The door to the sleeping compartment on the train from Krakow crashed open and a shouted voice barked out a warning. «Achtung! Berlin!» No sooner were the words launched at my travelling companion and me than the guard stalked off to repeat the procedure at the next room down the train car’s aisle.
It was a cold late autumn morning in 1992 and I’d arrived in Berlin for the first time.
I was studying archaeology in Rome at the time, and my friend John had persuaded me to take a week’s trip to what we still called «Eastern Europe» in those days. We started in Vienna, stopped in Budapest, a city which struck us as exotically still communist (the red stars still on the trains, the old money, and the impossibly wide streets where we stayed made lasting impressions) and were entranced by Krakow.
We had decided to complete our trip by making a 24-hour visit to Berlin for little other reason than it was there and had an easy connection to Rome. As we stumbled out of East Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, today’s Ostbahnhof, into the wan morning light, we blinked at the desolate scene before us. The old station and the few battered brick buildings around us, along with what appeared to be a remnant of the Berlin Wall, painted a bleak picture. In those pre-internet days, as a couple of 20-year-old archaeology students, we had little idea what we were looking at. Ironically perhaps, to people like us who were used to digging around the ruins of buildings millennia old in Italy, everything seemed too new, merely beaten-down products of the 20th century. Feeling like we had little else to do, we eventually found our way to the Victory Column in the Tiergarten and decided to climb to the top.
As we climbed up the stairs, I fumbled around in my bag for a cassette tape I had picked up in Budapest. I had no idea what was on it, so I stuck it in my Walkman and pushed play as we reached the top. The vista was unexpectedly striking, with the Brandenburg Gate in the middle distance and the city center rising behind it. Absurdly, at that very moment when Berlin’s form was imprinting itself on my mind, the music kicked in and as I stood atop a column in the former West Berlin looking into the ex-East Berlin, the sounds of Erasure’s tune «Reunion» came blasting into my ears. It was a moment of almost ridiculous serendipity and the memory of it has stayed with me for well over three decades now.
And that proved to be Berlin in a nutshell. The city still has this almost bizarre ability to create or maybe it’s better to say, to enable these moments of poetry, where memories can be made that will last a lifetime. Berlin is rarely mentioned for its beauty, although it has its moments, especially with the reconstruction in the city bringing back some of the elegance visible in old pictures from before 1945. But Berlin is always mentioned as a place that has the power to create special moments, moments of meaning and moments of absurdity, of excitement and discovery. It’s a place where you come to experience life as much as to look at relics of the past. That moment atop the column turned out to have been the perfect introduction to one of the world’s great destinations.
Cumulatively, that trip to the former Warsaw Pact nations changed the course of my life. What had been until then just current events – the fall of the Berlin Wall was something I had noticed but not cared much about, it was just «the news» whereas I was gripped by tales of Greek temples and Egyptian pyramids – became for me an entirely new world, a vividly alive Europe that I had never encountered before. Although archaeology is still an interest of mine today, I’ve made the study of Central and Eastern Europe my profession as well as my passion since that trip.
I think that ultimately is the point of travel. We visit places like Berlin not just to see the sights, but to engage in conversations with the past and with other cultures. Through these interactions, we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Something of that is what I experienced during my first brief stay in the city that made the 20th century.
Today, all these decades later, I still find myself in that neighborhood around the Ostbahnhof. The area has become somewhat gentrified and is festooned with newly built high-rises and blocks of flats. Yet those once derelict old brick buildings I remember are still there, spruced up, but still retaining their Kaiser- Wilhelm-era essence. I sometimes smile, remembering that very first impression. No, they’re not old by Rome’s standards, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have big stories to tell. Character and age are not always correlated.
Berlin today still has that power to transform lives. It’s a global city with a unique character. When you visit, rest assured that if you listen closely enough and open yourself up to what the place has to offer, you stand every chance of having moments of travel magic, as I did in long ago 1992.
