CONTEXT: I am currently nurturing some large writing projects, including an ambitious one for this blog. But rather than cease posting here till that is ready, I am going to re-post a few more items from my 2016 trip to Europe, starting with this one from Amsterdam. These will be relatively short, dealing mostly with substantial, not largely abstract themes. They are chosen in hopes they may provide context about places or events that inquisitive people might savor.

‘Exotic’ is a relative, subjective term. I live in Chicago, which seems comfortably familiar to me, but to someone from London, Moscow, Tokyo, Lima, Lagos, etc., my hometown may well seem ‘exotic’ – just as theirs would to me. For example, I was delighted when a group of visiting Parisians once told me they found Chicago – with its parapet of Skyscrapers and much of the best modern architecture anywhere sitting on the shore of glittering, opalescent Lake Michigan – ‘spectaculaire.’ They knew of nowhere in Europe where such stupendous works of Man abut such an auspicious natural setting.

I am very fond of my city and while I never considered it prosaic, it was a revelation to hear the impression it can make on people seeing it for the first time. So please consider: Might that also be true of wherever you live? Could there be things there you take for granted that would delight, even amaze, a newcomer? Paris’ inhabitants have appeared to me to be almost indifferent to their surroundings, even though those include some of the most elegant streets and structures in the world.

So while familiarity may breed indifference, never forget that our Earth is full of wonders and marvels, human and natural – or maybe denying easy categorization. Not all of them are ‘show-stoppers’ like Chicago’s rampart of cloudbusters, but many of them may be ‘breath takers’ anyway. And some of them may be in your life every day. So be attentive to the possibility of ‘wonders and marvels’ around you.

To start this interim series, something very cute from a museum in Amsterdam. By the way; ‘Brazilie’ is the Dutch name for ‘Brazil,’ where they once had colonies.

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, in addition to artworks at the level of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch,’ was full of varied, whimsical items gathered globally, to remind the Dutch of the giant shadow their little land cast in its era of outsized, multifaceted achievement in the late 17th – early 18th centuries, when their ancestors sailed forth to explore, and exploit, vast reaches of the world. Its collection echoes a culture of openness to outside influence, upon which their culture apparently continues to evolve. This stuffed toy looked like an anteater, though I’m not sure (the Museum was closing as I dashed through its store, where this was displayed; no time to investigate). Such things don’t usually attract me, but now I wish I had bought this. It was a real novelty, and as you may agree, very cute.

Today’s Dutch people are reputed to be irreverent, resistant to pomposity and rote convention; very different from the severe character of their thrifty, Bible-guided forebears in their Golden Age – and possibly a logical development of their society’s drift away from rigid, approved behavioral codes. This is also reflected in their moral flexibility and live-and-let-live attitudes, demonstrated by the adult pleasures on show in Amsterdam.

It is also reflected in their attitude towards the Rijksmuseum itself. Although it contains some of the greatest creative treasures in the world, it did not seem like some set-apart temple of high culture, revered as a semi-sacred space and treated with hushed decorum. Instead, the Rijks felt more like an active part of contemporary Dutch identity. In fact, it is literally implanted in the everyday experience of Amsterdam, because a heavily used bike lane runs at street level between its wings. Such a synergy may say as much about the Netherlands of today as the displays inside the museum say about its Golden past.

It seems good the Rijks is part of dynamic communal life rather than an inviolate temple to be venerated at a worshipful remove. Great art requires concentration to create, or fully appreciate; but not necessarily humble reverence, for its energy to spread and affect a broader community. And that is surely true for sensations from the natural world around us, too.

CONTEXT: A final re-post, for now, from my 2016 visit to Berlin with my friend Paul. I post this to try to exorcise my still-throbbing rage at this image – as you, kind reader, will surely understand when you see it. This post was meant to convey stark, heartbreaking evidence of why Soviet style Communism not only would, but must succumb, as an encumbrance to the happiness of the world. This, my last word on the Berlin Wall, is chosen to affirm my opinion on that matter.

However: As I have aged (matured?), I cannot reconcile donning a metaphorical robe of righteousness to validate oneself and all that is dear to one – like a proud proclamation that ‘All men are created equal’ – then acting as if somehow, such assertions offset behaving non-righteously. For a coarse but valid example, let’s ask Native- and Black Americans how ‘equal’ America seems to them.

Loving something – as I love my country – or someone, doesn’t mean we must pretend the object of our affection is perfect. Indeed, love may let us recognize its potential to become better than it is, and strive to make it so. Thus, in my last post, about ‘Checkpoint Charlie,’ I suggested that despite having outlasted Communism and providing more material abundance, the American system of Capitalism is far from ‘perfect’ in various senses. And that we Americans should not avert our eyes from the harm and injustice that system is capable of doing.

For example – an echo of what you will see in this post – no doubt, innocent American children have also died needlessly because some executive made a ‘business decision’ to cut corners on car safety design – until the number of people killed in car crashes necessitated adding features to prevent such deaths. No robe of righteousness can conceal the implications and consequences of a culture that so often ‘puts profit before people.’

