BACK TO BERLIN
by
William H. Knospe M.D.

Presented before
The Chicago Literary Club
on
May 5, 2003

© Copyright 2003

In 1958 I completed my residency in Internal Medicine and began my obligated military service in the U.S. Army as I had been deferred through medical school, internship and residency. After completing the basic course for medical officers at Ft. Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas, I was assigned as Chief Medical Service, U.S. Army Hospital, Berlin, Germany for the next three years. My initial depression at being assigned to the isolated and widely damaged city was rapidly dispelled and I began what was to become a most fascinating period of my life. That period during the height of the Cold War was the subject of my first paper before the Chicago Literary Club on March 24, 1975 entitled "In Cities Little Else But the Works of Men". Over the past 45 years Berlin continued to exert a fascination which drew me back on five occasions and permitted me to observe the dramatic changes in its political situation as well as its physical transformation.

In 1958 access to Berlin was over one autobahn which connected it to West Germany and the border town of Helmstadt. Military convoys as well as military personnel and civilians could traverse the Russion Zone of East Germany, later the DDR, or Deutche Democratische Republic on the road but could not exit the autobahn at any point. There were two rail routes, one to Frankfurt in the American Zone of West Germany and another to Bremerhaven in the British Zone. Three air corridors connected Berlin to West Germany and were the basis for the Luft Brucke, or Air Bridge during the airlift, which after almost a year saved West Berlin from threatened Russian incorporation into their East Zone.

Berlin was divided into four sectors of occupation- French in the most Northern portion of West Berlin, the British in the middle and the American Sector occupying the most southern portion of West Berlin. The Russian Sector was the largest of the four and contained almost half of the pre-war boundaries of the city. It contained governmental core, with the city hall, the remains of the Kaiser's City Palace, the museum island with the major art and archaeological collections, the Protestant and Roman Catholic Cathedrals, the State Opera, Humboldt University and the Main Drag represented by Unter Den Linden, and its cross street the Friederich Strasse which was equivalent to State and Madison. Right on the boundary section between East and West at the end of Unter Den Linden was the Brandenburger Tor in the American Sector.

By four power agreement at Potsdam in 1945, all four of the occupying powers were guaranteed free access to all four sectors of Berlin and as military personnel with U.S. Army plates on our privately owned vehicle we could drive through all four sectors of Berlin including the Russian Sector without impediment. We explored Unter Den Linden; the Museum Island including the famous Pergamom Altar, the Wilhelm Strasse with its ghostly ruin of Albert Speer's Reichs' Kanzlei, Hitler's bunker and the intact air ministry of Hermann Goering. We attended many operas at the Berlin Stats Opera where tickets could be obtained for about a $1.00 by exchanging 4 West DMs to the dollar and then converting West DMs to East Marks at a rate of 4:1. Russian Crimean champagne was available at intermission. A second internationally acclaimed opera company was also in East Berlin- the Komische Oper. Both operas were lavishly subsidized with Western musicians who mostly lived in West Berlin. One of the most memorable was Tschaikovsky's Eugene Onegen with Russian singers.

Our first six months in Berlin was notable for Kruschev's Ultimatum in November 1958 which called upon the Western Powers to settle the anomaly of West Berlin, and presumably evacuate, or face expulsion. Civilian and military traffic was frequently stopped on the autobahn.

In 1958 much of the World War II destruction in the Western Sector had been cleared away, or rebuilt. Wide tree lined boulevards carried traffic around the city. The recreational center of West Berlin was the Kufurstendamm which had developed in the 1920's as a trendy alternative to the stodgy Unter Den Linden. Lined with many restaurants and street-front cafes, which were ideal for the sport of people watching. The most elegant shops and stores were located there as well as the major department store the Ka-De-We (Kaufhaus des Westens). The city contained one of the largest city parks in the world, the Grunewald, which had been the Kaiser's Hunting Preserve. Our apartment complex was directly adjacent to it and contained miles of hiking trails and pedestrian paths. The Western border of the city containing the Wannsee, a lake that connected with the extensive river system of the Spree and Havel, was used for boating and swimming.

