Beautiful

The most beautiful thing about Berlin is also the most difficult thing to put into words.

But I'll try.

It's not the spectacular architecture that makes it so exquisite. It isn't this city's deep, deep appreciation for art, literature and philosophy. Nor is it the clean efficiency that seems to come so naturally here.

It's the gratitude. For all these things...and many, many more. That is what makes this city so easy to love.

Berlin is a living, breathing, walking, talking reminder of how easily the right to live, breathe, walk, and talk can be taken away. It is a metropolis with a history that is terrifying, but a future that is full of promise. And a present that feels like one huge collective sigh of joy and relief.

It starts with Frederick the Great, a king of Prussia.



He was a ruler with a deep love of music, art, and literature. It was he who ushered in the era of German enlightenment. Although he was an avowed atheist, he worked hard to ensure that everyone could practice their religion free of persecution. He built chapels and churches for many faiths. He opened the Berlin Opera House to the people. He was a brilliant military strategist who made sure the people he ruled were also the people he served.

This is a man who was utterly dominated by his father, growing up. At the age of 18 he was forced to watch his father execute his lover. Despite this horror, he grew into an incredible leader. He would not be diminished. Instead he sowed the seeds for this incredible city and it's people.

Berlin's is a history that moves through some of the darkest times that humans have ever recorded. A World War won and lost. Blame accepted and a crippling reparation paid. Inflation and a depression that was even more bleak than what was suffered in most other countries. Another decimation in another World War...this one marked by the rise and fall of a fuhrer so evil, who did things so inhuman, that I refuse to utter his name on this blog, nor post a picture of his hideous face.

After that it becomes a city divided. For forty years more than half of it's population would be walled in, distrusted and insulted, cut off from their friends and families, even almost starved.

And they weren't even the real prisoners.

I'm currently reading Stasiland, by Anna Funder. It's an incredible book that was lent to me by my good friend Alison. I highly recommend you read this book, so you can understand, first-hand, the atrocities committed by the GDR. The people of East Germany were spied on, imprisoned unjustly, screamed at with propaganda, and constantly made to feel that they weren't human beings...they were cogs in a machine.



But Berlin survived. It grew stronger. It cast off the shackles of communism and re-united. Now, almost 20 years later, they paint graffiti on the walls that once penned them in. They promote their artists and listen to each other's ideas. They build houses of parliament with glass-floored observation decks, so their politicians must look up at the people and remember who's really in charge. They drink beer on the subway, and dance themselves into oblivion until the wee hours of the night. They remember their history, not embracing it, but learning from it. So it won't ever happen again.

And they never forget that they are living, breathing, walking, and talking. In freedom.

That's what's so beautiful about Berlin.

And that's why I love it so much.


Jim out.