Berlin is still a big open-air workshop. After the reunification started the largest operation after the rebirth of a city built, also in Berlin, in the aftermath of World War II. It still is not over. Work continues and the last socialist barracks, with those concrete cubes that resemble pieces of a Lego construction, inevitably leave room for new forms of modern architecture. Berlin is certainly not lacking in the interest of and for all kinds of seduction Caller: never has been.
But today offers a unique opportunity: the chance to make a sort of pilgrimage to a city that changes wildly through space captured and processed, ideas that are transformed into works of wonder for a new glimpses which is also nice, light and transparent architecture that purchase volume and appearance through the projects of masters such as Rogers, Piano, Eisenman, Grassi.
I do not think this will last for much longer: if you are not yet in Berlin lose no more time.
And so now the way to this city that, for better or for worse, was at the center of the tragedies and hopes, and desires of the crimes of our time for redemption.
I look at Berlin that once was and that there is more, the Berlin and the protagonist of the story that was brutalized by history.
The crisp breeze, the windows lighted, the people flocking peacefully to the tram stops, the fun consists of imbiss - the kiosks where you can always stop for a beer and a sausage sandwich - the elegance of the restaurants Oranienburger Strasse ... all this does not help to understand.
For me the strength to turn my head thoughts. I find myself Potsdamer Platz and meditate on what was a no man's land.
I enjoy the beauty of the transparent dome of the Reichstag fire and return that one day the Nazis hanged, dismal signs of the next catastrophe.
I think of the Wall on November 9 hacked to pieces, torn by hand, a hammer, with blows of a pickaxe, and only then with bulldozers, but then I let myself be dazzled by the memory of another 9 November, one of Kristallnacht: night of another collective frenzy, that the hunt for Jews and synagogues razed.
And I enjoy the newfound freedom, but I can not help but think about the intricacies of history, its cruel contradictions, the inexhaustible possibilities of suffering they can inflict.
the era of socialism, which certainly has never been heaven on earth, and the disillusionment is already lurking around the corner, because the West is not a bed of roses, not just supermarkets overflowing with deli and advertising with smiles and promises of happiness.
is also poverty, it is also difficult, it is also evil.
think at least he had turned the page once and for all and behold the cities of the East, especially the poorest suburbs, are populated by scary Nazi bands. And the "nostalgic", let's call them, are beginning to enter the regional parliaments.
Just as disturbing is published here are of the research center studies of the SPD, the great Social Democratic Party of Germany: Germans on at least 15 percent, I read, I could identify with a party of the extreme right, even the 20 percent cultivate anti-Semitic prejudices ...
As if nothing had happened ... a clean slate on the most appalling tragedy of the twentieth century.
Everything is moving, in this extraordinary city, everything is ready to be surprised because it changes, not because it is equal to itself.
in East Berlin, however, still resists the ghost of a great stone.
The old Stalin Allee, today Karl Marx Allee, the road is certainly more ideological and Germany together a metaphor for nostalgia.
on this great avenue, along two kilometers wide and more than a hundred meters, overlooking the most classic examples of social housing. The buildings, completely restored and preserved, recover the fees and austere Soviet compact construction, but not completely remove the architectural heritage of the Berlin of Bismarck.
Overall not bad, the glance is far from unpleasant, at least to the extent that you can keep an eye cold, detached.
If emotions take part, as happens to me now, the speech is another.
This way, I know, for over fifty years has engaged in lengthy debates planners and architects from all over the world. But what stirred within me is not an aesthetic dilemma.
Today, almost a whole day, I traveled back and forth, the shade of linden trees, lingering over details and thoughts. Several times I paused to contemplate the symbols that evoke the bygone regime.
also in other towns in eastern Germany gravestones and monuments were spared from the iconoclastic fury, and it is right, because the destruction of today certainly will not help the memory of tomorrow.
But all that is see, you can breathe, you can even touch that recalls the past in this way: along with the little that remains of the Wall now the Karl Marx Allee brings us back to the times of the Cold War really and blocs.
Only in this way that one can understand really what it was when Berlin was divided in heaven and on earth, when the Berlin Wall cut through neighborhoods, separated families, left end in nothing roads that once linked.
Everything reminds me of something.
The benches at the side of the gardens, for example, are very crowded. To occupy the tourists are not, of course the fly, but the tenants of the great mansions that overlook the street.
we were in any other part of the planet, you'd think nothing better than to retirees who kill their time lazily in the warmth of a pale northern sun.
But you can not live by chance in what was once proudly bore the name of Stalin Allee.
The accommodation here, were assigned to those who had acquired special merits towards the regime and the ruling party. An apartment on this street was a prize. No, not necessarily a privilege reserved for careerists and opportunists, because there were those who believed, there were those who have given their lives for socialism ...
Among these old people there is probably someone the "pioneers" who flocked to Berlin after the war by volunteers, to sweep away the rubble and rebuild a city worthy of a new nation, a new man ...
In recent days along the Karl Marx Allee Allee Stalin is remembered for a time with a series of photographic exhibitions.
stands out among all the images, including dimensions, of the October 1989 military parade on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the birth of East Germany, that the GDR.
is impressive show of force: a mighty army that passes between the masses into a frenzy.
A triumph which does not seem to miss anything.
Never seen so many people.
huge party of people, really: and instead, to review everything in hindsight, nothing but a funeral.
The funeral of an anachronistic regime, soaked in the foundations, now unable even to shore up some attempt to self-reform.
The story is often tragic, but sometimes not without irony. A month later, only a month, and this would have gone, the Wall was torn to pieces!
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