But for my last word on the subject: I believe absolutely that willingness to kill babies to uphold state control is far worse than accidents due to callousness (despicable though that is). A government that would do so has forfeited any right to obedience or respect, let alone patriotism. Be outraged and thankful the Berlin Wall and the awful regime that needed, built and maintained it are gone, but do not then be satisfied that our own society is faultless. Recognize its flaws, care for it in spite of them, and – if you feel it is worthwhile – resolve to help bring it closer to its ideals than it was, or is.

Photos of Children Killed Trying to Escape through Berlin Wall:  The weather when Paul and I went to the site of this remnant of the Wall and memorial to fugitives murdered trying to get past it was chilly, gray and damp – thoroughly suitable for so depressing a spectacle.  It started to rain as we walked around, as if Nature herself were weeping at this site of such bleak evidence of the folly and failings of men (that may sound like a cliché, but truly is how it felt).  Many people had been killed at the Wall, their names and pictures enshrined here, but it was particularly infuriating to see these images of children – presumably their ages when they died, probably with parents risking all their lives to get to freedom – so that I may have snarled involuntarily aloud on seeing these.  I’m not sure I did, but given the setting and provocation would not have been the least embarrassed to do so.

No single political ideology is so all-encompassing as to address every human need and aspiration.  And any that assert that they are – as did both Communism and Nazism – must fall short, and often resort to force to maintain the semblance of inerrancy, so at odds with actual experience.  The Soviet Eastern bloc was no Workers’ Paradise, no matter how often or loudly its rulers bellowed that it was.  Their reflex was to suppress evidence to the contrary, and to treat anyone who wouldn’t play along with their official fictions as a criminal.

Capitalism certainly outlasted Communism, but that doesn’t mean that it was, or is, remotely perfect.  No system in which some members flourish massively while others starve can ever be considered “ideal.” But that doesn’t mean I’d find any sort of Totalitarianism preferable to America’s messy, contentious, always-in-progress democracy. 

And if I’d had any uncertainty about that before, seeing those pictures of dead babies certainly squashed it.  Any sort of regime that can only survive by killing people, even children – for the heinous offense of wanting to live elsewhere is in effect, committing human sacrifice to the idols of its doctrine, rather than admit it is not flawless – is inherently doomed.  The sooner it croaks the better; and that surely includes North Korea.

CONTEXT: This is another image and text from my 2016 visit to Berlin. This scene may have changed in the years since, as might the accuracy of my reference to trolleys remaining only in what had been East Berlin. I’ve heard since that there is some possibility of reinstalling them in former West Berlin given the traffic there, and Germany’s wish to discourage the prevalence of sole-occupancy cars, to help reduce Global Warming.

Which, along with its attendant mass refugees, and the worldwide emboldening of dictators such as Orban (and Putin/Xi) – as governments and business communities foolishly fray mutually beneficial Social Contracts with their countrymen – are developments that have accelerated or appeared, since this picture was taken.  

One thing that has not changed since then, distressingly, is the dangerous and dispiriting way nations that had relative economic equality (or at least not ludicrous inequality) in the 30 years after World War II have continued to revert to a 19th Century/quasi-Third World social structure of a thin stratum of extremely rich, but heartless, stupidly shortsighted people – who divert more and more national wealth to themselves – and everyone else, from whom that wealth gets diverted, struggling to maintain a decent standard of living.

And justifiably resentful of needing to do so. That is relevant to the point I try to make at the end of this post, and it seems more true now than it did then. Which is depressing, but also ominous.

Even before the Berlin Wall was begun in 1961, travel between the city’s Soviet, and French, British and American zones was closely regulated, but not enough to stop the debilitating flow of East Germans to the West.  This site on the broad roadway of the Friedrichstrasse was the only authorized entry/exit point between the American and Soviet sectors after the Wall was built. 

The Americans officially regarded the division of Berlin as temporary, so never constructed permanent control-structures here (the wooden guardhouse now in place is a mockup erected to mark the original’s location). ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ saw frequent heartbreak and desperation after the Wall went up, as East Germans tried guile to sneak past here, as their country became, ever more, a veritable prison.

Please note the KFC sign, of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I’m not sure that spreading relentless consumerism means that Capitalism “won” in the sense of proving objectively better than Communism, as this crass sign is hardly a banner of noble hopes fulfilled. But its presence at an iconic site of the Cold War certainly shows who buried whom (Soviet Premier Khrushchev, when his country was winning the Space Race, had jovially taunted the West “We will bury you.”). 

Since 1990, eastern Berlin is being updated in ways Communist economics could not afford to do after the city’s devastation in the War, so as to gradually become indistinguishable from former West Berlin (other than trolley cars in the East, which had been ripped out of the West due to the abundance of private cars there).  But putting a fast-food logo by a place that perhaps deserves reflection – even thoughtful respect, given what it has witnessed – suggests that not all change is invariably ‘improvement.’

Marxism failed to deliver on its Utopian promises, and was only sustained by force in East Europe till its inevitable collapse.  However, a reality check would seem to be in order: Most Soviet Bloc propaganda about Capitalism and “bourgeois Democracy” was a tissue of lies, but it included one assertion that was not, and is not, so easily dismissed.  It said that of all the supposed Freedoms in Democracy and Capitalism, the most basic is the ‘Freedom to Starve.’

