Three European Capitals
M
is for…
Memorials
The City that never forgets
Berlin
has not the captivating romance of Paris, or the elegance and variety of
London, or even the Asia-meets-Europe charm of Istanbul. Certainly not
steeped in the culture of the ages as Rome is.
Berlin
is one of the younger European capitals, and it doesn't have historical firsts,
classical empires or captivating architecture.
Its
modern history is filled with occurrences entirely without
precedent. The most punishing of peace terms in the Great War that
sowed the seeds of another, more destructive war... a crushing defeat in
the Second World War... a large-scale social experiment of clashing political
ideologies. Berlin became the symbol of the Cold War, with its concrete version
of the Iron Curtain in the form of the Wall between the capitalist West and the
communist East. And all of these left behind a trail of racism, discrimination,
exile and genocide.
And
today, this city seems committed to remembering all of its past, through its
variety of museums: historical, thematic, self-critical, open-air, and
everywhere. The story of a visit to Berlin is the story of its museums and
memorials.
The Judisches Museum (Jewish Museum) is quite
avant garde in its layout. Designed along three intersecting axes of exile,
holocaust and continuity, this traces the history of the Jews of Germany
through centuries of discrimination, their unique customs, and their prominent
personages. The exhibition strives through all of this, to create a very human
face of the Jewish community, displaying them as an entrepreneurial people, who
are as German as the rest of their countrymen.
The Deutsche
Historisches Museum is rather well-conceived, laying out two
millennia of German existence in neatly planned-out sections, in true 'German
precision'.
Neue
Wache is
an old guardhouse dating from the 17th century, that has served variously as a
Memorial to the martyrs of World War I, later to victims of Fascism, and is now
dedicated to the victims of war and tyranny.
 |
| A fragment of the Wall at Potsdamer Platz |
Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe: With its arresting format, this
museum leaves no doubt about what its rows upon rows of concrete
stelae represent.
Topography
of Terror:
Using a combination of indoor and outdoor displays, this museum housed in the
site of former Nazi buildings takes one through the terrifying phases of the
war.
And
then, the remnants of the Wall themselves have been turned
into outdoor displays, narrating tales of attempts to escape, and of victims of
shootings in no-man's land.
When
it comes to uncomfortable memories, it's human tendency to forget, to bury deep
in the subconscious, and to move on… or so I had assumed until I met Berlin.
Even the worst wisps of memory of a bygone past are remembered here with
relentlessness. A large number of memorials: to Jewish holocaust victims, to
the Poles, to the Sinti, and to the Roma dot this fiercely self-critical city.
Cenotaphs are common enough across the world, but the rash of memorials that
Berlin is home to is incredible on every parameter: scale, number and concept.
I,
for one, was baffled by the obsession of the city to remember even the darkest
hours of its history with such ferocity. I discovered that the Germans have a
term: Geschichtsbewältigung, which in English translates to 'overcoming history'.
As with all translations of German words to English, I can only imagine that it
fails to capture the sense of the original word in its entirety. Perhaps, I
thought, strange though it may seem, memorialization is the only way to come to
terms with the past? Could keeping the ghosts of the past in front of you, in
plain sight, help you overcome the prejudices of your fathers, and to
focus on creating a future of equality, justice and amity?
And
then, in another museum, in another city, I stumbled upon a piece of text
that matched words to my nascent thoughts. And that takes me to another
narrative.
*****
M
is for…
Music
 |
| Hofburg Palace, Vienna |
Vienna:
The centre of European culture, art and music, and many a grand
Schloss (palace).
Seat of the Hapsburg empire of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination
triggered the Great War. An empire that was embroiled in a continuous stream of
wars: located as it was in the intersection of the east and the west, facing
alternating, sometimes simultaneous threats from the Bourbon Kings of France,
and the Ottoman Sultans of Turkey, amongst others.
Putting
up at Ringstrasse, the backdrop of nationalism in World War 1, and attending a
Wiener Mozart concert at the Staataoper (State Opera) meant being close not
only to the historical centre of culture, but also to the scenes of wartime
civilian life of exactly a century ago. A pilgrimage of culture and krieg (war),
in short.
