DAY 246 - CHRISTMAS IN BERLIN - PART 1

2378 miles–5,101,001 steps

After the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdammer Platz, and remains of the Berlin Wall, there were three visits I wanted to make before leaving the city: the first was to the Holocaust Memorial, the second was to the Olympic Stadium constructed for the for Berlin  Games in 1936, and the third was the Hansa Recording Studios where U2 recorded the classic song ‘One’.  I had considered making the 30km trip out to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which was used to train SS Officers in acts of mass killing that were then deployed to other camps, but to be quite frank with the carnage of Verdun and the devastation of the Battle of Berlin, I just didn’t have the strength to look into the face of such evil, especially on a Day of Hope.

One of the lessons of history is that Evil always overplays its hand and the Berlin Olympics and the Holocaust were proof of this:

In the morning I attended the Holocaust Memorial, which is unusual in that it is comprised of thousands of stone slabs of different heights and yet they carry no inscription. In the absence of words and symbols, the visitor is left to reflect on the greatest crime ever committed. This crime was not just against a race, the Jews, but against humanity as a whole. It is a memorial, but it is also a warning because if we think such unspeakable evil could never happen again then I believe we are dangerously wrong; times change, but the human heart does not. We therefore need to maintain eternal vigilance by reminding us, not the Germans, but all of us what we are capable of when power and prejudice are left unchecked by justice and empathy.

Given this fact, it seemed appropriate that I should arrive Memorial via Hannah Arendt Strasse; for few people have done more that Hannah Arendt to explore the nature of political power and violence, which as a Jewish intellectual she was to witness at first hand in Nazi, Berlin. Her essay ‘On Violence’ is a work which I would most like to be required reading for every despot, dictator, mobster or bully because it will explain to them why they are acting and thinking the way they are. Essentially violence becomes permissible when we consider that we are more and others are less than we are. When we no longer consider all humans to be equals, all manner of evil become possible and even justified. Religion, race, national borders and ideologies have been used through the ages to embody this belief in the superior and the inferiority of different peoples. However, in the case of monotheistic religion, often this is unintentionally so, but is logical consequence of a belief that there is one truth (theirs), one god (theirs), one church (theirs), one Heaven (theirs) and one Hell (not theirs), and they will be populated of respectively by the, ‘chosen’ and ‘not chosen’, ‘saved’ and ‘not saved’, ‘faithful’ and ‘infidel’. Once we convince ourselves that god has written off a country, a race or a people for eternal damnation, it ‘legitimises’ the actions of those looking for an excuse to send them there.

In contrast, where there is a belief in One God who is the creator and sustainer of all things and in whose image we have all been made, black or white, female or male, Muslim or Christian, capitalist or communist, rich or poor, gay or straight; a God who loves each of us unconditionally not because of our nationality but because of our humanity; a God whose only command is that we love and value each other as He loves and values us; then religion, at a stroke, becomes a means by which we celebrate what we are, rather than point out what others are not. Looking at the world in 2011 this is of course an ‘impossible dream’ for us, but not I suspect for God. Then again He always was an optimist, that is after all why He made us in the first place. Happy Christmas!