Please reflect on whether that assertion actually was, and is, still basically true, if – when – you see homeless beggars in America.  In post-war Communist Europe, state control of resources meant that almost no one chronically went hungry out of inability to make money, even if the general diet was pretty spare and bland.  In my view, actions speak louder than platitudes, so our stated values of justice, fairness and equity are grievously compromised by the reality that some of our fellow citizens are effectively treated as acceptable collateral casualties of the Free Market.

For me, that echoes – distantly, but still too close for comfort – with Stalin’s indifference to the colossal loss of Russian troops’ lives in order to conquer Hitler.  We in the West might not sacrifice blood that way, but it is less clear that we will not sometimes let whole lifetimes be wasted. 

This should not be idly accepted in any society professing that each person has value – in America, ‘endowed by their Creator’ – as distinct from his or her worth in hard assets.  That concept is the supposed foundation of our celebration of the Individual, and is stained when any life is treated as being of no inherent importance. Even that of a homeless beggar.

In this case, Soviet propaganda seems to have been right on the money; so to speak. No one – not even a Communist – is wrong All the time.

CONTEXT: I am working on a couple of larger projects for this blog now, but meanwhile, will repost a few lightly revised items from my 2016 visit to Europe. Starting with some more from Berlin, the lynchpin destination, from my historian’s perspective, of that journey.  

To my great surprise, the actual Wall (or at least this part of it) was relatively flimsy, just concrete a couple inches thick.  It had disintegrated in spots, exposing rusting steel re-bar within; in some places it had crumbled away entirely, leaving a hole clear through to the other side.  When it was intact, it may have appeared impregnable, but a few sledgehammer swings could have bashed holes right through it.

However, it didn’t have to be massive, just a solid barrier.  Probably few East Berliners knew how insubstantial it really was, let alone had implements that could punch through its apparent muscle.  When the Wall was new, simpler methods might still breach it.  For example, a few fugitives drove large trucks straight into it, successfully battering into West Berlin, where the Wall guards dared not shoot or pursue. (Presumably Moscow, which usually had the last word on regime actions in Eastern Europe, ordered such restraint, unwilling to provoke the NATO powers over issues of non-critical strategic importance.)

The Wall complex was gradually enhanced by watch towers along its length with machine guns and total visibility firing lines. Eventually, the wide “Death Strip,” guard dogs, land mines, trip alarms were all added in response to the desperation and ingenuity of Ossies (East Germans/“Ostdeutscher”) to bypass it.

Communism in practice met neither its ideals nor promises, so during the 1950’s, a hemorrhage of East Germans, especially skilled, educated and energetic ones, crossed from their Workers’ Republic into West Berlin, then the easiest crossing point between the two Germanies.  Aside from the embarrassment of masses of its people ‘voting with their feet’ thus, East Germany was hurt by the loss of many of its most gifted citizens.  To put a halt to that outflow, in 1961, the boundary between east and west Berlin was temporarily closed with barbed wire while the Wall was built.  (Harsh barriers had already been put at the East-West German border, ostensibly to prevent invasion by NATO.  In fact, they were as much, if not more, to keep East Europeans behind the so-called “Iron Curtain,” the western edge of the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the post-war Soviet sphere of influence.)

Other parts of the Wall may have been more robust than this bit looked.  But I wonder if, when it was first built, the East German authorities sincerely thought it would only be needed temporarily – and thus not need to be terribly sturdy – till their citizenry became lulled into loving Communism, and no longer wanted to flee to the wicked, decadent West.  If they really believed that, it is a measure of how deep delusion can be: Why would anyone love a state that might kill them if they didn’t return its ‘affection’?  And how could its rulers not realize how unrealistic that was? 

Those questions are just rhetorical.  More likely, they made the Wall just enough of an obstacle to slow down would-be escapees till they drew the attention of the guards and their machine guns.  Rather than delusion, it was probably the hardest cynicism, the Regime knowing full well most people would never really want to live in a state that could give them no better than semi-poverty, watched and harangued them constantly – and could be murderous to retain control.

The Wall’s frailty, as shown here, proved an apt metaphor for the inherent weakness of Soviet-style Communism, or of any regime that can only survive by coercion, an ostentatious pretense of invincibility, and propaganda that is obviously in conflict with lived reality.  

Surely, bondage by intractable doctrine cannot have been what Marx intended when he proposed Communism – communal ownership of means of production – to protect ordinary workers from the abysmal depredations laid on them by the raptor Capitalists of the 19th century (Labor unions, often demonized now, were instrumental in preventing outright Communism from arising in the West, but that’s another story). Nowhere was this perversion of initially benign intentions more starkly and brutally manifest than by the Berlin Wall. 

But also, nowhere was it more splendidly overturned, as East Germans forced the Wall open, then hammered it down late in 1989.  For Berlin, liberation was personal; for the World, that stepping back from the chilling peril of the Cold War caused a collective sigh of relief so great it felt as if it had blown away much of the 20th century’s fear, chronic anxiety, and basis for despair. Believe me; I remember feeling just that way then.

CONTEXT:  Below is a re-post about Germany’s national monument to the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews, from my 2016 visit to Europe. Memorials should not just be passive reminders, they should help us grasp the gravity of events we did not personally experience; an urgent function of ‘History.’

To give an example of the importance of this which directly impacted many people reading, in 1933 Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act in response to behavior that caused the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and Great Depression. It restricted the activities of banks and financial firms many of which had been reckless, gambling with the money of unsuspecting investors.

