Not Alone in Berlin
Dark Angels co-founder, John Simmons, reflects on the recent Dark Angels trip to Berlin for ‘Walking with Words’, a four-day writing workshop exploring Berlin based on his poem ‘Berliners’.
With our guide to Berlin in 1933 - Stefan Zollhauser
On the Sunday, the final day of four in our ‘Walking with words’ visit to Berlin, we took the S-Bahn out to the suburb of Wannsee. There we visited the Wannsee Konferenz, the villa where in 1942 a group of Nazis gathered to sign off ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’. Their answer to that question was the Holocaust, and plans were laid out in the coldest language of bureaucracy for mass deportations to concentration camps where Jews, gypsies and other minorities would be starved to death or executed by gas and buried in mass graves. More than 80 years later, shivers run through our bodies as we read the information panels on the walls, and the documents from the time in this room – the room where such sadistic decisions were made with such a void of human feeling.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of all was the agenda for the meeting. Item 1 was to agree the decision and then the only item to follow it was ‘breakfast’. In this way they even provided an incentive to decide the matter swiftly with minimal discussion.
If the Nazis had allowed no space for words, we were stunned speechless too. Fortunately I had some words previously written in my poem Berliners, and we went outside as a Dark Angels group of nine to stand on the terrace overlooking the misty lake where I read the section on Wannsee. And perhaps the one important word we all took away from there was simply “Remember”. Never has it been more important to remember what happens when ordinary people find it easier to turn away from compassion and kindness, allowing the cruelty of authoritarian rule to dictate the fate of its own citizens. As we stood there I thought of what is happening in the world today, how dangerously we are flirting with a revival of far-right ideology – in the USA, the UK, in Europe, all around the world.
About to go down into the underground tunnels in East Berlin where people dug tunnels to escape to the West
We were lucky that my co-host Catherine Ann Berger had booked for us after that to visit the nearby villa of the artist Max Liebermann. Max was another victim of the Nazis but one who saw his own salvation and that of the world in the art he created for his villa and in the gardens that he planted around it. After the fraught emotion of Wannsee Konferenz, the Liebermann villa was a welcome, depressurising refuge, a place to read the final pages of Berliners and bring this memorable Dark Angels visit to a close.
On the previous days we had seen Berlin on foot, on a boat, on U-Bahn trains. We had visited sites where the Nazis had engineered their rise to power in 1933; we visited the historic Berliner Ensemble (Bertolt Brecht’s theatre) to see an extraordinary musical production of Kafka’s The Trial; we had gone down into the underground tunnels where Berliners from East Berlin had risked (and often lost) their lives after the Russians erected the Wall overnight in 1961; we walked beside remnants of the Wall, looking at powerful photographs on the sides of buildings along the route; we visited Bebelplatz and read poetry at the monument that marks the infamous burning of books by Nazis before they went on to sidle into power after the burning of the Reichstag. We talked, we walked, we wrote a little, we enjoyed the comfort of friendship as a necessary antidote to the historic horrors we had seen.
And as we were saying our goodbyes to Berlin, I handed out flower seeds for the group to plant and for them to bloom in spring, inscribing on the envelope the single word: “Remember”.
John Simmons
John Simmons’ poem Berliners is available from Paekakariki Press.