Blocking of military traffic often at night resulted in the rumble of our handful of tanks toward the Russian Checkpoint. Although, they were no match for the thousands of tanks and twenty Russian divisions, which surrounded Berlin; the American tanks would have been the trip wire for full-scale conflict with the Russians. Invariably, before our tanks reached the Russian checkpoint at Babelsburg the traffic was released to travel the autobahn to West Germany. In addition to our two battalions, the British and French each had a regiment. All were supposed to travel to the Olympic Stadium in the British Sector- our redoubt in the case the Russians attacked West Berlin and a site for a last stand. Krushchev never implemented his ultimatum and Berlin's status pending a final German Peace Treaty was affirmed as the status quo. We knew the heat was off on Armed Forces Day in June 1959. The Americans paraded our military might in the Olympic Stadium- two battalions, masses of jeeps, the tank company, helicopters, etc. We were all surprised to see in attendance the Russian Commander in Berlin and East Germany with many staff officers and later they attended the reception hosted by the American commander in Berlin- MAJ GEN Barksdale Hamlett.

During the last 18 months of my assignment in Berlin I was appointed U.S. Military Physician at the Spandau Prison where Nazis convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg were incarcerated. Originally seven were imprisoned there but by 1959-1960 several had completed their sentences or were released for ill health. Only three remained during my assignment- Hess, von Schirach and Speer. Their cells were located on the ground floor of the newly constructed part of the prison. The historic and abandoned original prison was a rusting, ghostly 19th century multitiered structure which had been a political prison extending back to the Kaiser Reich and on cell walls were graffiti in all the languages of Europe. The entire complex was walled with guard towers.

Spandau Prison was one of the two remaining institutions in Berlin where four power cooperation continued- the other was the Air Safety Commission which governed air traffic in and around all four sectors of Berlin. After the blockade in 1947, the Russians walked out of the allied Kommandatura and four-power governance in Berlin ceased. Normally two committees operated at Spandau- an administrative one composed of the line officers who ran the prison and a medical committee composed of the medical personnel who oversaw the health of the prisoners. Each month the occupying power and its soldiers would march out to be replaced by the succeeding power. The medical committee would confirm the health of the prisoners, any untoward events discussed and any change in medication or diagnostic tests gone over. Every fourth month I would check the medical records of the three, do a physical examination and determine if any new medical problems had supervened. If special studies were required or emergency medical or surgery treatment was required the prisoner would have to be transferred to the British Military Hospital which was only a short distance away. Emergency surgery was required several years before, but fortunately, no such event occurred during my tenure. Any such maneuver would require four-power agreement and I lived in apprehension of such an event. I would see prisoners twice a week during my month on duty.

The histories of the three prisoners were fascinating. Rudolph Hess had been Deputy Fuhrer but had tried to mediate peace in 1940 between Hitler and the British. He felt Hitler had a soft spot for the British and never wanted to fight them. Hess, without authority, commandeered a plane and flew to Scotland to parachute into Britain. Britain would have none of his embassy and tossed him into prison and later to the docks at Nuremberg. I always thought he was least culpable of the major bigwigs. His position obtained largely because he was an early Nazi, was imprisoned with Hitler in Landsberg Prison after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and served as Hitler's amanuensis for the writing of Mein Kampf. I have heard the Western Powers wanted to release him in the 1970s and 1980s but the Russians would have none of that. In a way, as the last surviving relic of the Nazi regime he was an essential symbol of the Russian claim for legitimacy in Berlin. He was never implicated in the major atrocities.

Von Schirach was a young Bavarian aristocrat and an early recruit to the Nazi Party. He was also a member of the English Mitford sister's circle who was close to Hitler. He became leader of the Hitler Youth and later Gauleiter of Vienna. His mother was American, his Grandfather a Civil War General and a pallbearer at Lincoln's funeral.

Speer was also an early recruit to the Nazi Party, an architect who was strongly attracted to Hitler on charismatic grounds. For Hitler with his frustrated aesthetic impulses Speer was a younger alter ego who continued on a personal and emotional basis to be among the closest to Hitler in his inner circle. He designed the opulent marble clad Reich's Chancellery for Hitler and laid out grandiose plans to remake Berlin as the capital of the 1000 year Nazi Reich. He was finally the War Production Czar. He was the only Nazi to take personal responsibility for his actions and who expressed guilt and remorse, which was probably why he only received a 20-year sentence as, did von Schirach.

