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Berlin The Heart of the New Germany I HAVE HAD THE GOOD LUCK TO WATCH BERLIN become one city and begin to shine. In the process it has been a city under intense construction with dug-up streets, monuments in various stages of rehabilitation, and shining new glass towers next to ugly, cheaply constructed structures of the Communist regime. I first entered Berlin in the summer of 1992. My husband, Fred, was an exchange law professor from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to Kaiser Wilhelm University in Bonn. Berliners whom we had met on the Blue Ridge Parkway in a view pullover had invited us to spend the weekend. The memory of the visit resonates with the sounds of an all-Beethoven symphony performance led by Claudio Abbado, a visit to Potsdam, and seeing San Souci, the home of Frederick the Great. Frederick had welcomed French Huguenots to Germany when they were being persecuted by Louis XIV, who had revoked the Edict of Nantes. Later, in 2001, we returned to Berlin to visit with the head of the Egyptian section of the museum and to enjoy the beautiful castle and garden of Charlottenburg, as well as to see the much-coveted Head of Nefertiti. Back again in Berlin because of the Francisco Goya (1746–1828) exhibit at the National Gallery of Berlin, we stayed on the seventh floor of the Adlon, a Kempinski Hotel at the Brandenburg Gate. The view of the Reichstag, with its waving yellow, black, and orange flags was just out of our windows. The elegant hotel was filled with wealthy Germans. The sumptuous lobby was adorned with flowers, statues , and water fountains. Our room looked out over the “quadriga,” the four horses that stand above the Brandenburg Gate. The city seemed overwhelming. Everywhere there were vast buildings, huge spaces, large crowds, and too much cement. The weather was definitely cold for August 6. The high amid rain showers and wind was hardly 55 degrees. But we had come for a purpose, and so, with the wonderful assistance of the concierge at the Adlon Hotel, we procured a much desired ticket for the Goya exhibit. Long lines circled the museum. I had known Goya from my art appreciation class at Sweetbriar only as the court painter of the aristocracy of Spain of the eighteenth century. He earned handsome commissions painting the royalty. With respect to all of his other paintings, he said, “I paint only what I want to paint.” In a multitude of small drawings and paintings, he recorded the world he saw around him. I quickly realized that I was in for a modern-day horror show. I am too old and perhaps too wise to believe in witches, cannibals, demons, and other horrors 132 Germany that inhabit the nether world. But these were etched in vivid and wrenching ink and oil in Goya’s small paintings and drawings. What anguish! What horror! Rarely has one man so strongly depicted the surreal dreams of nightmares. As Goya said, “I no longer fear witches, and goblins. All I fear are human beings.” One painting is etched in my mind’s eye. It was titled “The Dream of Reason,” although it was a horrific nightmare. It may mean that we in our consciousness rely on reason, only to find that reason disintegrates and offers no palliative in an unhinged world. Goya’s scenes of prisons, insane asylums, and the chaos of war suggest the repulsive degradation to which humanity can descend and his brushstrokes are foreshadowed and echoed by the monstrous events of later history. Is this bleak view of humanity a prescient image for our time? Goya painted the inmates in the prisons, the insane in the asylum, the blind, the beggars, the madmen . And then he painted the dreams of cannibals, wild owls, witches, ghosts, goblins. There are scenes of personal horror such as babies gathered up in baskets by witches. Goya’s nightmares reflected the Inquisition, as well as the destruction of Spain’s wars with France. Goya’s images resonate today. If he had been present on 9/11, he would have painted the explosion of human bodies and the scattering of human remains. As Thomas Hobbes said, “and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—this is what Goya painted. It amazed me that this Goya art show was enjoying such success in Berlin. However, the German people are not far removed from the destruction of...

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