From the New York Times story by Michael Slackman:
Nazi Kitch
"This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation (Volksgemeinschaft) and Crime,” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.
Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler. But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past."
Currywurst is more than just a sausage: it's one of life's experiences--in Germany, at least, where you can buy one practically anywhere at any time of day. A currywurst doesn't cost much and doesn't take long to eat. Just long enough, in fact, for a chat with other currywurst connoisseurs. Currywurst may be everywhere, but it is always special. This urban snack has cult status and econmic importance. Its place in German culure is eulogized in songs, films and literature. Our exhibition looks at this culinary institution from many sides (or should we say ends?)...
So begins the main exhibit at the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin. This was my final museum, and now I'm back in my hotel by the Tegel airport.
If you go to Berlin (or anywhere in Germany, really) you must eat currywurst. Even if you're not sure you like it the first time, it gets into your soul. I don't feel the same about Doener Kebabs or Turkish Pizza or Jaegerwurst. Currywurst, despite the fact that it's kinda disgusting, is uniquely deee-licious.
The museum itself? Inspired. It touches on all aspects of currywurst kultur. Jokes about currywurst, what the inside of a fast-food cart (Imbiss) looks like when it's properly tricked-out, how "green" currywurst is because it's served in a paper dish that breaks down in the environment. In fact, the only element that was missing was the spiritual one, and I imagine that the curators take it for given that any visitor--anyone who would take time out of a busy schedule and slap down $12--probably already has a spritual relationship to currywurst.
They only sell their t-shirts in sizes L, XL, and XXL.
Some folks think that currywurst is just katsup and curry powder on a brat, but that's just wrong. There are a whole set of ingrediants (and I got the recipe if you want it) that go into the sauce. The origins of this gastranomic triumph have long been disputed. Some argue that it was Hamburg's Lena Bruecker who accidentally "discovered" the sauce in 1947 when she tripped and fell while carrying a mixture of black-market acquired ingrediants.
The museum takes the position, however, that it was Herta Heuwer of Berlin who created the sauce in '49. She refused to surrender her recipe.
A moment of silence please for the Gnädige Frau Herta Heuwer. She has given a great gift to humanity.
During the war, Hitler had three sets of Flakturm (anti-aircraft towers) constructed in order to ward off allied air attacks. The idea was to pair up a set of 8 high-velocity anti-aircraft guns with a high-tech radar array, and then create “windows” of high explosive that would knock down any plane that flew into them. Any look at a postwar map of the city reveals how ineffective the monster structures actually were. The Berlin Underworld Association looks after the tower in Humbolthain and offers guided tours as well. The tower was the last of three built, and unlike the others, it was not entirely demolished after the war. The French brought down half the structure, but the remaining battlements overlooked an important S-Bahn route, so they're still standing. Rather than get into the technical specifications of the thing, I'll simply include some images from the war.
This is the Berlin Zoo tower at the end of the battle.
Here are soldiers drilling on the roof of the tower.
What is left of the tower is in bad shape. Standing at the entrance you can see that the facade was heavily shot-up by Soviet ground forces as they tried to work their way from the north into the city. By the time Berlin surrendered, there were thousands of civilians hiding in the tower, without access to fresh water or sufficient sanitation. Inside the tower, staircases are collapsed and there are holes dropping down 30 meters or more. On the tour we wore construction helmets and were carefully shepherded through areas that seemed less stable. The tour was first rate. Our guide combined terrific story-telling with clear explanations of the details of the tower's construction, capabilities, and demolition. I think this would be a great tour for our kids, but the tower is closed to the public during the winter months, as it serves as a bat sanctuary. If the bats are disturbed during the winter months, they won't return to hiberation and then they'll die.
Today, the face of the tower doubles as a rock-climbing wall.
