Walking down many memory lanes

Cities such as Berlin have valuable lessons on how multiple histories can coexist in a single place

August 27, 2017 12:15 am | Updated 12:42 pm IST

Berlin skyline vintage vector engraved illustration hand drawn sketch

Berlin skyline vintage vector engraved illustration hand drawn sketch

Spending time in one of northern Europe’s big cities can be instructive in many ways. Once you get over the effects of long-lasting wealth on a society, the smooth, extensive transport systems, the latest technology in daily use, the plethora of goods, the wide choice of cuisines, the relative safety which women and children enjoy, the palpable good health of most of the people you see on the street and so on and so forth, other stuff comes to the fore.

Change and continuity

Having been in Berlin for the last few weeks, I’m once again struck by the continuity the urban landscape has with previous centuries. Standing at this or that U-Bahn or S-Bahn station on the metro network, one sees on the walls not only advertising imagery but huge black-and-white photographs of what the area around the station looked like earlier, in the 19th century, in the early years of the 20th century, mid-century, and more recently. It’s startling to see the huge church you’ve just walked past looking the same in black and white, except dotted around it are horse-carriages or cars from the 1930s. “Chalo”, you think subconsciously, “obviously a church or a monument would be preserved and kept protected from developers.” But then you see a street-scape and you recognise quite ordinary but beautiful buildings, a corner of a park or even a kiosk, and you find yourself thinking, “No, that would not have survived back home; someone would have tampered with it, erased it.”

Places like Venice or Paris are obvious outliers in a sense. For centuries, these cities have ingrained in their DNA the understanding that their USP is their glorious past, that they are what they are because tourists from all over the world come there to see and admire various ‘golden eras’ that adorn the city in the shape of the buildings, the squares, or the waterfronts. Berlin has also attracted people over the decades, starting from the latter part of the 19th century, but unlike Paris and Venice it took serious damage in the Second World War as the Allied bombers retaliated for the ravages the Nazi air force had visited on their cities. Unlike any other European city, Berlin was cut up after the war, first into four sectors and then into two. During the Cold War, for nearly half a century, the city was made schizophrenic by the Soviets and the Western powers, with West Berlin an outpost surrounded on all sides like an isolated rook on a chessboard. From 1961 the siege effect was intensified by the huge, ugly wall that sawed the city into two with a wide, barren no man’s land running through the middle like a dead river. And yet, all that has been absorbed as Berlin continues to transform.

Absorbed, digested, but somehow not erased . Over the last 150 years and more, Berlin has had huge ups and downs: the capital of the newly unified German state was established here; there was the pomp of the Kaisers; the radical scientists and the subversive, subterranean strata of artists and bohemians who worked here before the first World War; there was the humiliation of defeat in that first huge conflict and then the great flowering of the arts that followed in the ’20s and early ’30s; there was the ugly triumphalism of the Nazi era and its destruction, followed by the Cold War years and the three decades that have followed. Today, you can see traces of all these times.

Cookie-cutter homogeneity

What this brings home to an Indian born and bred in our major metros is that we, as a nation and society, have no value for anything but our ancient or medieval structures and even that is highly tenuous. As for our colonial past, the formative years of the Republic, and the first layers of our modern cities, we are happy to throw them into the dustbin and replace them with cookie-cutter, real-estate developer homogeneity. Now, it’s as if each generation is the first one, with nothing having come before except a fake, twisted notion of an ‘ancient culture’. Not only are we poor economically or in terms of health, we have also managed to impoverish ourselves in terms of memory: devastating large swathes of our heritage, wiping out the topographies that trace how we got from the past to where we are now.

It’s true there is only so much we can learn from the wealthy countries. Just as what has happened to the Indian urban landscape is complex, with each major metro and smaller town having its own struggles between preservation and real-estate depredation, between the need to protect ‘heritage’ and provide for the needs of a burgeoning population. But in all this, the tendency across every political party, municipal regime, State and central administration has been to avoid difficult decisions, jettison history, and allow the nexus of politicians and builders a criminally free hand. Even as we feel outrage at every precious ancient monument the Islamic State destroys in West Asia, perhaps one of the lessons we could learn from the multiple histories that coexist in cities like Berlin is that we ourselves must find feasible and sustainable ways to cease the carpet-bombing of our own history.

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