Berlin on My Mind: An Anti-Memoir

Though I’ve never been to Berlin, the city has loomed large in my life. Growing up in South Africa just after the war, I acquired an idea of Berlin primarily formed by Jewish people there who had felt the threat of Hitler to their families and friends—those who had been directly touched by the war. Berlin was the location of many large and formidable pro-Nazi rallies that spelled danger to all Jews: it was there that many aspects of the twentieth-century war of horror were nurtured and kindled. Berlin provided the backdrop for the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht—that violent chaotic commencement of the Nazi war against the Jews.

In my mind the Berlin of World War ii is a big bullying city of lethal size and deadly foreboding. I cannot think about Berlin without thinking about men in storm-trooper uniforms, lounging against large, black, shiny, and menacing Mercedes Benzes, their jackboots gleaming as they smirk into the cameras aimed at them, their guns and clubs casually draped over their arms, ready for use (they obviously relish being photographed). These men are the muscle of Nazism, and they belong to my Berlin. There are, of course, other Berlins, though none so dominant in my mind as this one. But Berlin is exciting in many ways: it is a playground for the rich and famous, and the headquarters of German money, political power, and old traditions. There is also the Berlin of backstreets and brothels and gorgeous blondes in slit skirts and high heels—a louche, decadent, suggestive, sexy, and exciting city, known to me only through books and pictures.

It is impossible to separate the tantalizing sexual swamp of this underworld Berlin from the larger ideas of the city as a place of war and death. The Berlin of the war, in all its facets, is a paradoxical place of order and chaos. Nazi Berlin, dedicated to unswerving political power and conformity, is also a chaotic place of brutality and turbulence. Images of the ss careening around the city in their cars proudly assaulting those who do not conform: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals are fair prey for the men in uniform who seem thirsty for violent action. The ss bring order to the city, an order maintained by the rule of fear. The prevalence of this kind of order suggests that beneath its surface lies chaos seeking release. The ss is as strong and violent as the photographs show. Someone, another ss man, is taking those pictures with an eye to presenting the men in jackboots as heroes, their victims as vermin.

The Berlin of this period is, as Berlin always has been, a place of culture. The arts thrive, though deformed by the imperatives of “useful” art dedicated to the betterment and celebration of the state that—it is decreed—this art must serve. In fear for their lives many true artists of Berlin leave the country to practice their trades in places where they will not be impeded by rules, laws, and terror. Berlin’s leading citizens and city managers pride themselves on their city’s cultural superiority and encourage the arts in which they profess to believe. Culture flourishes, despite Hanns Johst’s infamous remark that the word makes him reach for his revolver. To be sure, the culture of Nazi Germany is perverted by political imperatives; but an arrogance informs the ideal, as if culture can be ordered like a new suit or modified like an engine in its design and direction. Subversive, satirical, underground culture is soon quashed. The art of Nazi Berlin is infected with a brutal moral superiority; an insufferable hauteur pervades officially approved culture while cultural nonconformity is threatened and persecuted for its betrayal of the Nazi state. And the threats are not idle: violence is the wages of the individuality and independence that true artistic integrity requires. There is political correctness with a vengeance in this Berlin, a grinding and authoritative insistence that drives the makers of culture—the artists, poets, and musicians—in a single direction: the validation of the...