The Thin Edge – Ruchir Joshi* / The Telegraph India
History makes fools out of pompous and vainglorious leaders and regimes. If there’s one city that drives home this point today, it is Berlin. Sitting here, it makes for odd watching as white supremacists openly wave Nazi swastikas in torchlight rallies in Charlottesville. The first thought that comes is that these are bitter people who have let irrational hatred climb over them. The second thought is that this mentality is purely evil, with the attendant question – will humanity ever be free of this kind of thinking? The third thought – more a realization – is that this is what happens when a country fails to educate its youngsters properly; that this evil, this hatred, has been built upon a deep foundation of ignorance; that this mentality is a result of a deep ignorance that has been cultivated by the powers that be over a long period of time; that it has suited succeeding generations of politicians in the richest country in the world to keep a large section of their population mired in an abject poverty of knowledge; that this poverty of knowledge is about being walled off equally from history, geography, economics, science and rationality.
In terms of history, even Arnold Schwarzenegger gets it. By no stretch of the imagination a liberal or a lefty, Schwarzenegger nevertheless has this to say to the American neo-fascists: “Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause. Believe me, I knew the original Nazis. I was born in Austria in 1947, shortly after the Second World War. I was surrounded by broken men, men who came home from the war filled with shrapnel and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you, that these ghosts that you idealize spent the rest of their lives living in shame. And right now they are resting in hell.” In Berlin, in certain parts of the city, at certain corners, you can still sense these evil ghosts, but you can also sense their defeat, their destruction, the fact, as Schwarzenegger puts it, that they belong on the “trash heap of history”.
Walking down the wide central boulevards of Berlin you can imagine, if you try, the huge Nazi rallies, the phalanxes of panzers clanking past, giving Hitler their salute, the fighter planes, of what was then the most powerful air force in the world, growling past in formation above. You can hear, if you want, the huge crowds roaring approval of their Führer. As you look at a large, wind-battered carving of a Nazi eagle perched on the side of a Reich-era building, you can smell the arrogance but also the fear that arrogance was designed to generate in the populace. If you look at the massive buildings, some from the 18th and 19th centuries, some from the time of Albert Speer, you can half-close your eyes and see draped down the walls the huge Nazi flags they so loved at the time. If someone takes you around the city, you can still see the bullet marks on some buildings, the restored synagogues that they had burnt down, the spot where they killed a resistance man or woman, the square with the S-bahn bridge where they lined up the homosexuals and machine-gunned them.
And then, if you allow yourself to imagine it, you can also see the dreadful, barren winter of the soul that followed the destruction of the Third Reich: the hungry kids roaming in the rubble, the aftermath of the mass rape of German women, the lower-ranking Nazi murderers – having thrown off their fancy, black SS uniforms as if they were on fire – skulking in rags in cold apartments, the higher ranking killers hanging by the noose or living out their lives surrounded by defeat, ignominy and the grey walls of Spandau prison, sometimes for as long as 50 years.
If that is not enough, this is a city in which you can also see the ghosts of another kind of fascism, the one that replaced the Nazi regime in East Germany and East Berlin. The trace of the Wall cuts through the city, embedded in the cobblestones. The old Soviet monuments haven’t been destroyed, like many Nazi buildings they also have been left there as a history lesson for coming generations, as if to say, “This, too, was what we once were, though we are very different now.”
There are neo-Nazis in Berlin, of course, but they are in a tiny minority. There are still political parties that hold on to the old Soviet communist ideology, but they are marginal. Hitler’s homophobia and that of the Soviet bloc are dead in Berlin. At Tempelhof, the huge aerodrome built by Hitler, Göering and Speer as the headquarters of the Nazi air force, young men lie on the decommissioned grass kissing each other, other youngsters of all ethnicities skateboard on the decommissioned tarmac, Turkish families do barbecue cookouts, Syrian refugees live in the massive buildings alongside artists’ studios, children run around chasing kites, someone flies a toy drone. In the maze of the Holocaust Memorial built right next to the Brandenburg Gate, people wander through the grey slabs, others sit in contemplation, while, again, children play hide and seek among the asymmetrical rows. On a U-Bahn a young mother, possibly Vietnamese, kisses her kids goodbye and gets off the train, leaving the roughly seven-year-old daughter to escort the perhaps four-year-old son to wherever they need to go. In the same carriage, two old guys, in another time and culture you’d call them hobos, hold up their beer bottles and sing drunkenly, one of them dancing with his equally scruffy dog. They bother no one and no one minds them; it takes all sorts to make up the world that is Berlin in 2017.
It’s not that the city is idyllic or perfect. People are gruff, often quite rude and, unlike this warm summer mood, in winter everyone is far more closed off from one another. House prices are going up, the poor are poor, even in Berlin, and the refugees coming in from the Middle East will bring as yet unknown changes to the social fabric. In the coming elections there might be gains for the soft-fascists of the Alt-Deutschland party and/or the doctrinaire, semi-communist Die Linke. Violence is never far away in a big city and the other day the 21-year-old daughter of a German friend got punched in the face while being robbed. The point is, for a city that has been battered so hard by history, Berlin at this moment is a place of remarkable warmth and easy-going, non-judgmental interaction between all varieties of humans. A Bong artist friend living in Neukölln describes his neighbourhood with love and no little Calcutta nostalgia: ‘Jaanish toh, eikhaane ektu, kirom ekta purono Jodhpur Park para type vibe achhey.’
As Trump continues to equivocate about his neo-Nazi supporters, pushing his little white supremacist foot deeper and deeper into his mouth, as Modi chants hypnotic lies from the ramparts of the Red Fort, doing his own equivocations and fake-rebukes of the gau rakshak goons he has empowered, as the government keeps increasing the quantity and size of the national flag that the RSS-BJP have always held in contempt, as the RSS shakhas do their own version of the Nazi salute they’ve always admired so much, there is some consolation in wandering the streets of a town like Berlin. Looking around you feel assured that history is waiting quietly for the Trumps and the Modis, just as it waited for the cruel clown-emperors who once ruled this city.
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* Ruchir Joshi is an Indian writer, a filmmaker and a columnist for The Telegraph, India Today as well as other publications. He is best known for his debut novel titled The Last Jet-Engine Laugh.
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