a 10 year old even I sat down to watch the events unfolding. That Berlin is a city of visible scars, and those scars are important to remember.

Germany of course also brings visions of the World Wars—especially from the Holocaust, or the Shoah—or, in the words of Paul Celan, “that which happened”. World War II is another scar. The country where the Reformation began; that had its own Romanticism in Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and others; that gave us the music of Bach; that gave us Albrecht Dürer—well, it also brought us a vision of what humans are capable of inflicting on other humans. Following the separation of East and West, there was also the East German Stasi. The puzzle women are still piecing together documents that reveal the fates of many East German people in the years of separation.

The truth is, there are places I feel contain so many big ideas—wonderful and awful—that I can’t comprehend them. I know that sometimes people talk about a reluctance for Germans to discuss their recent history—though this is changing, with the younger generation wanting to confront it. I just know that it was hard not to be aware of the history of the German twentieth-century as I walked around Berlin.

I have chosen a poem by the poet Peter Huchel for today. It comes from the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry.


Roads

Choked sunset glow
Of crashing time.
Roads. Roads.
Intersections of flight.
Cart tracks across the ploughed field
That with the eyes
Of killed horses
Saw the sky in flames.

Nights with lungs full of smoke,
With the hard breath of the fleeing
When shots
Struck the dusk.
Out of a broken gate
Ash and wind came without a sound,
A fire
That sullenly chewed the darkness.

Corpses,
Flung over the rail tracks,
Their stifled cry
Like a stone on the palate.
A black
Humming cloth of flies
Closed their wounds.


—Peter Huchel
translated from the German by Michael Hamburger
from Twentieth-Century German Poetry