The Ghosts of Nazis and Stazi Past

I grew up believing that one day, a nuclear warhead from the USSR would land on the Air Force base not 30 miles from my home, and that I would die a slow painful death from radiation poisoning. We didn't need Chucky or Bride of Chucky or "Saw 5" to be scared: we had the KGB. Imagining being trapped behind the Iron Curtain, on the run, praying you'd make Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin without first getting a bullet in your back was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat. When I watched the Berlin Wall come down on CNN, I witnessed something that I never, in my lifetime, had I fathomed would be possible. Two weeks ago, I saw several sections of the Berlin Wall, standing where they would have stood 25 years ago in no-man's land, but this time surrounded by bustling shoppers, burdened with bags, rushing from the glamorous, glass train station to the Potsdamer Plaz mall. This area had been the busiest square in Europe pre-WWII, before being bombed out in air raids and left desolate for decades during the Cold War. I had never imagined I would see this place outside of the pages of a John LeCarre novel. The prosperity and glitz of post-unification is on display wherever you care to look. And yet there is enough evidence of the past to make me shiver as I passed scarred building facade, riddled with bullet holes, imagining what these walls would say if they could speak. When I passed Tempelhof Airport on our way into the city center, I saw both Hitler's vision for a grand and glorious reich and the Berlin Airlift. The Reichstag, standing near the massive memorial to the Jewish holocaust, stands as an eeire reminder of the glorious old Germany, post WWI Weimar Republic. The Brandenburg Gate, illuminated for nighttime and Christmas, recalled both John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan ordering Gorbachev to tear down the wall. In Dresden, I sensed the ghosts in the soot-blackened surfaces of so many baroque buildings and in the new Frauenkirche, rebuilt primarily by money raised in the US and Britain whose air forces destroyed the heart of Dresden in their firebombing in 1945. I heard the Bach Christmas Oratorio performed in the Frauenkirche; Bach himself played in the original Frauenkirche. Everywhere I looked on the road from Berlin to Dresden, I saw the stark, stripped down Soviet-style architecture, spruced up so it was less bleak (my favorite was an apartment building that had been painted bright yellow with a massive red lobster logo stenciled on the side), but still it was a reminder of the time when Germany was East and West. Then and now. Us and them. As much as we move on from the past, we don't; as F.Scott Fitzgerald says in The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boast against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."