Berlin, mon amour
One morning in February 1945, I, at the age of seventeen, arrived in Berlin in a verminous tank uniform, on a troop carrier from Prague and Magdeburg. We soldiers were given a day's leave. So we got off at Zoo station, and that's how I saw the capital of Germany for the first time: burning, full of fresh ruins, smoke, black smoke making the sun look like a pale full moon.
I shall never be able to forget the flames still blazing red and yellow from the windows of some of the upper floors on Kurfürstendamm. For me, they were associated with the blazing flames of synagogue burnings and the stakes for unwelcome books that offended the healthy popular opinion. Ruins, broken glass everywhere, like reminiscences of the Kristallnacht of 1938, of which we had also heard in the provinces, what am I saying, which had been organised by fellow citizens everywhere there were synagogues and Jewish shops, in strict compliance with orders coming from Berlin. Only now the roles were reversed, no more synagogues were burning, no more Jews were dying: now it was our turn, the Germans of all classes, we who, in the name of an extremely flimsy nationalism and an absurd ideology, had laid all of Europe in ruins, costing millions of lives. Now our own relatives and friends perished, in the flames, in the hail of bombs, on the collapsing fronts, under the relentless executioner's axes of the People's Court.
This first impression of Berlin (by the way, it was strangely quiet in the streets, no cars were driving, the rubble probably made it impossible for the time being, only the crackling of the flames could be heard) has remained in my soul forever. I didn't know then that I would survive, let alone that Berlin would ever mean anything to me other than the apocalypse. It is not good when young people grow up under such conditions, it spoils their sense of the measure of things, it distorts their image of the world, it leaves behind incurable injuries. That is why it is so important that we, the older ones, work together with the young people for peace in the world and reject and fight against any form of intolerance.
A few years after the end of the war, I came back to Berlin, my first scores under my arm. In the meantime, things had been cleared up, reconstruction had begun, the theatres and orchestras were now playing the works that had been banned under the dictatorship or that had mainly been written elsewhere during this phase.
People were trying to find their way. I tried to get a foothold, but it failed, I was too weak, I was unable, I knew too little. I realised it and left again, but since then I have always tried to get to know Berlin, that is, its audience, whose recognition must have been as important to me as London is to the British, or Paris to the French. And sometimes I was lucky, other times it went wrong, then I tried again, like a lover who refuses to be rejected.
Time and again I have lived incognito in Berlin for many months, have loyal friends there, old and young. Even after the city was divided into two parts, the metropolitan impetus can still be felt, the energy, the speed, the ambition. Even the dialect is one that only metropolises can produce. I feel at home in Berlin, I love this city, I fear and suffer with it. I can't hide the fact that I sometimes try to imagine how the two parts of the city might one day come together again in a completely natural, self-evident way. A utopia.
Under permanent threat, held in ever new political-economic tension, subjected to the greatest difficulties, beats this battered but courageous metropolitan heart, made of three million courageous metropolitan hearts, of three million individuals who demand their right to a fulfilled life, to peace, to a happy future.
(First printed in: Eberhard Diepgen (ed.): 750 Jahre Berlin. Anmerkungen, Erinnerungen,
Betrachtungen, Berlin 1987, pp 132 - 134). Translated by M. Kerstan)