G.S.A. helped moderate Wall Street for decades, but by the late 1980’s most people actively involved in the ‘29 Crash had died, and such legislation began to seem (to a new generation) as useless impediments to free markets. So the financial industry got G.S.A. partly suspended, re-authorizing profitable but risky trading. Sure enough, by 2008, such gambles wrought another economic calamity. G.S.A. might not have prevented the Great Recession of 2009 but had it still been fully in force, financial firms might have been constrained from some reckless activities – and attitudes – which blew up then.

The adulterating of Glass-Steagall displayed how we may fail to apprehend the full import of events we did not witness ourselves. An infinitely more dire example is the Holocaust, which can show how lives – and our own worthiness as human beings – may be at stake for failure to learn lessons from the past.

As the last survivors of Hitler’s ethnic slaughter (and those who watched it happen) are now dying, the urgency of recognizing the implications – mass murder to solve some alleged problem like a ‘Jewish Question’ – of this hideous atrocity, along with the indifference or complicity that facilitated it, ceases to be a duty of memory.

It becomes instead a test of posterity’s moral conscience. Can we register, viscerally, horrors that are not in Living Memory? If we cannot or will not, can we ever advance beyond repeating them? This Memorial presents that as a challenge to our ability and willingness to recognize evil as an abstraction, then confront it before it hardens into harsh, concrete reality.

Holocaust Memorial (Claustrophobic view): Formally called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, this maze-like battalion of multi-sized concrete blocks (“stele”) occupies a three football-field size site near the Brandenburg Gate on space left vacant after the Berlin Wall and its Death Strip were removed.  As other land nearby got developed during the ‘90’s, it was decided that this area should be set aside for a fitting national shrine to the most massive criminal undertaking – of which there were many – by the Third Reich.

There is a superb information center here, but personally all I needed was awareness of the memorial’s subject to be impacted by my encounter with it.  Some 2700 of these blocks, sightless, soulless sentinels whose function is to constrict and menace, mark aisles like this one. Many form canyons high enough to isolate visitors, visually cutting them off from the cityscape around them and from each other.  Even more unsettling, the foot surface is deliberately not level, detectably undulating; walking through it was disorienting and subtly, but unmistakably, disturbing. 

A visitor feels severed from all typical sensations, caught in an oblique world in which anything – no matter how horrific or contrary to basic assumption – can happen.  That vaguely jarring dynamic is certainly what I felt, although the site’s architect (Peter Eisenman, an American) denied his design was meant to have any specific “limiting” interpretation.

Emerging from these chasms of grim, anti-organic monoliths (as I had to do after a short time, so sinister was their grip), hard and inhumane as Hitlerism itself, one may look differently at the normal world, if only temporarily so.  As Europe’s Jews, relying on the rule of law, reason and the basic decency of their fellow beings found out, “normalcy” is not inevitable.  It can be overtaken by a madhouse in which the very Earth one walks on – on which one’s foot does not quite fall where one expects – is suddenly not dependable. Even malevolent, treacherous.

Words must fail to capture the scope of crimes so infernal as to crowd out ordinary perception, or of the primitive hatred that propelled them. To try to convey those non-verbally, the memorial’s oddly disquieting environment prods visitors to confront how tenuous life may sometimes be.  It calls to mind a situation in which all that is good is suddenly at risk, and where even supposedly neutral surroundings abruptly become hostile – even potentially lethal.

If ever there was an outrage whose implications we need desperately never to forget nor disregard as irrelevant just due to the passage of time, it was surely the Holocaust. That word came to be applied to Hitler’s Jewish genocide because it originally meant ‘burnt offering’; in this case human sacrifice, often by literally burning victims – dead or alive – to feed a madman’s frenzied visions.

A few years after this monument opened, in a noble effort to expand the definition of the “Holocaust” beyond just the Jews to anyone the Nazis targeted to achieve their ghastly conception of a pure Germany, smaller satellite exhibits were added to it commemorating their mass killing of Gypsies and homosexuals.  The former were considered racially inferior larcenous vagrants, and the latter were pronounced morally repugnant.  Can you imagine Nazis describing anyone else as ‘morally repugnant’?  Now that’s what I would call truly perverted.

Finally (speaking of messages underfoot), I should note a more modest but inescapable form of remembrance of the Holocaust found throughout Berlin and increasingly in towns and cities across Europe, wherever people were killed for being proscribed by Nazi ideology.  These are “Stolpersteine,” ‘stumbling stones,’ small brass plates engraved with the name and birth-death dates of Nazi prey (mostly Jews, but also Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists etc.) cemented into the sidewalk outside their last known residence or workplace.  These are randomly located – appearing wherever a murdered one happened to live or labor – and so are sporadic but recurrent perpetual reminders of Europeans seized by the jaws of a fiendish enterprise.  Pedestrians come upon them unaware, as intended.

Powerful as large, central Memorials may be, the Stolpersteine, by their presence literally underfoot in daily life, tug viewers’ attention to the void left by each person whose life they commemorate and keep from being forgotten.  Because they can be located anyplace routinely associated with a victim, they disallow complacency, serving as chilling evidence of the reality that evil can lurk and arise anywhere.

CONTEXT: This photo accompanied my post, below, from my 2016 Europe visit. It shows remarkable archeological treasure about 10 feet below Cologne’s present street level.

