Transcendence

One of the things I noticed today was how Berlin is very different from Geneva, but still as beautiful. The main difference I noticed, touring all of Berlin's famous places (The Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, etc.), was the general sense of melancholy remembrance that still hangs over a lot of the city. Geneva is famously a city of peace, a city of plenty; but Berlin, fabulous as it is, has a great deal of terrible history crammed into the last hundred years.

Take this sculpture, for example. It's called, "Woman holding her dead son." It sits in a dark building with a hole in the ceiling immediately above it; no glass, just an open space, leaving the titular woman and son defenseless against the elements. It serves as a memorial for those lost in war. The sculptor herself lost a son in WWI.


Or this solemn concrete labyrinth, which is the memorial to Europe's murdered Jews.


Even the magnificent Brandenburg Gate sits in the shadow of what once was the Berlin wall; the space the wall once occupied is only a few hundred feet away, in the middle of the street, with a line of bricks showing where it once was. In the courtyard of nearby Humboldt University, a glass window sits in the ground to let people view an underground room of empty bookshelves. The Nazis staged an enormous book burning there.

Berlin Cathedral

I don't mean to say that Berlin is solemn or sad or depressing. On the contrary, men dressed as Yoda, Darth Vader and an Indian Chief were inexplicably posing with tourists in front of the Brandenburg Gate today, and you can buy pieces of the wall at just about any souvenir shop in the city; the place definitely has a sense of humor. What I do mean to say is that Berlin has scars. Maybe Geneva has scars, too, most places do. But Berlin's scars are still new enough to see clearly. And Berlin wears them well, with the right mix of reverence and transcendence.

The Reichstag Building

There's a part in the book Eat, Pray, Love where the author and friends try to find a single word to describe the cities they come from. The New Yorker claims that New York's word is achieve; a woman from Oslo claims that Oslo's word is conform. Having toured Berlin, I would guess that Berlin's word is transcend. Berlin survived, Berlin moved forward, Berlin transcends.