We spent a few days in Berlin last week, and we had seldom been in a city that produced such contradictory emotions. On the one hand we had to admire the sweeping boulevards, the grand architecture from the past, the green spaces, and the splendid public transport system. On the other hand, at least for people of my generation, Berlin evokes some very dark images indeed. Seeing the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden and the site of Hitler's Reichstag, it's hard to forget that this was the capital of the Third Reich in all its baroque horror. In 1945 Berlin was more or less flattened by allied bombers. Vast areas of the city were rebuilt in the bleak modernist style, and there are still Building sites everywhere. There is also plenty of evidence of the paranoid years after the war when the city was divided. You can visit the preserved remnants of the famous Berlin Wall, now a tourist attraction, and the tour buses cross from East to West as easily as they cross from East Side to West Side in New York.
Historical memories are short, but it is incredible that so much has been swept away and smoothed over so quickly. Now Berlin is the political and economic heart of Europe, and a magnet for young people from all over the world. It has, so I'm told, the kind of night club scene that makes the movie Cabaret look like an entertainment for children. If the whole purpose of cabaret is to forget reality, then Berlin is the capital of amnesia. If New York is the city that never sleeps, Berlin is the place where sleep is never even considered as an option, at least by the young. It's just too exciting.
Perhaps I should never try to judge a city, even though I was born in one. I grew up on the story of the Town mouse and country mouse. In the original fable by Aesop, now about two and a half thousand years old but still as relevant as it ever was, a sophisticated town mouse visited his cousin in the country, who offered the city mouse a meal of simple country food. The town mouse was not impressed, and invited the country mouse back to the city for a taste of the "good life." So the two cousins moved to the city and lived like kings, just as we lived well in Berlin, and enjoyed wonderful hospitality. But the mouse feast was interrupted by dogs that chased the mice away, so they had to abandon their gourmet indulgence to save their lives. After this the country mouse decided to return home, choosing security over luxury. This became a vastly popular moral tale with the message: city bad, country good. Having lived in both I have never found any reason to doubt the truth of this.
A city is full of decadent temptations and dangerous creatures. That is true, even in sophisticated Berlin. Country mouse that I am I was glad scurry off home, which right now is a small village in the middle of nowhere. We have no night life, I'm happy to say, but don't lack for fine food here, or interesting society, or indeed for culture. And down in the basement we even have a few real country mice, innocently dancing in the dark, enjoying the good life.
Copyright: David Bouchier