After central Cologne (‘Koln’ in German) was largely bombed to rubble in World War II, choices were needed about which structures to rebuild and which to consign to history, to save scarce restoration resources. Previously, the ‘Spanischer Bau’, ‘Spanish Pavilion’ for diplomatic activity when Cologne was a self-ruled Free City of the Holy Roman Empire, stood above the site shown here. The venerable Bau had been destroyed in the air attacks and was not rebuilt, replaced by new government offices (their floor slab is this ceiling).

Cologne was originally ‘Colonia,’ a provincial capital of the Roman Empire, its furthest north major city in continental Europe. The destruction of its urban fabric in Hitler’s war exposed remnants of many Roman structures (some known, some long forgotten) concealed for generations by later construction.

One such was the site shown here, foundations of the ‘Praetorium,’ palace of the local Imperial governor. Cologne had long been most renowned for its astonishing Gothic Cathedral, but when rebuilding the devastated city, it was decided to reveal many of its long-hidden antique vestiges into the public sphere, as the bomb wreckage over them got cleared.

For the Praetorium beneath the vanished Bau, the arrangement shown here was devised. The new municipal facility was built over the Imperial remnants, but designed to preserve them, while keeping them accessible to the public.

Cologne’s Roman beginnings are a fascinating part of its heritage, many physically re-emerging as a result of destroying Hitler’s Reich, the Teutonic heartland he rightly boasted the Empire had never effectively conquered. But as alluded to in my post below, Nazi Germany – showing barbarism akin to that for which the Romans had such contempt for Germans of long ago – was overcome, in part, by other forces that Classical culture consciously deployed: Rule of law, and much more channeled reason than unleashed passion.

Not visible from outside, this site is well worth following public markers to find. Not only for its artifacts but its intimations, as my post below tries to suggest.

Ruins with Suspended Artifacts:  This view of the foundations of the Praetorium shows a flock of ceramic and clay pottery fragments, seemingly hovering in mid-air.  These were artifacts discovered during the excavations of the site, now artfully suspended to show their exact positions in relation to the ancient stone and mortar when they were found. This was to illustrate the reality of archeology, in which items lost or discarded long before are uncovered in random disarray, unlike the tidy displays in museums.

Another section of this wall (not shown here) had a large, semi-circular gash like some monster had swooped from the sky to tear a bite out of it.  This was identified as damage caused by a bomb that pierced the now lost Spanischer Bau above, then exploded down at this level. 

The Nazi era is not my main focus for Cologne, but this detritus, seeming to float across time, moved me to meditate on Roman daily life.  And I reflected how unlike their Colonia, this city today is the work of free people, not largely of slaves – another aspect of “Roman daily life” – to sustain the comfort of their owners, but whose own lives, let alone wishes, merited little sincere concern.

But not so very long ago, the Nazis tried to reverse the long momentum towards consigning slavery to evil memory by reviving it to support their war economy.  Some 8 million people from their conquered territories, mainly from ethnic groups Nazi doctrine branded sub-human, were shipped to the Reich and forced to do jobs performed in peacetime by Aryan German workers or farmers, now off fighting Hitler’s wars; or dangerous weapons/munitions production under terrible conditions and violent supervision, for little or no pay, and dismal food and shelter. 

(I don’t know if many such slave workers – “Sklavenarbeiter” – were made to work in Cologne itself or its near environs, but many surely toiled in the factories of the Ruhr area to the north.  And a great many were killed, all over Germany, in the bombing of the strategic facilities in which they were forced to labor; innocent, collateral victims who didn’t even want to be there, much less to help Hitler.)

The real “sub-humanity” in all this was the Nazis’ hyena-like pressing of their (temporary) advantage.  But that seemed only proper to true-believer National Socialists in thrall to the idea that Fate favored the ruthless wielding of power by anyone fierce and strong enough to snatch it. They tried to create a Teutonic version of Roman cultural values beyond whose inherent cruelty the Western world had largely long since evolved. 

The British and Americans held that such attitudes were anathema to all progress of legitimate civilization, so repugnant that they had to be defeated regardless of the costs or means.  So it seems a macabre irony that Cologne, former German locus of warlike Roman practices the Nazis sought to partly emulate, was thoroughly flattened in the horrendous struggle to thwart them from doing so.

Such observations are not directly connected to this picture of old rubbish, but the latter is an allegory for how fragile and transitory our species’ improvement – like so much busted crockery, though far more precious – can prove to be. Due to brutish efforts to push the world backward toward a grimmer reality, and to what it might have become again, had they been allowed to prevail.  Slavery would not be merely a hateful footnote of a benighted past but, consistent with the Nazi concept of Germans as Earth’s ‘master race,’ a scourge revived on a vast scale.

The Romans, even rich, powerful ones, dwelt in a milieu of such omnipresent harshness (average life expectancy then was apparently about 35 years) that it was, arguably, unsurprising they might be hard-hearted enough to exploit their fellow men to make their own lives less generally dreadful.  This does not excuse their callousness, but may at least help explain it.  Besides, slavery was hardly unique to Rome; most pre-industrial societies practiced some form of it. 