When the monthly four power Medical Committee meetings adjourned we repaired to a luncheon hosted by the vacating power and joined by our wives. The American luncheon was mediocre and sans alcohol. Some years before a visiting congressman had expressed outrage over cavorting with commies under the influence of alcohol, which I might say, was often needed to provide social lubrication during what might otherwise be a rather turgid affair. The British tried valiantly, provided cocktails and wine but the cuisine was less than grand. The French luncheon at the end of their monthly sojourn was excellent- French Champagne, hors douvres and white as well as red wines. However, the Russians outdid all with the best vodka, salted fish from the Caspian Sea, Russian Champagne from the Crimea, outstanding Borscht Soup, Beef Stroganoff, etc.

The Spandau luncheons or their administrative counterpart, or the Air Safety Committee occasionally served as a venue to solve critical problems between the Russians and the Western Powers. The Russians had walked out of the Allied Kommodatura; the vehicle set up at Potsdam for four-power government of Berlin and Germany. Shortly thereafter the Berlin Blockade occurred and even after its resolution, the Russians never returned to engage in four-power collaboration in the occupational governance of Germany. Each power governed its own sector or zone and the post-war division of Germany ensued. Spandau and the Air Safety Committee were probably essential to deal with the frequent frictions of the Cold War after the Russians left the Allied Kommandatura.

In 1961 we left Berlin for a year of graduate study in Radiation Biology at the University of Rochester and a subsequent four-year assignment at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. I left the Army in 1966 to return to Chicago and a 27-year career at Presbyterian St, Luke's Hospital and Rush Medical College. The first return to Berlin occurred in 1975 after a Hematology meeting in Split Yugoslavia. We met friends from Chicago in Venice and drove through Austria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany to Berlin, stopping overnight in Dresden to view the remains of one of the most beautiful pre-war cities in Europe was a bonus. West Berlin did not appear different except for the wall put up in August 1961 by the East Germans to staunch the flow of East Germans to the West. It had been erected three months after we left. We met our old friends Gary and Renate Stindt who took us to the Wall after dark. The flood lit approaches on the east with its guard towers, barbed wire and raked sand was chilling. Gary, born in Berlin, was Chief of NBC News Film in Central Europe and based in Berlin. He father was an early Pathe news cameraman who sent Gary to the U.S. as a teenager because his mother was Jewish. He trained in motion picture photography, joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as a combat photographer and entered Berlin as an accredited journalist at the beginning of the occupation. He developed several famous TV documentaries on Berlin, including the Seven Men of Spandau, which showed the prisoners in their daily walks in an inner courtyard of the prison taken from a nearby church tower. He also did the Berlin Tunnel show showing West Germans burrowing beneath the wall to release escaping East Germans. He was a vigorous advocate for the unification of Germany but never expected to see such in his lifetime. The next day we drove through CheckPoint Charlie into East Berlin. Apart from the wall not much had changed. Vast cleared areas of rubble stretched in all directions away from the Stadt Mitte. The East Germans had built a huge Radio-TV tower, which dwarfed the famous Funk Turm in West Berlin. The museums including the Pergamon Altar were about the same as was Unter Den Linden, the Opera and the rather dreary ministry buildings dating from the Nazi era. Returning to the west we observed border guards sliding mirrors under the undercarriage of the car to assure the Volks Polizei that we were not smuggling an East German out to the west. The emotional tenor of this visit was definitely subdued compared to the vibrant and defiant mood of the 1950s and early 1960s.

My next visit to Berlin was in May 1981. I had almost finished a sabbatical in Basil, Switzerland and was invited to deliver a lecture at the Klinkum Eins of the Free University in West Berlin. The Chief there had learned of my sojourn in Switzerland and wanted me to discuss the Knospe Schema, a therapy for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, much admired by the Germans. Reluctantly I agreed though I was anxious to return to the U.S. We arrived at Tegel Airport in the French Sector of Berlin without reservations. We wanted to stay at the Kempinski on the Ku Damm but it was filled and probably beyond our means. We stayed at a small pension Hotel just off the Kudamm and a block from the Kempinski. Walking over to the Kudamm we heard a large explosion which shattered the windows of a McDonald's. Berlin had acquired an alienated and dissident youth population over the previous decade, which was also heavily into drugs. Youth residing in Berlin were exempt from the West German draft. We walked over to the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a symbol of West Berlin. A modern glass chapel had been built adjacent to it and hanging out on the floor were a dozen stoned young people. Somehow the Kudamm and its elegant stores and cafes seemed somewhat dowdy and shabby.

