U2 rocks the Brandenburg Gate
BERLIN – I spent last night in the East German city of Magdeburg, about a 90-minute train ride (with stops) west of here. I was on a tight schedule because a close friend had asked me to lecture at the University of Magdeburg today (Thursday) and I wanted to be back to Berlin in time for the 6 p.m. U2 concert, held outdoor at the Brandenburg Gate.
U2 fans wait for the rock band to take the stage at the Brandenburg Gate Thursday night. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)
Before I go any further, let me say that was one terrific – albeit short – show that this Irish band put on for some 10,000 gathered in the Gate’s Pariser Platz. This was a win-win situation for the City of Berlin, its commemoration of the fall of the Wall, U2 fans, the band itself, and the MTV Europe Music Awards held in Berlin tonight. Featured on the TV show was the short set the band did on the platz.
Berlin holds special significance for U2 since this is where they came in 1990, a year after the fall of the Wall, to reinvent its sound and produce it’s Acthung Baby album.
Bono performs with his band U2 Thursday night. (AP Photo.Gero Breloer)
Over the past several days I’ve been listening to stories from both East and West Germans about what the Wall meant to the country and the City of Berlin when it was up and what it meant when it fell on Nov. 9, 1989. Some of these stories have been pretty heavy, and some have had a touch of humor mixed in with the tragedies. But the upbeat touch that U2 provided tonight was very welcome by young and old Germans alike.
There is one interesting story going around and you can actually find it in the online version of the Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/1989/ (you can translate it with Google.) It involves a Lutheran pastor named Rev. Martin Weskott who has been saving tens of thousands of books in East Germany that were thrown on the trash heap after the Wall came down. It was as if these books were somehow contaminated because they came from the East, were maybe written by East Germans, or they were about life or politics there.
Pastor Weskott has an interesting reason for wanting to save the East German books.
“It’s not by throwing culture away that people will rid themselves of their past”, Weskott, 57, told Der Tagesspiegel. The pastor had grown up in West Germany where the memory of the burning of books by the Nazis in 1933 still haunts many Germans.
In fact, it is interesting that Germany celebrates the fall of the Wall not on Nov. 9, but on Oct. 3, which was the date that reunification was officially proclaimed 11 months after the Wall came down. Why isn’t the official celebration on Nov. 9? Because that is the same date (Nov. 9, 1932) as the infamous “Kristallnacht,” or the night of the broken glass when Nazis raided Jewish businesses and synagogues and tossed thousands of books into street bonfires. The shadow that cast on German history was not one that this country wanted confused with the positive events on the same night 57 years later when the Wall came down, so Germany moved the official celebration to Oct. 3.
So the Germans have dubbed Pastor Weskott “the book reverend” for his efforts to save history. He sells the books at his church, and the money for them all goes to charity. Many of the books came from East German libraries that were forced to close for lack of funds.
“No one wanted GDR (German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was known) books anymore,” said Siegfried Lokatis, a book specialist at the University of Leipzig.
No one, that is, except for the book reverend.
Well it’s approaching 3 a.m. Friday for me in Berlin, so I’m thinking about shutting down this post for the night. Before I do, though, how about one more Wall-related story, and this one is a funny one believe it or not. And forgive me, but it comes from my cousin, a guy named Jim Wintermeyer who now lives in Virginia but who traveled much of the world with his parents when his dad worked for the U.S. government.
This story happened not to Jim but to a friend of his (we’ll just go with his first name of Steve because he may still be embarrassed by it). Like Jim, Steve was a U.S. expatriate high schooler living in Turkey in 1961. Because his parents also worked for the U.S. government, his family could take space available on military planes going to various European cities for practically no cost.
So Steve tried to talk Jim into going to East Berlin, something Jim very much wanted to do but which his dad prevented. “I think Dad knew something was in the works in East Berlin,” Jim says, “and he thought it would be dangerous for me. Turns out, he was right.”
So Steve goes to East Berlin, drops in at a bar for some beers and meets a young woman who invites him over to her place. The route to her apartment, however, takes them down a dimly-lit street where Steve feels something hard hit him on the back of the head. When he wakes up, it’s the middle of the night, he is in the street, but he is in the street without any clothes. His money and passport are gone, he knows absolutely no German, and he is wearing only his birthday suit. So Steve does the only thing he can do: he gets up and flags down an East German cop, which turns out to be a big mistake.
Instead of helping Steve, the cop — who turns out to be a Stasi officer — arrests him on the spot.
Steve pleads, “Hey, just let me cross the border to West Berlin,” but that’s when he discovers what my cousin Jim’s dad apparently already knew: This was the night in August 1961 when East Germany officially closed its Berlin border to the West. Construction on the Berlin Wall itself would begin the next day. There was no way out.
So Steve winds up in an East Berlin jail for two weeks while the Stasi try to figure out if he is some kind of spy, pervert, or both. American diplomats have to get involved, and ultimately he is discharged with a one-way ticket out of East Germany. And some borrowed clothes on his back.
Now all he had to do was to explain all this to his dad when he got home. Part of Steve probably preferred the East Berlin jail to that.
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