But Germans by the 1930s, the Nazi era, had myriad advantages people in antiquity lacked; superior medicine, safer food supplies, sanitary housing, greater knowledge of the natural world, the empathy commended by the 18th Century Age of Reason, etc. To say nothing of ages of exposure to the theoretically pervasive Christian ethos of “Love thy neighbor.” 

Thus, unlike the Romans, 20th Century Germans – it seems to me – deserve no benefit of partial indulgence due to their own inescapably miserable circumstances, or to the social norms of their time.  And unspeakable as World War I was, the Nazis’ crazed resentment at their country’s defeat in it doesn’t come close to excusing the bestial kill-or-be-killed theory of life they devised to avenge it, nor their attempted forced march backwards towards many evils – of which slavery was but one – of darker eras past.

It would be understandable if most ordinary Germans were unwilling to brave the the Third Reich’s ghastly terror apparatus, and tacitly accepted Hitlerism mainly out of fear.  I myself wouldn’t have been nearly courageous enough to actively oppose it.  But beyond the committed Nazis was a large cohort of Germans (if not a majority) who gladly overlooked Nazism’s overt monstrosity – at least while they were winning – in return for Hitler’s reviving the nation’s economy, for telling them that as Germans they were better than anyone else, and for showering them with booty like foodstuffs from conquered lands.

Such folk may have had private misgivings about Hitler, but put them aside for near-term advantages (many of them unethical at a glance). As such, they failed to show a shred of the generosity they might have, if only in gratitude for the good fortune of living amid the gentler realities of a gentler epoch.

Unlike ancient Romans, they should have known better; they should have sensed better.  They had no persuasive rationalization for being witting accomplices to such profound malevolence.

Full stop.  

Before re-posting the first of two items (indirectly related to Christmas) from my 2016 visit to Cologne, I present this one from earlier in that journey, about the renowned, melancholy Jewish graveyard in Prague. Its relevance to Christmas is still more oblique, but I offer it now (having already put it on this blog in July, 2022) to manifest my belief that the charism of Christ’s Nativity was intended to offer benevolence to the whole human family. And most especially to its victimized members – ‘massacred innocents’ – like the Jews of Nazi-controlled Europe.

(Besides: as it explains here, it is delectably satisfying to think that one may, even minutely, help to frustrate part of Hitler’s most dreadful dream.)

Surely, few attitudes could be further from one who transcended the Self to the point of forgiving those crucifying Him, than indifference to the welfare of other people; Any other people. And Christians are meant to believe Christ’s sacrifice (and example) was not for themselves alone, but also for those who do not accept that faith; formally. For as noted before, I believe actions speak louder than words.

Concern for more than just one’s Self is a pillar of classic Jewish ethics, much of which got transmitted to the world via Christ. So I hope it is not unseemly for me to refer, even ‘obliquely,’ to Christmas in the context of this iconic Jewish site. It is also my gesture of respect and gratitude to Judaism, which has so helped to define civilization in general.

Which was surely one reason the Nazis, as enemies of true ‘civilization,’ were so murderously hostile to it.

Jewish Cemetery, Prague: This is a last picture from my visit to Prague, posted separately from all the others to call special attention to the long Jewish presence there. It is my small contribution to helping to thwart Hitler’s dream that not only all of the world’s Jews, but all memory of their very existence, should be obliterated.

Long before the Nazis definitively eradicated it, the ancient Jewish community there had a tempestuous and often violent history. The tale of the “golem,” a mythical monster created to protect Jews from persecution, originated in Prague.

These monuments had a calm dignity that made them very different from the only other cemetery I intentionally visited in Europe, Pere Lachaise in Paris. That place is far newer – its first burials seem to have been from around the time this one accepted no more. There have been no interments at this location for some 200 years, and many of the stones are so old they are slowly sinking into the soil, as if to mimic the “dust to dust” return to Earth of those who lie beneath them.

But many tombs in Pere Lachaise were the virtual opposite, in spirit, of these simple memorials. Most were at least ostentatious, others over-the-top Gallic theatrical. Many Parisian ones made with wrought iron or intricately carved stone are now deteriorating badly, no longer the proud spectacles their owners probably hoped to last forever. These in Prague, much less elaborate (usually just a Hebrew inscription and some image to mark the owner’s work in life, like grapes for a wine merchant) are much less liable to such decay.

I can only speculate on why there was such a stark contrast in how eternity was approached in these two places and eras. It may just have been that the Jews of Prague couldn’t afford anything finer, or that religious authorities there prohibited ostentation. Or it may have been a resignation to mortality that the Parisians refused, trying to resist the anonymity of death with elaborate memorials. No such pretense is apparent among these gravestones of Prague. And ironically, as the monuments at Pere Lachaise now rust and erode, they imply the destructive triumph of time more, not less.

I am still perplexed – though delighted – that the Nazis, who despoiled Jewish culture everywhere they conquered, left this cemetery and venerable synagogues nearby alone. These are all in central Prague so the Germans must have known they were there. Perhaps it was just one of their absurd concerns for “appearances”, of imagining the natives wouldn’t think they were vicious barbarians if they left a few familiar local highlights (but not live Jews) untouched.

If anybody knows why the Nazis spared this cemetery and those adjacent sacred structures, please tell the rest of us.

