Berlin And Beyond. Broken Promised Lands

Berlin And Beyond. Broken Promised Lands

BERLIN IN LATE APRIL, SUNNY IN A wintry way, a spritz of rain, a South African Australian wrestling with a lifetime’s demons: sweetly, many of the particularities of my Cape Town childhood are there – the milk-rice my mother made my German father as a treat, for example, was echoed in the supermarket, milchreis, milchreis everywhere, and the men’s manicure sets he was partial to and kept in his bedside table were there, at the Sunday neighbourhood flea market. But at the flea market too, were some people of a certain age (I found myself doing the calculations all the time) selling antique jewellery, and I wondered where it came from. Contradictions, loving the language of the émigré who bought their salt pretzels from the German bakery in Cape Town, but shuddering still at its associations.

On arrival, my friend who picked me up (who had confessed some time ago, in sunny Sydney, that his parents were Nazis) drove straight to the Olympic Stadium where Herr Hitler had held his rallies. From there, since I expressed no preference and had never heard of it, it was off to Gleis 17, the train platform from whence Jews were sent to Auschwitz and other camps, and from there it’s a blur of monument after monument for the rest of the week. And still I didn’t see them all: the restored synagogues, the infamous bunker, and all those pavements with embedded name plaques of their one-time Jewish residents.