City of light

It was while trailing after the tour guide in heavy felt overshoes into Frederick the Great's Music Room at Sans Souci that I suddenly got a strange sense of déjà vu. This was where the Musical Offering was born. This was where Frederick must have conceived the famous Thema Regium for Johann Sebastian Bach to transform into a sublime set of variations. The Rococo extravaganza of the utterly delightful palace belies Frederick's fearsome reputation as one of the greatest military strategists in history and, as the name of the place implies, shows up the man who was a genuine aesthete; one who spoke French in preference to his native German and was a regular correspondent of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists and who was and still is part of Germany's cultural identity to this very day.

It was my first visit to the recently reinstated German capital. All through my childhood and youth, it was Bonn that was designated as the capital of West Germany, while the East and divided Berlin along with it, was rarely mentioned, incarcerated as they were behind the infamous Wall. Since the fall or rather joyful destruction of the wall and the reunification of Germany, Berlin has once more been given its pre-eminence. My visit coincided with an exhibition of Maltese art at the splendid Dresdner Bank in Pariser Platz which is just off the Brandenburg Gate and the Unter den Linden, to which I was invited to participate by our ambassador to Germany, William Spiteri, to mark Malta's 40th anniversary as an independent sovereign state.

The Brandenburg Gate marked the dividing line between East and West. It is still the focal point of the reunited city; a city that paid a very high price indeed for the tragedy of World War II. Very little of West Berlin survived. The entire city must have been bombed and smashed to smithereens and steamrolled into oblivion. The Wilhelmskirsche in the centre of Kurfurstendam stands as a stark memorial to the Berlin that once was; its blitz marks and smoke stains left just as they were in 1945, a startling contrast to the new Berlin which like a phoenix rose from the ashes around it.

New Berlin is astoundingly beautiful. I never imagined that I would be fascinated by modern architecture. It is as if every post-war architect of note has left his or her mark on the city. The building, highly controlled and never utilitarian but always exceedingly pleasing to the eye, is still going on. There is also a sense of limitless space; splendidly vast boulevards cutting through enormous expanses of lawn and innumerable waterways ensure that there is no overcrowding and the glass palaces that abound everywhere are separate entities. There is a feeling of light that defies the sometimes gloomy history of the city and truly symbolises Germany's ultimate recovery from post-war depression and ultimate renascence.

The Sony Centre, dominated by its strange and tilted concave dome recalling Mount Fuji, was especially fascinating while the home of the fabulous Berlin Philharmonic stands like Nero's Domus Aurea just a couple of metres away from the wall that was. A wall that separated families and friends for practically half a century.

Just a stone's throw away, in the former no man's land between East and West, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews is under construction. In the space of at least two football pitches a sea of different sized sarcophagi covers what will be a museum for German Judaism. Despite the fact that we have been bombarded all our lives with anti-Nazi propaganda and have watched innumerable enactments of the vicissitudes of Jewry in Nazi Germany, I still found this colossal monument overdone. At least three generations have lived and died in the shadow of World War II and its excesses.

Is it necessary to burden the consciences of future generations with the sins of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers? I cannot think of any other nation in history that has been forced to not only remember but pay for the sins of its ancestors. If it had always been so, the world would be overcrowded with such memorials. Do not misunderstand me. Not for a moment do I deny that what happened was a horrendous catastrophe; however, time moves on inexorably and what is happening in Israel cum Palestine today is not so different, wall and all. But that is another story.

No visit to Berlin can be complete without visiting the Pergamon Museum. Anyone who has visited it will understand how totally gobsmacked I was when I suddenly found myself in a vast reconstruction of a temple which was brought over, stone by stone and limb by limb, from Pergamum. The structure is awe inspiring and breathtaking and is but the central attraction in this utterly wonderful museum which reconstructs Persian palaces and Islamic fortresses.

The Gemaldegalerie, which was recently reconstituted in a thoroughly modern setting, brings together several world heritage collections under one roof as hitherto they had been dispersed in the East and the West. Splendid Velasquezes and supremely elegant Watteaus rub shoulders with Titians and Tintorettos, Holbeins, Cranachs and live happily with Raphaels, Breughels and Vermeers, Van Eycks and Van Dycks; all that is memorable and symbolises the ultimate expression of western art lives in this extraordinary museum.

The apogee of our sadly short visit was undoubtedly Potsdam. The extraordinary beauty of the fabulous gardens of Sans Souci is but the crowning glory of the idyllic setting of the entire area that is dotted by wonderful lakeside palaces and villas in which once lived scions of the ruling Hohenzollern family. This family too symbolises Berlin, as it was a Hohenzollern who, along with Bismarck, unified the geographical expression that was Germany in 1871. They are always portrayed in uniform and yet like Frederick they were great patrons of the arts. This innate intellectual bent is reflected in modern Berlin today; a proud city with an incredible past but one that looks proudly and confidently into the future.

kzt@onvol.net