Except in so far as death is a part of nature, this account does not relate to the main theme of my blog.
I took a bit of a break from my nature watching activities to spend a few days in Berlin between 14th and 19th October. Berlin is such a big place with so many attractions that it's good to have a theme to follow. So I decided on "Death in Berlin" in loose analogy to "Death in Venice", an attempt to look into some of the many people who were murdered there, or died in less than pleasant circumstances, and the stories that surround them.
GDR Escapees
There were so many cases of East German citizens dying while trying to cross the Berlin Wall that I decided to pick on a couple of the most tragic ones.
Building worker Peter Fechter was one of the earliest. He was shot at the border near Checkpoint Charlie by East German border guards and horrendously bled to death just a few yards short of the wall. West Berliners shouted "Murderers!" and threw Fechter bandages that he was too injured to use but neither the West German police nor the American troops dared intervene to help him as his cries for help gradually weakened and the East German guards only removed his body upon death.
The first visit on my trip was to the monument to Peter Fechter at the place where he died on what is now Zimmerstraße. Unfortunately the area has been transformed into a commercial backstreet since reunification so that you get little feeling of the poignancy of his death.
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Not exactly the right environment to get the sense of horror the event provoked at the time and perhaps a rather cold momento too.
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| Freudenberg memorial |
Freudenberg had the idea of emulating the success of two East German families who escaped by balloon. He and his wife were in the process of launching the balloon when they were disturbed by the police. Realising that the balloon was insufficiently inflated to carry them both, it was decided that Freudenberg should go alone. Unfortunately the balloon was too inflated to stay at low height and rose to a height of several thousand feet where the inadequately clothed Freudenberg stayed perched on a small wooden beam for five hours in sub-zero temperatures.
Eventually the balloon came down over Zehlendorf, just a small distance short of re-entering East Germany near Potsdam. The body of Winfried Freudenberg was found in the garden of a villa in Limastraße. It is not clear whether exhaustion caused him to fall from the balloon or whether he jumped.
The particular tragedy of Winfried Freudenberg's death was its date - 8th March 1989, just a few short months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, making him its last victim.
In a recent book, Caroline Labusch suggests that the Freudenbergs, originally resident in a small East German town and apolitical by nature may have been unaware of the crumbling of the GDR regime and the strength of the demonstrations in cities like Leipzig. Eight months later, they could have walked to freedom.
Typically for such a bourgeois area, his monument is not at the exact location on Limastraße where his body was found, which is not known, but at a pleasant spot on a path just west of the Waldsee.
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| Limastraße |
Murdered Socialists
I was keen to visit the memorials to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were murdered by Army Officers in the Tiergarten area on 15th January 1919. As leaders of the revolutionary Spartacist movement, having gradually broken away from the German SDP, they had already been imprisoned for their anti-militarist views, the subject of a campaign of hate, they had been in hiding at a safe address until their location was betrayed, apparently by an SDP source.
They were first interrogated at the Eden Hotel at the junction of Budapesterstraße and Kurfürstenstraße. Eden Hotel no longer exists but I managed to find the location, obviously rebuilt:
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| Corner of Budapesterstraße and Kurfürstenstraße |
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| Liebknecht Memorial |
Liebknecht was manhandled, assaulted and spat on by hotel guests as he was forced into a car, taken to secluded location near the Neuer See, shot and his body returned for burial as an 'unidentified' corpse.
Luxemburg was similarly forced into a car, shot in the temple and her body dumped into the Landwehrkanal somewhere between Lichtensteinbrücke and Corneliusbrücke.
Thanks to Google Maps, which sent me on a false trail through the Zoologischer Garten, I had some difficulty locating their memorials. After much doubling back, I finally saw from a distance then found the one to Karl Liebknecht, presumably at the location where he was assassinated. The peaceful aura emanated by the Neuer See is in sharp contrast to the brutality of Liebknecht's murder.
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Rosa Luxemburg in particular was one of the outstanding figures of her time. Academically brilliant and a polymath who spoke several languages, she was a convinced communist from her schooldays in Poland who had to cross many borders and many social barriers to become the main leading figure in the Communist movement outside Russia. It seems an appalling shame that such a talented individual should be dumped in a canal at the age of 37.
With help from my friend Sylwia I also found time to visit a couple of locations in Schöneberg where she lived before going into imprisonment and hiding.
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Another memorial to Liebknecht can be found at Potsdamer Platz - the result of a much postponed project on which the inscription has been faded and which looks as though it needs completing by the addition of a statue or similar.
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| Inscription on Liebknecht memorial in Potsdamer Platz |
Unfortunately I did not get time (or forgot?) to visit the graves and monuments to Liebknecht and Luxemburg at the cemetery in the Friedrichsfelde area - next time hopefully...
