10 September 2010
Bebelplatz
No word from the Village, or from our network of agents up there in Michigan, though I did get a note from my sister at midnight, Alaska-time, so the day may have passed without execution of the Secret Plan. I don't know.
I do know that the last week- can it only have been that long?- was one of the longest in my life. It had been high summer when I left, and now I feel the lovely cool caress of Fall on my cheek. It is disorienting beyond words.
It brought the elasticity of time back to me like the snapping of a rubber band. I was cool last in Berlin, in the elastic time of a blitz tour of a town mighty and abject all at once, playful and horrifying by turns.
My associate had returned to class after a delirious few days careening around town. I was on my own for the afternoon, and decided to explore Mitte, the central district of the German capital, which had once been the edge of East Berlin.
My steps took me along the Unter den Linden, crossing the great museum squares to the south, and past the grand Opera House. The Commies, for all their flaws, did a better job of restoring the city the way it looked than the Westies, who were determined to reconstruct their chunk of the ravaged city as a testament to modernism.
There is a square to the west of the State Opera building, which once took its name from it. Currently, it is named the Bebelplatz, which sounds to my un-Germanic ears like the word “bible,” and thus derived from what happened here.
That is incorrect. The square by the Opera and in front of St. Hedwig's Cathedral is actually named for August Bebel, a founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the days of the Kaiser.
I saw a few people in knots in the center of the square and wandered over. There are two bronze tablets set into the stone, and a glass plate that offers a glimpse into a room of book-shelves in ghostly white, empty.
Bebelplatz- then Opernplatz- was where members of the Sturm Abteilungen, SS, Nazi students and Hitler Youth groups burned around 20,000 books on this spot. It was the evening of May 10th, 1933.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels egged them on, declaring the works of Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and hundreds of other authors were un-German.
The memorial was designed by Micha Ullman. The words on the tablets are from Heinrich Heine: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" (in English: "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people").
I don’t know about that, but May is cool in north Germany, just as this September is cool in Washington. It is still warm down south, where that preacher is egging on the Islamic world, threatening to burn their holy books.
The latest word in the week-long saga is that he may have backed off, or may not. That is what got me to thinking about the Bebelplatz. There is nothing good that comes with burning. There is nothing good in mindless hate.
But there is something abroad in the land. A seething anger on this day before the Anniversary of the murders is rising. The lightning rod of is the Cordoba Center, the “Islamic Cultural Center” named for the capital of Andalusia, Islamic-occupied Spain.
I find it offensive and disrespectful; it is difficult to take it any other way. But it is an immensely clever thing, this new memorial of insult.
I support property rights, and I don’t care who worships what, so long as they stay out of my way. So I am left without a decent argument to oppose the erection of such a landmark so close to where thousands were brutally murdered.
Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center is stoking the fire. Maybe he will go ahead and burn tomorrow, and that is going to get some people killed. So, to moderate the tendency of others to kill, we appear to have to self-censor our political speech, legal, even if unkind.
Screw that. I am an American, dammit, and I think free speech is- at least virtually- an absolute right. If this is going to get to the point that political or religious speech in America is like “yelling fire in a crowded theater” we are headed for a show-down.
Maybe people won’t be killed here, as they were ten years ago. Maybe it will be some Coptic Christians in Egypt, or Animists in the Sudan, where the Islamic bandits have been merrily murdering in Darfur for a decades. Perhaps the killings will be in Afghanistan, or Indonesia. But people will burn, for sure.
The whole concept is interesting. After the last flames in Berlin died down, the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles, ranging from school-books to poetry. It included works that were on my mandatory reading list at War College, like von Clausewitz.. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and destroyed.
At the time, the representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings, and that extended to Nazi works of art. The Allies announced that:
"…all collections of works of art related or dedicated to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism will be closed permanently and taken into custody."
The directives were interpreted broadly, and led to the destruction thousands of paintings. Those that survive are from deposits in U.S. Archives. It includes at least one whose subject is that of “two middle-aged women talking in a sunlit street in a small town.”
The offense must have been what they might have been talking about.
At the moment, Preacher Jones seems to still be talking. Last moment news indicates the backers of the Mosque at Ground Zero are standing their ground, in accordance with their constitutional rights. Ramadan ended last night, and the traditional three days of feasting- the festival of Eids- is going to coincide with September 11th for the first time since the slaughter.
Muslims are concerned for their safety, and yet the Cordoba Center initiative continues. The organizers are continuing to push at the seams of our collective freedom.
I don’t know where this is going, but it does not appear to be anywhere good.
(Tablet in the Bebelplatz)
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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