CONTEXT: A bleak artifact of the Cold War between the U.S./NATO and U.S.S.R./Warsaw Pact from about 1950 to 1990, and a focus of superpower military friction which we who lived at that time feared could spark World War III at any moment; a terrifying anxiety to constantly endure. I may repost more captions (referred to in here) about it that I wrote for my other pictures from Berlin later, on this blog.

But I include this item as one of my first blog posts, because in it I speculate that the Nazis’ beastliness could probably only be defeated by an even bigger beast, like Stalin’s U.S.S.R. A depressing, but plausible observation. The Russians overran eastern Germany and captured Berlin in Spring 1945, taking ferocious revenge on German civilians for Hitler’s unprovoked invasion of their land and the innumerable and unspeakable atrocities committed there by German armed forces. It must have seemed like the wrath of one of the warlike Norse gods the Nazis had revered (Thor?) was being visited on them. Nazism proudly lived by the sword, and – unsurprisingly – perished by it, taking much of the prior world with it in its collapse.

The Wall, mandated by pressure from that Soviet ‘bigger beast,’ was started in 1961, meant to stop the outflow of East Germans into (free) West Berlin. So it was actually, in effect a monument to the failure and dysfunction of ossified Communism to create a world most people would not flee if allowed to do so. This essay reflects on the dynamics that finally dissipated Marxism’s inflexible, sacrosanct ideology, as well as on the ultimately futile means deployed to impose and sustain it.

(As noted before, the ‘we’ mentioned in this piece is my friend Paul from Boston, who was with me for the middle part of my travels, from Salzburg to Berlin.)

This is not the same preserved Wall section I discussed in earlier posts, but one we saw from our passing tour bus. As I later learned, this is right next to the Topography of Terror, the memorial on the site of Gestapo headquarters, whose horrendous dungeons survived because the Wall’s Death Strip was later built over their ruins. In a bit of mordant irony, that Strip was one iniquity succeeding another (Gestapo HQ), until events rendered it too, unsustainable – though far less violently than the military apocalypse that subsumed the Gestapo along with all of Hitler’s other foul works.

The Berlin Wall finally fell because Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet president in the late 1980s, had made clear to Soviet client governments in Eastern Europe that he would not use Russian armed force to keep them in power, as the U.S.S.R. had done in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. And as it became obvious that the Iron Curtain was corroding, the East German regime – though willing to kill a handful of its would-be escapees – had no stomach to slaughter its own citizens en masse. Or at least, not without Russian backing. Or perhaps they finally realized there was no way they could do so with a straight face, and maintain their obviously sham pretense of being ‘a People’s government.’

The details of how the Wall finally ceased to imprison East Germans are complex, but its abrupt opening was sudden, fast and chaotic. On November 9, 1989, after the regime made an ambiguous announcement about loosening transit restrictions at the Wall, crowds of East Berliners approached it demanding to pass into West Berlin, and – almost miraculously – its guards, unsure what their superiors had really intended, let them do so. It was like the opening of the Red Sea to Moses.

Other Ossies (Easterners), on hearing this news, dropped what they were doing and sprinted past the barriers and into the West. They feared their rulers might capriciously change their minds, clamp the gates shut again, and massacre disobedient citizens (as had happened 5 months earlier at Tienanmen Square in Beijing). Many probably had only the clothes on their backs, unsure if they could ever return home, but were willing to abandon their whole prior lives for a straight-forward chance at the liberties they knew existed beyond the Wall. Only vicious force like the Nazis would have used, without hesitation – which the East German state would not – could have crushed such a huge popular upsurge.

The Wall ultimately turned out to be a futile, feeble thing, its grip inexorably worn down by the restive, rumbling hostility of millions of Europeans and their hopes for self-actualization, instead of a Socialist straight-jacket worldview. With wondrous irony, it was almost inadvertently opened by bureaucratic fumbling between the East German regime and its security forces.

(In Moscow’s Eastern Bloc, obedience to Marxist doctrine often counted for more than practical competence. The confusion that led to a sudden lapse of restrictions may have been partly a spectacular instance of people who got critical jobs because they were loyal, rather than because they were capable.)

And the evil spell of fear and helplessness in nations where the U.S.S.R. had imposed Stalinist Communism after World War II withered over a few breathtaking weeks, crushed under newly assertive popular aspirations. If you want to see the power of collective will and spirit, find and watch film of that electrifying November night at the Wall. It was astonishing, glorious, and intoxicating to people watching it on television, as much of the world did. East Berliners standing atop the Wall, with the Brandenburg Gate in the background, bashed at it with sledgehammers charged by decades of pent-up rage. That was an image for the Ages; the atmosphere in Paris after the fall of the Bastille may have felt much the same.

Lenin, father of the Soviet Union, once said that a successful revolution is usually just ‘the kicking in of a rotten door.’ And so it was; in 1989, the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (Year of the Miracle), the festering Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed with relatively minor ripples. The West’s dynamics of individuals’ worth and autonomy – which, rather than sullen Russian passivity were the true opposites of the Nazis’ glorification and mobilization of our worst instincts – had finally outlasted the East’s downtrodden subservience.

Such a ruthless, despotic use of Soviet power had been essential to do most of the bloody, brute work of pummeling Hitlerism to death. But whether those Western style ‘dynamics’ have triumphed forever is still unfolding now, in 2017.

(And regrettably is still ‘unfolding,’ in 2022, as of this re-posting. Demolishing the concrete of the Wall was only the start, and possibly, the easy part, of making a truly ‘Free’ world.)