Victims of the Sixties
Before heading to Schöneberg I travelled along the Kurfürstendamm to find the exact location of the attempt on the life of Rudi Dutschke, the renowned left-wing student leader, by a a right wing fanatic. Having just left the office of the SDS (left-wing student office) on 11th April 1968. Dutschke was shot in the head outside a chemist's where he was waiting to collect some medication for his son. Bleeding profusely, he staggered towards the road, removing his shoes and talking incoherently before collapsing by the kerb.
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An interesting fact I discovered was that the chemist Dutschke visited was next door to the SDS office at KuDamm 140 and not as appears to be shown in the film "Der Baader Meinhof Komplex" the chemist's further west at KuDamm 139. I'm not sure if this was done deliberately for cinematic reasons or was a simple error. If so it seems rather a pity since the book by Stefan Aust on which the film was based adheres to very high standards of accuracy.
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After the attack Dutschke amazingly survived an emergency operation and spent several years in Britain where he was forced to give up political activity and placed under surveillance by the secret services until the new Conservative government withdrew his visa in 1970.
As a result of the assassination attempt, Dutschke suffered from severe epilepsy for the rest of his life and drowned in the bath as a result of an epilepsy episode in 1979.
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| Ohnesorg memorial |
The same morning I visited the site near the Deutsche Oper where Benno Ohnesorg was unaccountably shot dead by policeman Karl Heinz Kurras on 2nd June 1967. This was the sequel to a massive demonstration against the Shah of Persia during which there was considerable evidence of police brutality.
It was the first major demonstration that Ohnesorg attended and he was mainly a spectator until police pursued demonstrators they were attacking into a courtyard on Krumme Straße 66 and he followed. Perhaps unfortunately he was wearing a red shirt.
Kurras' colleagues were astounded when he shot Ohnesorg at point blank range but he was nevertheless acquitted of murder.
The murder of Benno Ohnesorg is regarded as the turning point that persuaded some members of the radical student movement to move to violent forms of protest. One of the groups was poignantly named Bewegung 2. Juni. The results of this development were to become worldwide news.
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| Yard at rear of Krumme Straße 66 |
Of course the main terrorist organisation to emerge after the events of 2nd June was the Baader Meinhof group the Red Army Fraktion. While in Schöneberg, I took the opportunity to visit Ulrike Meinhof's former address at Kufsteinerstraße 12 and the nearby Badenschestraße 3, which was briefly inhabited by Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.
In terms of my overall project this was a bit of a swindle as none of them actually died in Berlin but they did cause several deaths in Germany overall - including police officers, US Army service personnel, members of the Springer organisation and other group members.
The premises at Badenschestraße struck me as ideal for Baader - suitably ostentatious for a trendy playboy but with an obscure, hard to find entrance at the rear of the building.
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After Baader foolishly got himself arrested for a driving offence while in hiding, it was Ulrike Meinhof's flat where the gang met to plot his escape from captivity. Only gradually sucked into extremism herself, Meinhof was supposed to be a mere accomplice until the escape plan went wrong and he s jumped out of a window to join the others on the run. Her daughter Bettina Röhl, with whom I briefly corresponded, believes that a brain operation in her earlier career may have affected her later decisions.
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While I pondered the entrance that Meinhof will have used, vaguely thinking that some part of her DNA must still be present there, an unexpected distraction occurred.
An old lady started to pass in front of me with a wee dog that suddenly decided to deposit some of its own DNA besides the entrance to the building. When the lady struggled to find the perforation in her strip of pooh bags, I helped her and noticed afterwards that she called the dog in English.
A conversation struck up and Renate told me how she had spent her childhood in East Berlin at the end of the war in an area occupied by superior Russian officers. Knowing how poorly the Russians treated many German women, I made to offer sympathy but Renate told me she had been favoured by one particular high-ranking family, resulting in hers receiving many privileges.
A conversation struck up and Renate told me how she had spent her childhood in East Berlin at the end of the war in an area occupied by superior Russian officers. Knowing how poorly the Russians treated many German women, I made to offer sympathy but Renate told me she had been favoured by one particular high-ranking family, resulting in hers receiving many privileges.
On moving to the West Berlin, she met an American whom she later married and spent most of her life living in Manhattan before finally returning to Schöneberg in the eighties.
Renate's story made me reflect what a great role chance plays in all our lives, determining whether you become like her or an Ensslin or a Meinhof.
She had no idea that Ulrike Meinhof had once been her former near neighbour and obviously there are no memorials to the terrorists. Few people are aware of the Dutschke memorial either. It shows how much Germany needed to forget this particular phase in its history.
For me the whole Baader Meinhof episode was a disaster for the perpetrators, their victims and the country and I think disasters need to be remembered.
The Jews
In summery temperatures I made my way from Zehlendorf to the Großer Wannsee to visit the Haus der Wannseekonferenz, where the Nazis met in December 1942 to decide in detail how to implement the already commenced "final solution" of exterminating the Jewish race in Europe. Discussions confirmed extermination as the revised aim rather than displacement to non-German territories and decided that those of mixed descent and those who had married Ayrians should be included rather than excluded.
