exhibited just the right amount of embarrassment,
and so parted friends.
3.3:Arrested Development
There is something about the very idea of a city
which is central to the understanding of a planet
like Earth, and particularly the understanding of
that part of the then-existing group-civilization
[*5*] which called itself the West.That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the
time of the Wall.
Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I
experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at
this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I
recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in
any normal, chronological sequence.My only
excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and
yet so bizarrely representative - it was like
something unreal; an occasionally macabre
Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real
world (and the realpolitik world), so much a
crystallization of everything these people had
managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate,
condemn and worship in their history that it
defiantly transcended everything it exemplified,
and took on a single - if multifariously faceted -
meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement
no city in its right mind would want or be able to
arrive at.I said we were more interested in Earth's
art than anything else; very well, Berlin was its
masterpiece, an equivalent for the ship.
I remember walking round the city, day and night,
seeing buildings whose walls were still pocked
with bullet holes from a war ended thirty-two
years earlier.Lit, crowded, otherwise ordinary
office buildings looked as though they'd been
sandblasted with grains the size of tennis balls;
police stations, apartment blocks, churches, park
walls, the very sidewalks themselves bore the
same stigmata of ancient violence, the mark of
metal on stone.
I could read those walls; reconstruct from that
wreckage the events of a day, or an afternoon, or
an hour, or just a few minutes.Here the machine-
gun fire had sprayed, light ordinance like acid
pitting, heavier guns leaving tracks like a
succession of pickaxe blows on ice; here shaped-
charge and kinetic weapons had pierced - the holes
had been bricked up - and sprayed long rays of
jagged holes across the stone; here a grenade had
exploded, fragments blasting everywhere, shallow
cratering the sidewalk and spraying the wall (or
not; sometimes there was untouched stone in one
direction, like a shrapnel shadow, where perhaps a
soldier left his image on the city at the moment of
his death).
In one place all the marks, on a railway arch, were
wildly slanted, cutting a swathe across one side of
the arch, hitting the pavement, then slanting up on
the other side of the alcove.I stood and wondered
at that, then realized that three decades before
some Red Army soldier had probably crouched
there, drawing fire from a building across the
street I turned, and could even see which window
I took the West-operated U-bahn under the wall,
cutting across from one part of West Berlin to the
other, from Hallesches Tor to Tegel.At
Friedrichstrasse you could quit the train and enter
East Berlin, but the other stations under East were
closed; guards with submachine guns stood
watching the train rush through the deserted
stations; an eerie blue glow lit this film-set of a
scene, and the train's passing sent ancient papers
scattering, and lifted the torn corners of old posters
still stuck to the wall.I had to make that journey
twice, to be sure I hadn't imagined it all; the other
passengers had looked as bored and zombie-like
as underground passengers usually do.
There was something of that frightening, ghostly
emptiness about the city itself at times.Although so
surely enclosed, West Berlin was big; full of parks
and trees and lakes - more so than most cities - and
that, combined with the fact that people were still
leaving the city in their tens of thousands each year
(despite all sorts of grants and tax concessions
designed to persuade them to stay) meant that
while there was the same quality of high capitalist
presence I'd been immersed in in London and
sensed in Paris, the density was much reduced;
there simply wasn't the same pressure to develop
and redevelop the land.So the city was full of those
shot-up buildings and wide open spaces; bomb
sites with shattered ruins on the skyline, empty-
windowed and roofless like great abandoned ships
adrift on seas of weeds.Alongside the elegance of
the Kurfustendamm, this legacy of destruction and
privation became just another vast art work, like
the quaintly shattered steeple of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church, set at the end of the K-
damm like a folly at the end of an avenue of trees.
Even the two rail systems contributed to the sense