The museums of Berlin are
filled with amazing artifacts of past societies and civilizations, perhaps none
more imposing than three exhibits in the Pergamon
Museum, each filling enormous rooms. The biggest and heaviest architectural
reconstruction in any museum is the Market
Gate of Miletus, built 2000 years ago by the Romans as the entrance to the
market square of Miletus in present-day Turkey, destroyed in an earthquake 900
years later, then unearthed
and reconstructed by German archaeologist Theodor Wiegand. This gate, 100
feet wide and 50 feet tall, represents the power of the Roman emperors
extending to the far eastern edge of the Mediterranean.
In a nearby room, the
reconstructed Ishtar Gate
displays the might of King Nebuchadnezzar II, who had it constructed about 575
BC in Babylon, the capital of his empire and perhaps the largest city in the
world at that time. Thousands of brightly glazed bricks with reliefs of lions,
dragons and bulls created an imposing sight, which was considered one of the
seven wonders of the ancient world.
The most famous holding of
the museum, the Pergamon
Altar, won’t be open for view until 2020, because the entire museum is
gradually being renovated piece by piece. This monumental place of worship was
built about 160 years before Christ’s birth to honor the political and military
achievements of the Greek King Eumenes II. Visitors can ascend stone steps 60
feet wide to view a sculpted frieze depicting the battle between the Olympian
gods and the giants.
These ancient monuments are
the most imposing celebrations of power among hundreds of such displays in
Berlin. Similar displays can be found in all European cities, where museums
preserve reminders of past dynasties, public statues glorify past rulers, and
restored palaces attract millions of visitors.
When we enter a museum, we
have learned to expect representations of past authority, power and prestige,
constructed of the finest materials by great artists, preserved for the wonder
of succeeding generations. We see the most elaborate creations of the past.
There are other artifacts and
memorials in Berlin which represent resistance, the opposite of power. Because
Berlin was the site of two terrible 20th-century dictatorships, the
bravery and foolhardiness of those who resisted power are also celebrated here.
The Checkpoint
Charlie Museum was built right at the Berlin Wall to memorialize the East
Germans who succeeded or failed to escape across the Wall. Instead of finely
wrought art objects, the most interesting exhibits are cheap East German cars
reconstructed to create tiny hiding places for escapees or rusty tools used to
dig under the Wall. The names and faces of those who resisted the Communist
government are noted here, but remain unknown elsewhere. Their achievements
were not beautiful, but daring and inventive, and often ended in death or
prison.
The theme at Checkpoint
Charlie is escape. Getting past the Berlin Wall or across the border into West
Germany meant freedom. Escaping from the vast territory of Nazi-controlled
Europe was much more difficult. Resistance to the Nazis was more likely to be a
lonely battle against a murderous regime in favor of human rights, that
predictably ended in death. Bernard Lichtenberg,
a Catholic priest at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in the center of Berlin, began to
protest the brutalities of concentration camps soon after the Nazis took power,
going directly to high Nazi officials to complain of their policies. He
protested against the mistreatment of Catholic priests, of Jews and of the
handicapped. He prayed publicly every day for deported Jews. He was imprisoned
and died as he was being deported to Dachau.
In a small park on the quiet
Rosenstrasse, a group
of sculptures commemorates a remarkable act of group resistance. Hundreds
of Christian wives of Jewish men who had been arrested in 1943 gathered before
the building where they were being held to demand their release. They were
threatened by SS trucks with machine guns, but did not move. After a week of
constant protest, the men were released, the only instance of a successful
German protest against the Holocaust. One of the women, Elsa Holzer, later
said, “If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you
wouldn’t have gone.”
Celebrations of power are all
around us. We don’t often think about how that power was exercised, about who
might have suffered to make that power possible. Those who resist power usually
pass into the fog of history because they were not famous and they had little
opportunity to create imposing objects to memorialize their actions. Stone
palaces and golden objects attract more attention than lonely dissent.
The more we know about the
great rulers of the past, the more we realize that the trappings and
accomplishments of power rested on the conquest and exploitation of vast
numbers of people, some of whom protested. Like the still anonymous Tank Man
who stopped a line of tanks
at Tiananmen Square in 1989, they could calculate that
their actions had little chance of success. They were not counting on their
names being recorded in history books. They acted from conviction and
desperation.
They deserve statues and
museums, too.
Steve Hochstadt
Berlin
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, April 18, 2017
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