Particularly shocking was the composition of the conference, including many highly-educated professors and scientists who you would have thought might have been capable a more sophisticated world view than that propagated by the Nazis. As it was the most liberal views were for exempting those of mixed race, Jews from Northern countries and Jews in forced labour camps essential to the war effort.
The exhibition made its points well but I did find it occasionally a little too tendentious, for example rather minimising the role of those who supported Jewish families somewhat, and complaining about the leniency extended to minor players in the holocaust even if they had already spent considerable periods detained under investigation. However these are issues of much contention and some items displayed were rightly horrifying:
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From there a took the S Bahn two stops north to Grünewald station, which itself is a monument to the persecution of the Jews as it was from the station's platform 17 that thousands of Jews were trafficked to the East.
The track itself has never been used since the war and is partly overgrown. Along the edge of the platforms though are a series of monuments recording each transportation, interestingly following the changes of Nazi Jewish policy and the extent of the final solution.
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| Memorial at end of platform 17 |
Initially most trains were to ghetto cities outside Germany. As time went on they were mostly to the ghetto or concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) in occupied Czechoslovakia. The location was partly used for further transportation to the death camps but it also offered less severe internment for prominent and ageing Jews. Numbers of human beings transported each time rose from 50 or 100 to figures more than 1,000 over the months and direct transportations to Ausschwitz began. By the last months of the war, numbers had sunk dramatically
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Eerily there are still road markings to be seen at the point where vehicles would have dropped people off - two columns marked H (Häftlinge ?) and DO (Dienstälteste Offiziere ??)
Heinrich von Kleist
A late addition to my hitlist, I had earlier stopped off at the Kleiner Wannsee to view Kleist's gravestone, having initially forgotten that he too died near Berlin.
A bit like his contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin, Kleist was an early example of the poet as misfit.
From a typical Prussian military aristocratic background, he was a most unlikely person to become an integrated part of "Das Land der Dichter und Denker" but became inspired by his encounter with the works of Rousseau. Increasingly depressed by his limited literary success and world weariness, he formed a platonic relationship and eventually a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel, another depressive, who was terminally ill with cancer of the womb.
On 20th November 1811 they travelled to what is now the Kleiner Wannsee, staying in separate rooms. They went for a walk, wrote farewell letters at night and the next spent a considerable time sitting outside reading and reciting to each other. Around 4.00 p.m., Kleist shot first Henriette Vogel as she had expressly wished and then himself.
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| Joint grave of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel |
Because of their suicide, a church burial was impossible.
When at University I wrote a short dissertation on Kleist in which my contention was that his interest in the difficulties of communication and emotionally charged tone was an anticipation of the German Expressionists. As an example I had found a little-known Kleist poem that showed some parallels to expressionist writing.
Some of his work reads clumsily but much of it is poignant and his last work "Der Prinz von Homburg" shows signs of a growing maturity. Ironically, he was to become famous in the German speaking world after his death.
The Museums
I went with some uncertainty to the Mauermuseum at Checkpoint Charlie as I had suspected it might be full of US propoganda. In fact I found it very enlightening and ultimately rather overwhelming. I was particularly drawn to the stories of some of those who helped people cross the wall, several of whom lost their own lives as a result.
Many touching stories were illustrated, notably that of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish Jew who saved many in Hungary by issuing them with documents giving them the protection of the Swedish Government, only for him to be transported and probably assassinated by the Russians who disliked his activities and the fact that he did not view them as liberators. Or the vicar Oskar Brüsewitz who set fire to himself in protest against the East German authorities.
There were some positive stories as well. Having escaped across the border himself, Hasso Herschel became the most successful trafficker of escapees by helping 1,000 East Germans to escape, many through tunnels dug under the wall. And Peter Faust escaped by paddling and sailing a rubber boat all the way to Danish waters, partly through a major storm.
Unfortunately they charge extra to take photos!
I also visited the DDR Museum - really a hangover from my visit to East Berlin about eight years ago when people suggested there wasn't much to see there, so really not relevant to my theme. I suppose some might say that life in Eastern Germany was a form of living death.
There were some interesting highlights. I found it quite amusing to learn that, in spite of Government disapproval, 80% of the population regularly bathed or exercised nude - possibly a form of inner rebellion? - and that contraceptives were regularly issued to members of the FDJ youth movement.
There were also some additions to my knowledge of Trabant jokes:
More disturbingly, one woman kept a diary of all the supply shortages she noticed in the shops:
When I left there was a considerable queue braving a rainstorm to get in so it is clearly popular.
My last visit was to the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Charlottenburg. I couldn't remember why I had decided to go there and thought it must be a Jewish connection. But it became patently apparent that she was very prepossessed by death as a theme following the death of her son Peter early in the First World War.
She returned to the theme constantly in portrayals that often confuse death and a living figure.
I think the pictures speak best for themselves:
People I've mentioned "Death in Berlin" to have mostly found it a rather morbid preoccupation but I can only say I found it a rather uplifting an at times an emotional experience - a sort of pilgrimage.
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