CONTEXT: One of the most famous and scenic bridges in the world and a foremost sight of Prague, where we spent a single day en route from Vienna to Berlin. Its famous collection of statuary was accumulated over generations, but its fortified towers at each end are near-original, and common features of Medieval bridges. Such crossings were difficult and costly to build and maintain, so were placed at points of great strategic or commercial importance. They often also served a defensive purpose, with fortifications like this gate tower at either end to repel invaders who might cross them to attack any city in which they were located. Old London Bridge, built in the Twelfth Century, had similar construction.

Here is the fortification at the other end of this bridge, nearer the Old Town. Its roadway is now only for pedestrians, and was very lively even on a chilly day in October. On a fair day in June, it must be as crowded as St. Mark’s Square in Venice.

I’m glad so many people can now travel, a privilege once limited by poor transport and expense, although such democratization can change an ambiance drastically. Lovely and evocative of distant ages as places like this are, it is hard to contemplate the sweep of passing time when forcefully reminded of the here and now by jostling groups chattering in many languages. But personally, I am willing to accept a diminished individual experience for the benefits of living at a time when ordinary people can have the luxury of travel. That is, are not considered their leisure-class betters’ mere workhorses, who have no business expecting any of the good things of life, and who rarely get them.

Moreover: Travel enables us to learn about both the cultural variations and fraternal similarities of our neighbors on this planet. For example, the many Chinese visitors I saw in Prague probably knew very little about the place, yet some of them appeared to be on the verge of tears of joy at what fantastic, exotic sights they were seeing. That was something that I – their fellow non-Czech – could fully share with them.

Some of us may like to study in advance to understand at a deeper level what we will see in our journey. But “Wonder” is a universal language; it needs no translation or practice.

CONTEXT: This was the last of my photos of Berlin I had previously posted online from my visit there in 2016. Berlin was the nexus of my tour of Europe; no other place had played such an outsize role in global events in such a sudden and violent manner, due to its having been the epicenter of Hitler’s efforts to impose his ghastly vision on the world. Many of my posts about the city’s history and consequence focus on its Nazi era, when it was the site of bestial efforts to revive primal domination as human life’s supreme value, an effort undertaken using 20^th Century science.

But Berlin before Hitler was a place of many great achievements for humanity, not against it. It deserves better than just a litany of crimes committed there by brutish men who hated its renowned free spirits, and did their worst to replace them with evil ones. So I ended my original online discussion about the city with this reminder of its level of contribution to civilization.

I had never heard of Virchow, who was honored by this statue near Humboldt University. Like Humboldt himself, he is not well-known in the English-speaking world; surely not as much as he should be. Piqued by this grandiose memorial, I researched Virchow, and learned that its drama is not excessive for his achievements.

He was one of Germany’s greatest scientists in the 19th century, a founder of public health studies – now a field of universal significance. He also rejected many racial theories the Nazis would later espouse (he died in 1902, long before their coming), using science to advocate generous perspectives about the fundamental brotherhood of the human family. Such theories were exceptional even for his own time, the Age of Colonialism, when Europeans and Americans were going forth to co-opt and exploit other parts of the planet, taking for granted their inherent supremacy as Caucasians, and their destiny to rule.

This memorial may be a post-war replacement. In view of Virchow’s assertion of the underlying equality of human ethnicities, it seems possible the Nazis might have destroyed any remembrance of him, as they had Lessing’s statue in Vienna. In any case, it now serves as a reminder of a life, and an era, of which Berlin and Germany may be justly proud, with no need to proclaim them the acts of bogus “Supermen.” Virchow’s actual deeds honored mankind’s potential more than any marble trophy could.

In addition to its stain by Nazism, Berlin deserves to have its very substantial contributions to our collective progress reclaim their role in how the city is perceived. Virchow was just one of its residents who made our world better in a practical sense, or even expanded our understandings of the universe (as did Einstein, a long-time Berlin resident).

At first, this statue seemed to be just one more gratuitous Germanic exaltation of strength. But it isn’t; the struggling figures are evidently meant to show the progress, in which Virchow played a major role, in subduing an ogre: Epidemic.

If that is the case, then this truly is a worthy image of an epic accomplishment of reason and enterprise, not a crude effort to warn the viewer to bow to power. Not about mere domination, this portrays our contending with one of the world’s worst scourges. And as such, this dramatic imagery is supremely appropriate.

Given Virchow’s counter-evidence to what the Nazis would later preach, this monument may also suggest how Man’s better instinct can vanquish his baser one, a pestilence often more insidious than those of Nature. This goal can be achieved by great personal exertions like his, or simply by treating life as something savory and thrilling, rather than as Hitler saw it: A blood sport, in which it is the right and duty of the strong to crush the weak.

As such, Virchow’s life seems a fitting end of my postings about Berlin, a partial offset to its being bound to Nazism in the world’s imagination. Stories like his might be truer to the city’s historical essence than its short-lived plague of Fascism. The latter must never be forgotten, but it is far from being Berlin’s whole, or principal, identity.

My last comment on this city, given all the diversity and openhearted (if not exuberant) “Luft” it showed me, is a hope that it may contribute positively to human enlightenment again – even more than the role it once played in our near-run reversion to beasts.