When I arrived in Europe, I put it down for a week. It seemed no longer appropriate, overly American at a time when the focus of our experience is Europe. As we have found ourselves driving East in Europe, it has found its way back to the top of my bag. Rainy days have made for good reading and writing. Traveling east in Europe feels like traveling west in the U.S. We drive away from the major cities into more open space across the continent, more unknown lands whose languages and native stories weren't taught in our schools.
One of Steinbeck's last chapters sounded a clarion call of familiarity at its first sentence. "While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school." There it was on page 249. I had never read this book before, nor realized that such a benign book as Travels with Charley, Steinbeck and his poodle, dealt with such situations of gravity.
I had read this chapter multiple times in its entirety twelve years earlier in the wooden chairs of the Amistad Center Research Library at Tulane University. Nothing in that library could leave the library's walls if you were a student. At that point, I was piecing together exactly what happened and why in the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools. It was one of those term papers that becomes far more than just about writing a paper and getting a good grade. The subject enveloped me against the backdrop of my own experience volunterring in the still deeply (but not by direct law) segregated New Orleans public schools. At the time, Steinbeck was an interesting source. Among news clippings and legal declarations and edicts, minutes from the school board, NAACP and state legislature meetings, there was Steinbeck. It was a curious account written by a passer-through who stayed no more than two hours in New Orleans to observe the chaos first-hand before driving on. And what were Steinbeck's opinions and pre-disposition? I didn't know much about him at the time, just that he was from Monterey/Salinas California. Still perhaps I don't. It was more of a literary account anyway. At best, it would make its way into my paper as a one or two sentence quotation describing the mobs or the mothers screaming invectives.
And when I came across this chapter in my travel book, I put it down for another time. It was a bit too grave for the ease and joy I was experiencing in Hamburg. But it sat there, awaiting inevitable deeper examination like the trip stones of Germany. These trip stones are no bigger than a two of clubs, bronze squares at the doorsteps of homes across Germany. Each has a Jewish name and dates inscribed, memorializing the lives of Jews who left home for their deaths in the Holocaust.
Yesterday, Annette and I explored Berlin, much the same way we do with our first full day in any city. We walked, a map sometimes looked at to guide us, teach us, but not restrict us. After the requisite visit to the historic city gate and surrounding buildings of the state, we walked to the Memorial to the Murdered European Jews. Here is one city block of different sized rectangular pieces of granite. Each is rectangular shaped and polished on a grid, both directions. It looks somewhat like an above-ground New Orleans cemetery, except with a uniformity and namelessness and facelessness. On the edges of the memorial, families sit on these sarcophagi-like pieces of stone, snacking, looking at maps, resting from the weight of sightseeing. But as we walk further in, they rise ten feet above our heads in all directions. The solemnity of the scene quickly crashes into playfulness, as people of all ages play hide and seek with varying levels of enthusiasm among the stones. The large and modern U.S. embassy seems to stand sentinel at one side, overlooking the memorial. The only discouragement of playfulness is on a small plaque at the entrance forbidding drinking alcohol, running and loud noise. But there is no enforcement. And the memorial stands across the street from where the Berlin Wall was no less than 22 years earlier. In its shadow, enforcement of such rules feels offensive.
As we walk on, we encounter a 10 meter long section of the wall that is still standing. It is an exhibit of sorts, with displays recounting some of the wall's history and the future plans for memorializing this history. The wall is concrete, maybe 18 inches thick, 10 or 12 feet in height. Like most things, it is much smaller in reality than imagination.
Throughout Germany, we have talked a bit about when the wall fell. It is one of those moments like when Kennedy was shot. People can recount exactly where they were. I was in Mr. Horowitz's social studies class, maybe 5th or 6th grade. I was ten at the time. I remember spending several weeks on the subject as Mr. Horowitz attempted to convey the significance of this event to disinterested middle schoolers. The Heidemann girls only remember David Hasselhof standing on the wall, singing in a jacket covered with lights. We laugh now at the choice of entertainment. Pink Floyd would have been a better fit, but perhaps they were no longer unified when Berlin was. Katrin told us at dinner Monday that older Germans in Hamburg regret not driving to Berlin to see the wall crumble themselves, see East Berlin, and experience history.
The wall's path now sits at the foot of huge modern office buildings like KPMG. Clearly, it became an architect's playground. And capitalism has prevailed.
The wall, like much of Berlin, is covered in graffiti. Much of it is unintelligible to an only English-speaking observer. "Love your enemies. It pisses them off," it says in one section. But the wall has been defiled in a way far more powerful, defiant and subtle than graffiti. In a true act of collective resistance, people from all walks of life, all reaches of the globe, have placed their discarded chewing gum on the wall. Thousands of pieces, mostly old chewing gum gray in color, decorate the concrete of the wall.
From the wall, we found a walking path through parks, past a performing arts center, under a six-story building with a mural on its side. The mural stands nearly 100 feet tall, with Hitler near its top masturbating, ejaculating missiles toward a business man holding onto a Mercedes sign while flying through the air, his briefcase blown open to reveal an AK-47. Less subtle than gum of graffiti, but a form of resistance nevertheless.
The path winds on to our current destination, the Jewish Museum. The building is made of dark metal with gashes for windows to suggest scarred skin. Before we enter, we stop for currywurst and a broccoli casserole of sorts to supply some stamina for the museum. Inside the Jewish Museum is a history of Jews in Germany, rought 1,950 years of history, told mostly chronologically. The museum has three intersecting corridors at its entrance--the axis of exile, the axis of death, and of continuity. Only the axis of continuity leads to the exhibits, up 100 stairs or so. The stairs continue up six of seven steps past the entrance into a blank wall. Empty walls are incorporated throughout the exhibits as a memorial of sorts to the many missing Jews.
The exhibit winds fromt the top to bottom of the building with highly interactive tales of great teachers and scholars, tradesman and merchants, horrible oppression, and Jewish life and culture. Individuals are highlighted through history, too many to name. One comes through the 20th century on the bottom floor to find the Holocaust had its roots long before Hitler was born. The museum presents a continuity of Jewish oppression in Germany, climaxing but not ending with the Holocaust. The chronology of events in the Holocaust I know well from my research for high school and college papers. The aftermath I do not. There were some moving videos that showed parts of the Auschwitz trials and interviews both with leaders of the efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice and secure reparations for those affected, as well as every day Germans on the street in the 1950s and 1960s. The Nuremberg trials were seen in Germany as the "victor's justice," and mostly not attended nor respected by many Germans. It wasn't until the German-led Auschwitz trials of 1961 that Germans showed the willingness to begin to enact justice for the horrors committed. I thought of Annette's work with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Mississippi and what the trial of Emmet Till's murderers nearly fifty years later must have been like. For as horrible as human beings can be, the power of reconciliation is incredible.
I awake late this morning to a rainy Berlin day with my mind on resistance and its many forms. In some ways, I even think the night life of Berlin, with its pumping bass among huge graffitied warehouses and clubs that don't open until after midnight and don't close until after sunrise, as a form of resistance. Closer to graffiti than chewing gum perhaps, but resistance nonetheless.
So I picked up Steinbeck and read what he had to say about Ruby Bridges and the mobs that challenged her and the people who watched them and the people who seemed to do nothing. And I know nothing but that the journey is unfolding as it should and their is insight in the themes and patterns of it.
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