Following my lecture we had dinner with Gary and Renate Stindt and afterward were invited to the home of Helga and Emil Janocek to celebrate my birthday with Champagne and dessert. Emil was a Hungarian Jew and a survivor of Auschwitz who came to Germany in the post war period. He was a talented businessman who had made and lost several fortunes. He settled in Berlin (the only place in Germany he would consider living) and married Helga, a girlhood friend of Renate's. Her family were dissident protestants who hid Jews during the war and had one of the pre-eminent art foundries in Europe. They cast all the work of British sculptor Henry Moore. Emil had textile factories in Italy and Israel and sold knitted goods to the Russians in huge quantities. They couldn't pay his bills and offered him a large collection of antique Russian icons. He kept them in one of his humidity controlled warehouses. Herbert von Karjan, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, approached him in hopes of acquiring the icons. Emil invited him to his morning business meeting. Von Karjan arrogantly wouldn't communicate with him directly, but only through his intermediary. Emil, insulted, sold him an inferior icon at an inflated price. The evening was delightful and recalled many prior dinners we had with the Stindts and Janoceks. Sadly, it was the last visit with Gary, as he died 1986. The next day we began our return trip to Chicago.

Our next visit to Berlin was in 1994. I retired from Rush that year and before relocating to Albuquerque, NM, we made a trip to Vicenza, Italy to visit our youngest son who was stationed there in the Army. During that visit we drove to Berlin over the autobahn from Nuremberg. David was born in Berlin in April 1961 and we left six weeks later. Consequently, he had no memory of the city of his birth. The autobahn was in poor shape but much evidence of resurgent economic activity was seen in East Germany. We stayed at a small hotel off the Kudamm and introduced him to the café and street life. The next day we toured east and West Berlin and saw the remains of the Wall and Checkpoint Charlie. Most of the wall had been pulled down and distributed in pieces throughout the world as souvenirs. Economic activity was remarkable in East Berlin. Tall construction cranes were everywhere in Berlin, both East and West. One ironic change was a Mercedes Benz dealership on the Friedrich Strasse in East Berlin. We drove out to Zehlendorf adjacent to the American housing area and military headquarters. Renate and Helga laid on a lovely, and massive, luncheon. Emil was out of town on business. The entire atmosphere was ebullient and optimistic with reunification of Germany. Giant cranes were all over the city, but particularly evident in the East. We visited our former apartment area on Flanagan Strasse, named after Father Flanagan of Boy's Town fame who died in Berlin while on a European fund raising tour.

Five years later in 1999 we again returned to Berlin during the course of a visit to our son David, now out of the Army, but working for a private contractor providing computer simulation to the Army in Bavaria. Driving over the autobahn economic activity was even more dramatic and in restaurant gas stations en route. All kinds of food and tourist products were available and adjacent to the autobahn were many new factories and commercial enterprises. The construction cranes were even more evident and among the ironies we observed was to stay at the Raddison four star hotel located in East Berlin on Unter Den Linden and the Marx-Engels Platz. The Royal Palace, which originally stood on the site of the Marx-Engels Platz, was heavily damaged during WWII but restorable. The communist regime chose to level it and erase all evidence of monarchy in Berlin. The Marx-Engels Platz occupied part of the Royal Palace and its adjacent Lust Garden, or Pleasure Garden. In the 1950's Marx-Engels Platz was a huge, concrete paved site dominated by a massive reviewing stand over which Walter Ulbrecht, the part secretary of the DDR with other party officials, reviewed Russian and East German troops. The fact that the Potsdam agreement with the Russians forbade German Armies in Berlin did not deter the DDR. In the 1990s the concrete parade ground was replaced by a charming park with paths, trees and shrubs, in the middle of which were larger than life seated statue of Marx with Engels standing behind. On one side of the park many new and trendy restaurants had appeared which very popular with the West Berliners. This area was in one of the oldest and most charming sections in East Berlin- with many 17th and 18th Century buildings. It was also dominated by the City Hall, taken over by the communists in 1946 who forced the Western delegates out. With the reunification of Germany it was again the site of city government for all of unified Berlin.

