Berlin

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Hello All,

Berlin has been awesome, but I am ready to push on. Tomorrow I hike to Potsdam and then head west. I have been walking around and exploring the museums, history and districts of Berlin. I had planned to post something about the architecture of Berlin, collective memory through monuments, ect. But the subject is to large for the simple treatment I could give it. So instead here is the condensed version about one momument.

The East Side Gallery

The longest perserved section of the Berlin Wall is the East Side Gallery, where the wall was transformed into a canvas for over a hundred artists from around the world to reflect on the wall's collapse and the dawn of the new era. So in 1990, artists decorated a section of wall with murals and paintings, which would have previously been a murderable offense in East Berlin. Today, the wall is covered in graffitti, ranging from simple tags, to complex creations that eclipse the paintings underneath. It blurs the lines of "art" and "vandalism." Most of the tags are names, dates, and homelands, but there is also snippits that add up to an ongiong dialog about the meaning of the wall and the cause of human liberty. Thus the wall has become an ongoing discussion, in graphic and written notes form, in a multitude of languages.

By far the most overarching theme was "Love conqueres Wall." This was displayed in a variety of moving words and images, reflected in both the art and graf.

The other strikeing issues was where people called for action. Israel was a popular candidate, logically so as it is one of the only places in the world that still engages in this form of subjegation. Tibet, Xinjiang and suprisingly, Hong Kong were also very vocally supported. The HK graf made the point (although moot for the next 40 years) that they had been fallen behind a wall while the world watched.

Conspicuouly absent was the usual litany of American wrongs, the walls we have built. Such an obvious target usually gets hit, and certainly Berlin's graf and gallery artists in other places have not spared us their criticism nor their support (of Obama). But here, in this mile long of gallery, an ongoing artistic discussion over the years by thousands, the USA is largely sacrosanct.

The reason is that we stood by Berlin. The Cold War was real here, and JFK's statement that "all free men are citizens of Berlin" was no idle speech making. It mattered far more than his gaff at the end. "American Imperialism" was a joke compared to the systemitized oppression the wall and the East German system represented.

That is our legacy here. Can we ever hope that so honoring an expression of spraypaint will ever adorn the walls of the Green Zone?

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