Concentrated Penmanship

Day five in Berlin.

Coming here, we were told we were going to fall in love with this city—but here’ how I feel: Berlin is the perfect mix of metropolitan and old-time. A Starbucks sits on a corner, with its trademark crisp white block letters and that green and white circle we see on every block at home. There it sits, busy, helping tired, thirsty tourists who have just returned from Brandenburger Tor –only a glace away. This paradox of old and new is entirely commonplace here and is something that I definitely enjoy in its irony and honesty. The people are striking and remarkable however I have yet to feel a connection with a stranger, which is something I yearn to experience daily. I feel that a city is defined by its inhabitants and my lacking ability to experience its character through a smile exchanged with the old man walking down the street in his black corduroy pants and tan sweater or through a conversation with the mother of the mushroom-headed boy in the overalls disappoints me greatly.

The Earth has given this city a gift though. It’s a pleasure to look at under a blue sky or when its blanketed with fog. When the TV Tower sticks its head above a white misty line, looking like it’s wearing a turtleneck that day, the city maintains its same tone. The river is hugged by kelly, ever, and forest greens that market the city’s natural potential, giving the gratuitously lathered coats of graffiti an appealing and poetic setting.

Here are the trees and the bushes, gapped by Germany’s clear and freshly tasting air. The mostly uninterrupted sun spaces itself through the patches of nothing in the urban dense greenery. This creates a web of shadows that blankets the buildings and the bench you’re sitting on; it’s on you hair and your shoulders and your clothes. You see the natural infrastructure projected onto the ground you step on.

This jungle experience is accented by the whites, pinks, yellows, and reds of Germany’s flowers. These colorful decorations lack petals but are rooted in centered hearts. They no longer have scent, but your brain creates the intense—almost sterile—spray paint smell as you glance at it. They sing to you through the urban (and U-bahn) forests. Alice was right: they’re the flowers and you most definitely could sit with them and talk to them for hours.

I’ve realized that the most I can learn about Berlin’s people is indirectly in this unique way of graffiti-communication. I love that. The people of Berlin, after everything they’ve been through, have so much to talk about and I love the way they talk about it. It’s fascinating. It’s universal. So I suppose I can learn that way however despite the lovely and meaningful understanding I’m adopting by talking to the flowers, it’s the mind to mind via eye to eye conversation I still wish I have the chance to experience.

And so we come here. To a place where flowers do not grow save for weeds prompting annoyance and the graffiti is not slathered on with sprayed paint speckles, it is remarkably sparse and expressed by the finger and foot prints dusted over this sadly beige terrain. Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp is the work of an artist who lost his pallet and thus had to work with dirt, varied in concentration so to fluctuate the shades. Its flat terrain mocks the dreams its inmates have of a prosperous exterior, “concentrating a group of societal unwanteds.” However for the guards, tainted in the minds with a life filled of propaganda, the outer limits of the camp were designed to give them an illusion of “everything is okay” once they left the gates.

I keep thinking, people actually died here. Actually. Right here. Never in my life have I ever been in a location which housed so much suffering. Lamp shades made of human skin. Blood stains on the hard stone floor. Four hundred bodies crammed into a building built for less than a hundred fifty. This happened here. They were interned, raped, lashed, killed, kept from killing themselves. They were gypsies, asocials, homosexuals, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, being punished for forgetful misdemeanors. They died here. Right here.

I have no interest in speaking at the moment. I feel as if my mouth will never open again – it’s warm and sticky inside and almost suctioned closed. I have never felt less talkative in my life. The interiors of these camps have no circulation whatsoever. The air is still underneath the roofs of the barracks but also simply within the gates. It is possible in my mind that the suffering of this location has made this place an isolated vacuum. It’s quiet but tells you hundreds of stories. I’m standing in these hallways with about twenty other tourists and it already feels cramped and claustrophobic and I can’t bring myself to imagine it twenty times so. I’m standing in a room and reading documented (and translated) quotes from inmates, reading that a man was brutally murdered right in the room. On the floor my feet are touching. Prisoners had to walk 18-25 miles in boots that didn’t fit them. “Today we are walking on roughly six tons of human ash.” It’s unreal. This was less than a lifetime ago.

The prisoners were already in here, so what is the motive for brutally killing random inmates? Were the Nazis just drunk with power? Driven by violence? Were they so sick to believe that these men were tainting their land? I honestly don’t understand: why keep most but kill some?

I suppose it’s impossible to question the logic practiced by the Nazis.