The next day we took a three to four hour canal boat tour through East and West Berlin, something we had always meant to do when stationed there but never did. The Spree and Havel River system is connected by canals and locks which facilitated barge traffic between eastern and western Europe. Coal and raw materials moved west and manufactured goods moved to Poland, Russia and Hungary. The trip passed many examples of 19th and 20th Century Berlin architecture apartment blocks, churches and commercial structures. It passed the huge new government blocks housing ministries moved from Bonn. A dramatic view of the rebuilt Reichstag, or rather Bundestag, was seen with the striking capital dome by the British architect Sir Normen Foster. The symbolic dome was meant to project light into the re-established democracy of the reunified Germany. Afterwards we walked along Unter Den Linden which had been empty of people and cafes but was now filled with people and cafes between the University, the state opera and the rebuilt cathedrals, both catholic and Protestant. We stopped for cocktails in the rebuilt Adlon Hotel in the Pariser Platz adjacent to the Brandenburger Tor. Elegant and luxurious, it was falling apart in the last days of WWII. It had been the basis of the novel Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum and the 1930s movie of the same name starring John Barrymore and Emil Jannings. The Pariser Platz is soon to be the site of the British, French and American embassies destroyed on the same site in WWII.

Most remarkable was the redevelopment of the Potsdamer Platz. It had been one of the most vibrant spots in Berlin pre-war but had been completely destroyed and cleared away post-war. It was on the edge of the border between the American and Russian Sectors. The only structure post-war was a large, moving electric sign, which beamed news into the Russian Sector, to the great irritation of the Russians. In 1994 dozens of cranes were doing the largest construction project in Europe, even the world. Daimler-Benz in collaboration with Sony had enlisted the Italian architect Renzo Piano, the German-American (and Chicagoan) Helmut Jahn and the Japanese Arata Isoyaki, to design and build the commercial and residential towers (some 20 or more) which would contain restaurants, theatres galleries and supermarkets. It would be a self-contained community.

In 1998 the Western powers and Russians who had been in Berlin since the end of WWII ended their occupation. Military and civilian facilities were turned back to the Berlin government including the Truman Shopping Center which included the PX, Class VI Store, food market and movie theatre. The nearby company grade officers' quarters and adjacent enlisted quarters were turned over including magnificent apartment buildings, duplex houses for field grade officers and commandeered mansions given to Colonels and Generals. The compound of the Berlin Command was retained by the Americans but the 279th Station Hospital where I worked, and the McNair and Andrew's Barracks housing the enlisted soldiers were turned back to the Germans. The hospital was a charming 19th Century structure with a clock tower, Victorian brick architecture which had been a religious institution pre- WWII. Our apartment was located on 13 Flanagan Strasse.

Our last encounter with Berlin occurred in May 2002. We spent 2 days in Berlin at the beginning of an Eastern European tour of Poland, Hungary, Austria, Chech Republic and Slovakia. Many of the construction projects seen after the fall of the Wall and begun in the 1990s were nearly finished, or completed, including the new ministry blocks along the Spree and Potsdamer Platz renewal. Unter Den Linden was even more bustling with people, new cafes and art galleries. The Friedrich Strasse had a plethora of shopping facilities, including designer shops and a spectacular shopping "passage". The Galleries Lafayette by Nouvel housed a five or six story building built around a core which contained a huge double cone of crystalline glass which refracted light into the surrounding balconies and floors which contained shops of all varieties and all expensive. Picture an inverted cone coming to a point at the middle level of floors and meeting the point of another cone which then expanded to a base at the bottom of the gallery.

Near our hotel, the Astrom, in the former east, was the 17th-18th Century Gendarmen Platz, one of the most beautiful squares in Berlin. It contained three structures- the classical Shauspielhaus theatre bombed in 1944 during a concert and on each side the Deutsche Dom and the Franzosiche Dom. Those two miniature baroque, domed churches, misleadingly called cathedrals were developed to serve the expanding Huguenot population, which fled France during the religious wars of the 17th Century. The Huguenots brought sophisticated industrial and craft expertise which played an important role in the developing technological explosion in Berlin and Germany in the 19th Century. When we were stationed in Berlin in the 1950s these structures were stark shells of metal and fenestrated masonry. In 2002 they had been completely restored to their original beauty.

Along Unter Den Linden most of the classical 17th Century structures designed and built by the great German architect Schinkel had been restored including the Altes Museum considered the greatest of its type in Europe. Other building by Shinkel included the Zeughaus, or Prussian War Memorial.

A highlight of the 2002 visit was an afternoon in Potsdam. Potsdam was never accessible to us during my military tour in Berlin as it lay just outside the city limits adjacent to Berlin across the Wannsee Lake. We approached Potsdam by crossing the Gleinicke Brucke, which crossed the Wannsee. This bridge was the infamous site of many spy exchanges during the Cold War. The most famous was the exchange of the U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers and COL Rudolph Abel the Russian spy who lived in New York as an art gallery owner.