The Haus der Musik is a museum of music and sound, with
plenty of hands-on displays that explain concepts pertaining to sound, as well
as sections devoted to the musical greats: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and
Strauss.The best place to understand Austrian History, in my opinion, is
through the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum or Military History
Museum, which presents the story of Austria from the Thirty Years' War of
the 17th century to World War 2 and beyond. And a visit to the Hofburg Palace
gives one a sense of the splendour of the Hapsburg Court in its
heyday: when the empire had under its fold people belonging to 11
different ethnicities across western and central Europe.
It was in this unlikely
setting that I uncovered an answer to Berlin's compulsive need to memorialize:
of what it takes to come to terms with the past. In this house of music, there
was a room of profound silence: the Exodus Room, with its walls filled with the
names of musicians who were lost in the days of World War 2. And here, I found
a brief text on how to come to terms with history:
 |
| A snippet from the Exodus Room |
An examination of history
helps us grasp the tragedy of our existence, and leads us to a life of
realization and vision. And 'vision' is the power that defeats violence and has
the ability to change the world. As I glanced around at the almost entirely unheard-of
strings of over 600 names, and at the loss of all that could have been created
by these gifted people, the futility of the war that took them away struck
me in full measure.
Perhaps,
the compulsion to remember does indeed gives rise to the importance of
'vision': which in turn is a safeguard for the years to come.
*****
M is for…
Middle Ages
In the neighbourhood of the Karluv Most (Charles Bridge) lies the Stare
Mesto, or the Old Town of Prague. Walking across Old Town, surrounded
by Gothic churches, sculptures of kings and saints, to mention nothing of
gargoyles, and museums devoted to torture instruments, I could almost
believe it entirely possible that I would bump into an armoured knight, or even
be accosted by a Crusader. It's easy to imagine this as a bustling city of the
Middle Ages, as the capital of the kingdom of Bohemia. Ringed by the remnants
of its old fortifications, the Old Town appears to be in a time warp,
under a cloak of invisibility from the modern world.
Today, crossing the Vltava on the Charles Bridge involves weaving
through swathes of humanity. Guitar-playing marionettes, makeshift souvenir
stores, caricaturists and watercolour artists woo the tourists, as weary
medieval age statues look on.
Prague appeared to harbour an obsession with mechanical puzzles: stores
filled with a wide variety of traditional wooden puzzles dotted the little
alleys, and some of them even had television displays of the puzzles being
solved.
 |
| Colours of Prague (clockwise from top left): A panorama. A dial of the astronomical clock. Dusk by Charles Bridge. Rows of mechanical puzzles. A sun-bathed afternoon |
Prague is a city that tends to startle through its art: and this
seems to be a trend transcending the times. Be it the ultra-modern 'Tower
babies': a series of giant, crawling babies on the Žižkov Television Tower, or the sculptures of
mortal (of course!) combat in the Prague Castle, or even the 15th
century astronomical clock in the Old Town, art in this city is bizarre
at best, and macabre in many cases. The astronomical clock is
imposing, baffling and grotesque all at once: so filled with a range of dials,
figures and faces that reading the time is the last thing on the one's mind
when viewing this strange contraption! The local people were charmingly self-deprecatory:
such as my e-bike tour guide who joked about Prague being too
insignificant to be an air-raid target in the War. Yet they seem proud in their
own quiet way, of having won a nation for their people after a long history of
Hapsburg, and recently, Soviet overlordship.
The multiple colourful dials and the row of Apostles that move across
its face at the stroke of each hour, and the macabre figure that actually
strikes the hour: all of these hide the evident sophistication of this device
created centuries ago, clearly by people who had deep knowledge of astronomy,
with clock-making expertise to match.
In a way, this clock symbolises what Prague, to me, is all
about: its colourful façade, grim art and self-effacing people are
merely a foil to a culture of curiosity (puzzle-solving)
and of progressive thinking (the Bohemians had their
own break-away movement well before Martin Luther's
Reformation). A city that, after a violent history of Defenestrations and
Bohemian wars, is content with a Velvet Divorce (the smooth Czech-Slovak
split). Perhaps its laid-back aura is merely a result of having made peace with
its place in the world.
