father was born into this gathering chaos, in July 1921. When Niko was two, my grandfather made an entry in his diary that is almost unimaginable today: “A KW novel now priced at 5 million marks.”
The Berlin skyline is almost too jumbled to qualify as one. It’s as if city planners took instructions from Karl Scheffler’s 1910 observation that fate “condemns Berlin forever to become and never to be.” Yet a protean cityscape is somehow appropriate for a place that, during the lifetimes of my grandfather and father, has been by turns imperial, impoverished, heedlessly carefree, fascist, ruined, occupied, and divided, until its ultimate reunification and position at the center of the European project.
The renovated Reichstag is an exception to all this visual unruliness. To tour the building and its dome, you ascend the ramp that spirals up underneath the distinctive glass dome, then gaze down at the seats of the MPs in the chamber below. Symbolism is at play here twice over: government should be sheathed in transparency, and there’s no better way to remind a parliament of its proper place than to have constituents literally look down on it from above.
Germans can be relentless in their remembrance. During the Reichstag’s restoration, project managers chose to preserve Cyrillic graffiti left by some triumphant Soviet soldier that reads I FUCK HITLER IN THE ASS. Visible to the south is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; it’s no accident that the site, known informally as “the Holocaust memorial,” goes by such a precise and explicit official name or that it occupies a spot so central that no visitor to Berlin is likely to miss it. This historical humility informs much of current German political life, keeps memory alive, and drives the far-right Alternative für Deustchland crazy. If, as the AfD legislator Björn Höcke has grumbled, Germans are “the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital,” it’s because they’re discerning enough to recognize that they need to, especially as long as politicians like Höcke have a following.
One of the authors Kurt and Helen published in New York, Günter Grass, served as the moral compass of postwar West Germany, even as he felt uncomfortable in the role. “You cannot delegate your conscience to writers or anyone else,” Grass said in 2000. “I don’t speak out because I am a writer. My profession is a writer, but I speak out because I am a citizen. I think the Weimar Republic collapsed and the Nazis took over in 1933 because there were not enough citizens. That’s the lesson I have learned. Citizens cannot leave politics just to politicians.”
In late 1944, as a seventeen-year-old responding to a draft notice, Grass joined the Waffen-SS. He never admitted having done so until the end of a career in which he hectored Germans to engage with their past. In that, he was surely wrong. But Grass is right about the lesson worth carrying forward: there were not enough citizens.
The AHA Factory occupies much of an upper floor in an old Mietskaserne, one of countless five-story “rental barracks” built to accommodate workers who flocked to Berlin during the Industrial Revolution. Around me turn the cogs of the creative economy. Moritz, a jazz guitarist and arts impresario, swans into our shared office aglow from his success fishing over the weekend. Aidan, an Irishman married to a German of Turkish descent, is performing motion analysis for dancers. Ed, a computer programmer from Holland, is busy coding an app for parents of preschoolers, while Francesco, a filmmaker from Italy, creates videos for corporate clients and humble AHA Factory cohabitants alike. Each contributes to Berlin’s status as home to more start-ups than any other city in Europe. The cost of living is still cheap enough for the starving artist, and any day can deliver an energizing encounter with someone in flight from convention or repression. All of which leaves you with the thrill of being on the crest of a wave.
But this wave comes with an undertow that can yank you from the present when you least expect it. Each morning our kids go off to school on an S-Bahn headed for the Wannsee, where in January 1942 the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution; in the afternoon they return on a train bound for Oranienburg, from which the Schutzstaffel (SS) oversaw it. We buy meat and produce in the market hall in which Carl Herz, the Jewish mayor of Kreuzberg, after being chased from city hall and dragged through the streets by Brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was beaten on a spring day in 1933. Walking around our Kiez, as Berliners call a neighborhood, we come across some of the more than five thousand Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones—brass cobblestone memorials nested in the sidewalks of the city, each commemorating a Berliner victimized by the Nazis and set outside the last home he or she freely chose. Dates of detention and murder come inscribed beneath each name in recitative simplicity. The power of the Stolpersteine lies in their subtle obtrusiveness. Whereas you must consciously make a destination of immured, monochromatic gravestones in a cemetery, stumbling stones glint up at you throughout the open city, nuggets in the creek bed. To read an inscription you bend at the waist in a kind of bow of respect. As memorials go, Stolpersteine derive an animating power from being a work in progress, as tens of thousands of Berliners are yet to be memorialized.
It’s a sobering fact, the historian Timothy Snyder points out, that “cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero.” That’s precisely why each stone in our neighborhood calls out as it does, testifying to the meaning of one particular spot in the life of one particular person, insisting on its place in our daily routine. Cross the street to the ice-cream stand, weighing whether to enjoy one scoop or two, but only after you remember Wilhelm Böttcher, the widower with a wooden leg who, rather than finger other gay Berliners, killed himself in September 1936 in the Alexanderplatz jail two weeks after police took him into custody. Fill out a transfer slip at the bank on the corner, and you do so steps from where, a month apart in early 1943, the Jewish cousins Ruth Gerstel and Erwin Rones were detained and deported, Schicksal ???, fate unknown, their stone tells us. Approach the threshold of the nearest chain store to buy sundries, and you’re reminded that a tailor and postal worker named Martin Jaffé, who performed six years of forced labor at a chemical plant in nearby Tempelhof, lived here in a third-floor apartment before being arrested at work in February 1943—whereupon the Nazis, having decided to bring in captured Slavs from the east to replace Jews like Jaffé, sent him first to the ghetto at Theresienstadt and then to his death.
Just around the corner from where we live, the stumbling stone nearest to us, ERNA WOLFF, deported on December 14, 1942, murdered in Auschwitz. No relation, as far as I know. And I really don’t know.
My writ as a journalist often ran beyond sports, to how the games we play and watch spill into the world at large. So it’s hard not to see two events scheduled for the same day—the Berlin Marathon and the German election—as an invitation to find a spot along the marathon route a block from our apartment and riddle out what both mean.
The procession begins with outriding cop cars, follows with the African favorites, and soon delivers the pack, its riot of color at odds with a slate-gray sky. This being Kreuzberg, no one gets a bigger cheer than the competitors the Nazis would have eliminated: the handcyclists and a man with one arm. To watch anyone run is to realize how much this enterprise of the legs depends on swinging whatever arms you have.
Despite the breadth of candidates and parties on the ballot, most Germans regard today’s election as a binary choice. On one side stands Merkel, with her decision to welcome those million-plus refugees. Taking seriously the Christianity in the pedigree of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, she invoked the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger. Her mantra of Wir schaffen das—“We’ll manage it”—was an appeal to German practicality and willingness to tackle challenges. “I grew up behind a wall,” Merkel liked to say, “and have no desire to repeat the experience.” Her refugee policy was a spectacularly risky political choice, but it was the brave one, the righteous one, and, once asylum seekers had massed at the border,
