TURNING POINT : UNDER THE BERLIN WALL

APRIL 1986

UNDER THE BERLIN WALL

THE BERLIN WALL AT THE TIME OF ITS COLLAPSING

                              

The most most beautiful  cities  are not necessarily the most  happy ones; in Germany as well as in America.

But on this warm and sunny  morning, as Berlin was shimmering, we could not understand why this Russian sentry  was hiding from our camera. Obviously he was playing in a childish way. Moon faced, dressed in olive green fatigues, looking barely eighteen years old, the sentry enjoyed hiding every time we lifted our camera trying to take a picture of this famous wall where he stood in a wooden booth glancing down in the streets and far away. Berlin was then a quiet place without any trace of war. People, apparently happy, walked down the streets as clean as the building lining them.

This young sentry was however, a testimony and a legacy. War was over for a long time, but history was anywhere and everywhere. Here is the huge stadium where the Berlin’s games of 1936  took place. Hitler stood there, said our guide, named Tramm, a tall handsome man. Anywhere in Berlin public buildings and private ones have a story. This sentry recalled  that Berlin was still divided and occupied. However, as April was unfolding  under the light and colors of spring, it came to  happen that Berlin didn’t want to display any reminder of  its past.

It was however, under the wall, and especially at the border which divides the old city that we will find out what  this past has been. A few days after our arrival, we have been allowed to cross the border and step in East Berlin.. Don’t fail to  to  pay a visit over there, Dieudonne Fardin, the flamboyant  director of the Haitian weekly Petit Samedi Soir had been telling me. Berlin from the end of WWII has become a stronghold of communism. But, it was there along its ruins that stood out a kind of epic grandeur of Nazi pumps. Has this splendor already faded away? We didn't know. At the time we went to the East, we came to notice how the world has been changing.

Nevertheless, we continued our visit in Berlin and its shiny neighborhoods. We liked the wooden ones, the parks so clean and those highways set up in a geometrical way. Once we toured the city with our guide Tramm, polite and learned. We went into the crowded discos, enjoyed seeing Nourredine dancing in the Arab manner. A young woman named Magrit, was graceful while dancing. Our group, comprised mostly of French speaking West Africans, was discovering a Berlin  which had turned its back to the past, in spite of the war memories which were still alive especially along the wall where so many died trying to cross to the West's side.  Tramm was so precise and talked with some serenity regarding the German responsibility for this war. pointing out the place where the oldest prisoner of the world, Rudolph Hess a German dignitary was in. Berlin, however, was buzzing. Resorts were full of visitors. Businesses were springing up, justifying what a very proud German scholar had to say later on: Germany  is in the anteroom of history.