CONTEXT: The mass of blasted ruins in Berlin has long since been cleared away, but unsettling reminders of the city’s near annihilation in 1945 still skulk on some of the few remaining pre-War buildings. This one, unmistakably marred with the scars of bombing and street warfare, was across the river from the Museum Island, where so many cultural treasures are located. The dome visible here is Berlin’s immense Protestant Cathedral, also on that island.

I photographed this image because its paradox seemed vividly compelling: evidence of human ferocity literally within sight of the fruit of human creativity: The assemblies of our collective genius on the Museum Island. Seeing the proximity of such glories to the ghastliness betokened by these wounded walls would later summon the verse below, ‘We Stones,’ out of me.

The very fact that we, as a species, are capable of such extreme opposites of behavior deserves – demands? – that we reflect on it, lest it ever take us unaware, again. As my verse asks – however clumsily – of us ‘men,’ and our recurrent appetite for raw dominance, ‘Can they not help but be so?’

When preparing to re-post this piece from my 2016 visit to Europe here, I discovered a revelatory irony: I didn’t know what this scarred building was when taking this photo. But when examining a satellite image of the vicinity to confirm the dome is the cathedral, I realized that this wall is near the Deutsches Historisches Musueum – the National Museum of German History (this structure itself seems to be part of the Haus Bastian, a Center for Cultural Education). So it may have been deliberately decided to leave this lacerated stonework ‘intact’ as very much a part of, and testament to, the gruesome chapter of Nazism (perhaps that’s what the sign on the wall at the right says, I didn’t notice). This would not only be consistent with the nearby Museum’s mission, but possibly a more instructive exhibition about ‘German History’ than any of the tidy displays within it.

One hopes that the adamant lesson about the horrendous potential peril of a feverish drive for ‘Mastery’ registers with Germans who happen to see these stones. In fact, with all who see them, wherever they come from.

And at an individual level, not just a nationality one.

We Stones –

Formed of magma in crushing heat, cooled over ages, our mother Earth slowly pushed us to her surface. For millennia, we formed her mantle and her mountainsides, only rarely reminded of the violence of our birth by earthquake, flood and lightning strike.

Then men shaped us with their clever tools, and bonded us together as shelter against the hostile Nature that made us all. For men, we resisted wind, cold, heat, rain, snow and storms, sheltering all within us in small worlds of survival.

But then men brought the violence of our birth back around us. Great, blasting flames fell day and night from the sky, till finally, humans making their own fire to destroy each other, surrounded, then reshaped us – once again.

Quiet returned, and with it our repose and inert witness. How can Men be so clever, yet also like the fierce, mindless Nature that formed us?

Can they not help but be so?