Ein Herz fur Kultur!

I sit slightly sitting, merely laying on a blue hammock held by yellow poles in the middle of an artificial sand bank in the heart of industrial Berlin. This place looks how I imagine Mexico to appear – immensely colorful with shadows dancing amidst the sand in the breeze. Artistic graffiti, the kind you would give a prize to, lines every surface of this place and chill “mm ba da” music pays from a speaker in the tree behind me. It’s a club: a bar, a soccer field, volleyball court, kids in their swimsuits, sanded ground…and it just feels so relaxing and forced-natural but in a good way… but the thing is that buildings surround this odd sanctuary and you can tell the locals appreciate its existence so much it’s a shame to even imagine it’s to be torn down soon.

From it, I walk the sand out of my shoes to a dusty corner with less impressive graffiti against a wall with a rounded top. There. I write this literally against the Berlin Wall. This is shocking me to the point of thought-induced goose bumps.

It’s so moving. Here is this thing that literally ruined people’s lives. Split them apart. Fired them. Mocked them with its hard gray existence. Here it is right in front of me. It’s almost like looking at something like racism or homophobia. Classism. Sexism. Oppression. Genocide. This wall is segregation in its physical body. And it’s right here in front of me, staring me down. But I am the powerful one because though this wall’s grey skin has been honored with the paint of hired hands, one which has ended up recently on a canvas of mine as well, it is destroyed. Honored, but down. Recognized but lives only through memory now. Here it is, but here it isn’t.

Now sitting at the end of a walkway’s elevated stop which towers above a lower path on the other side, my legs hang along its taller half. I feel more than complacent. Somber. Calm. My serenity makes me feel as if the beauty and silence, wind and grass, is almost owed to a site devoted to remembering something so intensely opposite. This war memorial stands for everything counter of what I feel and I wonder if what I feel is reaction to an intentional counteractive design.

Bodies that I recognize by silhouette or decoration I’ve located walking far into the park and as the sun fills my page, a floater smoothes its path along the surface, causing me to glance up. The land before me calls so I stop writing and walk, barefoot so I experience a fraction of the pain necessary for this site to be in tact, thinking about honor and pain and how the two interact.