On the 27th, Joon (a visiting friend) and I met a local woman in her borough--Neukoelln. Joon and I had the morning to ourselves and he was still recovering from jetlag, so we walked the neighborhood just north of the Landwehr Canal near Görlitzer Park. Like Friedrichshain to the east acoss the Spree, it's a colorful, energetic neighborhood. We drank coffee across from a mosque and then visited the Kreuzberg City Museum.
I loved the exhibits--they were simple, yet very effective. I regret that I brought no camera with me. Kreuzbergers take pride in their migrant heritage. The first wave of migrants were Huguenots fleeing from religious persecution in France during the 18th century, the immediate postwar period saw an influx of Germans from Pomerania and Silesia, following the construction of the Berlin Wall there were Guest-Workers from Turkey and Vietnam as well. The most recent have been asylum-seekers from the war in Bosnia. The woman at the museum who led me around was muslim and wore a head-scarf.
The temporary exhibit concerned working class resistence to the Nazis during the war. Kreuzberg was a highly industrialized working-class district in the city. In 1848 rebelling workers actually smashed steam engines in a Luddite fury. This was an important year in the history of USM because it inspired Peter Engelmann to leave illiberal Germany for a more democratic America.
Kreuzberg was the center of Werner Siemens' (inventor of the Dynamomachine und Starkstromtechnik) business activities from 1847. The borough is also known for its breweries, textiles production, Bechstein pianos, and it's many publishing companies: Mosse, Scherl, and Ullstein (pubisher of All Quiet on the Western Front). During the 1919 Spartacist uprising, the Newspaper quarter was the site of heavy fighting between revolutionaries and the government.
Turks began to arrive in Kreuzberg as Guest-workers after the construction of the Berlin Wall. The first immigrants were young, professionally-oriented, secular women. Things have changed a great deal since then, and now many women wear some kind of headscarf. There is a general trend among young, born-in-the-west muslims towards greater piety (sometimes even Islamicist extremism) as well as ethnic nationalism. That is something that only really began in the 90s, and seems to reflect a widespread development throughout Western Europe. Ian Buruma analyses the causes and consequences of this second-generation “backlash” against assimiliation in his book Murder in Amsterdam, which focuses on the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2005. Only last week, a group of immigrant muslim youths attacked a Jewish dance troupe in Hannover, throwing stones and shouting epithets.
Neukoelln is no longer a manufacturing neighborhood, it is increasingly attracting young artists and other creative types. On Sunday Christina wanted to take us to "48 Hours of Neukoelln"--a gallery walk. Unfortunately, we sat down for a bite of lunch when we first met here, and there were only a few minutes to walk the neighborhood before all the galleries closed and the tattooed masses all sat down to watch Germany defeat England in the World Cup. The Germans set off fireworks whenever they score a goal, so it could get pretty noisy. Also, after this trip, I don't think I'll ever be able to imagine soccer without the constant, numbing buzzing of the massed vuvuzelas. We did what everyone does on a Sunday... lunch, Kaffee und Kuchen, Biergarten.
I took a ride out to Karlshorst on the afternoon of the 22nd. It's one of many sites dedicated to the war. Karlshorst is a quiet little borough in the former East, and other than a small market selling fresh fruit and fast food, there's not much else to see. After a long, warm walk, I arrived at the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. It's an unassuming building that once administered a school for German combat engineers. Between 1967 and 1994, however, it was known as the Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War-- the Kapitulationsmuseum, for short.