Potsdam pre-war was the site of several palaces built by Fredrick the Great during the 18th Century including the famous Sans Souci which survived WWII and became the site of the Potsdam Conference which gave shape to the post war arrangements among the victors of WWII- the division of Germany and Austria into four zones of occupation and the division of Berlin and Vienna into four sectors. The leaders of the victors- Stalin, Churchill and Truman (they wouldn't have De Gaulle) signed the arrangements, which soon lead to the breakdown of cooperation and the institution of the Cold War. The British held elections during the conference, leading to the sacking of Churchill and his replacement by Clement Atlee. Sans Souci was a sprawling half-timbered structure, more hunting lodge than palace and sited on the edge of the Wannsee.

Potsdam contained many smaller villas and palaces and before the ware the venerated Garrison Church, one of the shrines of Prussian militarism and the site of many parades and ceremonies.

That evening we were joined for dinner by Renate Stindt. Sadly Helga Janocek had dies several years before and Emil was ill and couldn't join us.

Potsdam was an important locus for the Hohenzollern Monarchy of Prussia and later unified Germany. The Potsdamer Platz and Potsdamer Strasse connected the Royal Palace in Berlin to the Summer Place in Potsdam along the Potsdamer Strasse.

So what do all these ancient reveries and recollections add up to. When I arrived in 1958, Berlin had an air of excitement and devastation mixed with some renewal and a constant but subdued sense of danger. The Cold War was a real phenomenon. Thousands in Eastern Europe were being incarcerated or liquidated. The week I arrived in Berlin in August 1958 a West Berlin lawyer prominent in the Free Jurists Association was kidnapped while boating on the Wansee and not heard from again. This sense of menace and excitement, of being in an embattled outpost of democracy was expressed socially in a frenetic round of receptions and parties given by the diplomatic community as well as the military community. A constant round of national and international visitors paraded through Berlin eager to get a glimpse through the Iron Curtain at Stalinist Europe. I hosted a series of distinguished academic physicians including Tinsley Harrison and A. McGhee Harvey.

Through Gary Stindt we met John Chancellor, Jack Paar (the first host of the Tonight Show), and Laurence O'Donell JFK's appointments secretary to be. Each trip into East Berlin carried the risk (small in retrospect) of apprehension and incarceration by the Volks Polizei. Visitors were often conducted in the evening to the Resi Bar a relic of Weimar Berlin which offered a rather kitchy water show of colored and vacillating spouts of water. The real show was that each booth had telephones and a pneumatic tube system that facilitated communication with every other numbered booth and mediated assignations. The grotesque devastation of a ruined metropolis was in a sense beautiful yet also redolent of loss. A Jewish psychiatrist who was reluctantly leaving Berlin after two extensions felt the city evoked his childhood in Brooklyn- the street cars, the 19th Century Victorian architecture and the insouciance of the people. The Berliner has often been compared to the New Yorker with his dry humor, and often bitter satire. The Berliner referred to the American Congress Hall, an ultra modern structure as the pregnant butterfly and an ultra modern church of the 1970s as God's Powerhouse. Much of this irreverent character is ascribed to the large Jewish population in Berlin, 70,000 pre-war, 5000-7000 after the war.

For me, the heavy aura of history has permeated every nook and cranny of Berlin. As a child and adolescent in the 1930s and 1940s the radio broadcasts of William Shirer brought Berlin into American households and later his Berlin Diary alerted America to the rising menace of Hitler and Nazism. WWII further brought Berlin into American consciousness as the personification of political and personal evil with the mad ranting of Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazis. Coming to Berlin as a soldier reversed or added contrary perceptions of West Berliners as brave and stalwart defenders of freedom and democracy. Living in Berlin surrounded by the many complex and opposing currents of history further added to the ambiguities of its past.

There was Frederick the Great entertaining Voltaire at Sans Souci and playing his own musical compositions- Yorcke Strauss in West Berlin raised the picture of the Prussian marshal who played a significant role in the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. There was the march of triumphant German science, technology, art and humanism as manifested by ____Rathenau who secured Edison's patents and founded Siemans in Berlin. His son Walter Rahenau became foreign minister in the Weimar Republic and was assassinated by a right wing fanatic. The Bauhaus architect Mies Van Der Rohne whose unfinished design has been realized as the New National Library succeeded the magnificent 18th and 19th Century classical architecture of Schinkel. A surviving building by Walter Gropuis is now a museum. Count Harry Kessler engagingly portrayed Weimar Berlin from the defeat of Germany in 1918 to the rise of Nazism in his diary published as "Berlin in Lights". His mother was said to be mistress of the old Kaiser and some even said he was an illegitimate son of the Kaiser. Known as the Red Count, he was a Social Democrat, who knew everybody in Berlin and Europe, served as the first post-WWI minister to Poland and was active in literary and theatrical circles. He collaborated with Richard Strauss on the book of Der Rosenpavalier.