In 1945, on the night of 8-9 May, the remaining representatives of the German military met with Allied field officers to sign the surrender documents ending the war in Europe. This building is as significant to the history of the World War as Appomattox Courthouse is to the American Civil War. For a long time after that, it served as the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. SOVIET TRIUMPHALISM: 1967-1988
For almost three decades, the museum told a heroic, triumphalist story of the war. This was during the first years of Brezhnev's Secretariat, and the Communists increasingly relied on nationalism and patriotism to maintain unity in the Soviet Union. It was also around this time that the 5-cycle film series Liberation appeared in theaters throughout the Eastern Bloc. (I've posted a clip of the film as well--it's about 10 minutes long--look for the characterization of the Russian soldiers, a tougher, more fearless, more humane bunch of warriors you'll never see... )
However, since 1989 and especially since 1990, it was clear that the Museum would soon belong to Germany. Incredibly, the Germans and Russians decided early in the process to create a totally bi-national museum. It's a truly collective historical event, and deserved a collective response. All the text is in (only) German and Russian, and I was fortunate that I know enough of the latter language to pick out familiar words in context. MISSION ESTABLISHED IN THE LENIN SAAL
The old museum's mission was "to encourage a feeling of soviet patriotism and proletarian internationalism" as well as "propagating the soviet way of life, the freedom-loving policies of the Communist Party of the USSR and the soviet government, international education, strengthening of friendship and collective work with the producers of the GDR, and military brotherhood with the forces of the National People's Army of the GDR". In short, the museum served a deeply political purpose. The displays were intended to evoke emotional responses, especially for Russian soldiers who were the intended visitors. "The soviet victory represents the achievements of a fighting morality, that of the spirit of Lenin, which soviet soldiers allowed to shape all their actions." This attitude was represented visually as well. Originally, the first hallway was the "Lenin-Hall" and provided a history of Lenin and socialism, rather than addressing the war itself.
MUSEUM AGAINST WAR
The new museum is, instead, clearly intended as a "museum against war". With an eye firmly set on depicting historical truth as closely as possible, Russian and German curators determined that "neither war nor victory should be heroicized; rather this war would have to be shown in all of its horror". The museum would no longer be a "Ruhmeshalle" or Hall of Honor to the Red Army.
Just how complicated such a process could have been is easy to imagine. Most likely, a long tradition of explicitly articulated pacifist ideals, combined with years of German Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (grappling with the past) allowed both parties to embrace the idea. When one considers how controversial the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian was in the mid-90s, or how terrifically controversial Tom Hank's comments about his miniseries, The Pacific have been, the speed with which Germans and Russians arrived at a common vision is impressive. HIGHLIGHTS A multimedia set-up. This American college student isn't getting much from it, as none of the kids on the tour spoke German, but whatever. I listened to Himmler's Posener speech from '43 where he acknowledges the extermination of the Jews. I didn't realize that it actually existed in recorded form!
Visually, there was also much to offer. There were some truly unique artifacts, like the straw boots that German soldiers had to wear to survive the winter in Stalingrad, or the chess pieces carved by German prisoners of war. You'll note that the white pieces are farmers (pawns), Red Army soldiers (bishops), and a worker (king) while the black pieces depict bourgeoisie (pawns), factory owners (bishops) and the Czar (king).Finally, there were plenty of artifacts pointing to the horror of war. Childrens' shoes from Treblinka, for example, or these notes from a doctor in the Charite Hospital in Berlin confronted with multiple cases of rape perpetrated by soviet troops.
TANKS, TANKS, AND ONLY TANKS
All of this was in stark contrast to the Tank Museum at Munster. Certainly, the museum curators sought to address some of the larger implications of war. However, there were only a handful of textual commentaries on the walls, with titles such as "Wartime Fates (of individual soldiers/their loved ones) or "Flight and Displacement (Vertreibung)". Also, the war in Russia was correctly identified as a Vernichtungskreig (war of annihilation)--important background to placing the war in context. At the end of the tour, I asked a woman in the gift shop if they had any literature about the museum (Karlshorst had a great text that included a discussion of the creation and purpose of the museum). It was telling that they had a book that did little more than list the vehicles and pair them with a set of mechanical statistics. Ultimately, the museum is a collection of artifacts rather than an attempt to further come to terms with history, and in that sense it stands out as unique during this trip.
Here's a special "see-through" tank used in the East German army to train troops. I must admit, it was pretty cool.