The megemaniacal designs of Albert Speer for the 1000 Year Reich and Hitler's Reichskanzlei have been succeeded post WWII by the surrealistic towers of Potsdamer Platz. Daniel Liebskind's Jewish Museum expresses the ambiguous character of Berlin's history and the large Jewish contribution in a zigzag building of concrete, steel and zinc which pulls the viewer wildly through the Enlightenment, Prussian militarism and the 2nd Reich of Bismarck, German Romanticism, Marxism, Fascism to the present. Liebskind has also submitted one of the most challenging and exiting designs for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in New York City. The German architect Joseph Kleihues who did Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art has converted the old Hamburger Bahnhof into a museum of the Present, designed the Four Seasons Hotel on Gendarmen Markt and twelve other Berlin projects. Hans Scharoum has designed the acoustically magnificent Philharmonic Hall in a modern idiom as well as the remarkable State Library.

Perhaps the writer who best expressed the ambiguous character of Berlin was the Berlin critic Walter Benjamin. Born in 1892 to a family of upper middle class Jews, his essays on Berlin and Paris in the 19th and 20th Centuries, "One-Way Street" and "The Arcades Project" dealt with the individual walker or flaneur and his relationship with the horizontal city- its architecture, commerce and culture. He was particularly fascinated with iron and glass roofed arcades as represented by London's Burlington and Piccadilly Arcades and the Milan Galleries. His thinking was suffused with Marxist, Freudian and Surrealistic ideas. Haussmann's Parisian boulevards were lined with endless dream factories composed of theatres, cafes and department stores where the dream was manufactured and facilitated by newspapers, advertisements and consumer manipulation. Shop windows with their wares and interior displays became "phantasmagoria" fueling dreams. Wandering over these two cities he became intoxicated by their beauty and surrealistic character. Berlin today can be conceived of as a three dimensional arcade where its glittering old and new buildings, its vertical arcades like the Gallery Lafayette or the soaring towers of the Potsdamer Platz stimulate the imagination of the latter day flaneur. It would surely have fascinated Benjamin.

Among the many symbols of old and new Berlin, one particularly impresses itself on my imagination- Schloss Tegal. This is the family seat of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt founders of Berlin University and bright lights of the German enlightenment. Alexander was an explorer in South America and a famous geographer after whom the Humboldt Current is named and Wilhelm was a philologist and diplomat. Approached along a long alley of trees and sited near the Tegal Lake in Northern Berlin it shows the best aspects of German humanism. Flooded with light upon white exterior and interior walls and built in a classic design, its interior walls were studded with Greek and Roman antiquities acquired in the brother's travels. It represented a path aborted by the darkening 19th and 20th Century German militarism and Nazism. Perhaps the recent developments in the arts and politics of a reunited Germany will permit a renaissance in German culture which will extend the humanistic impulses of the von Humboldts as well as the Weimar Berlin of and Walter Benjamin.

But still, why continued fascination with Berlin after all these years. As the center of the Nazi movement and later a flash-point in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union it played a major role in the events of the 20th Century. As a native of Chicago many parallels existed between Berlin and Chicago. Both underwent their major expansion in the latter half of the 19th Century. Industrialism was a major force for both. Corruption affected their political development, although there were certainly qualitative and quantitative differences in their corruption. It is interesting to note that Bertolt Brecht in his satirical play on the rise of Hitler and Nazism entitled "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" portrayed Hitler as a Chicago gangster. Both cities were the sites of magnificent architecture throughout their histories. Schinkel and later Mies van der Rohe in the 19th and 20th Century in Berlin and Chicago and Louis Sullivan and Frank Loyd Wright in Chicago built magnificent structures. They have been followed by a host of architects too numerous to mention who made both cities showcases of modern architecture. Music in both cities is outstanding in their symphony orchestras and modern art is vigorous in both. Both will be outstanding urban centers in the 21st Century.