Plate 2.
A crucifix near Jachenau, in southern Bavaria. With its carved wooden ‘curtains’, this is a
particularly splendid example of Catholic popular piety. In some predominantly Protestant areas of
Germany, such as Württemberg, small patches of territory rich in crucifixes testify to a long-distant past
when they might have been, for example, fiefs of the Catholic Austrian Habsburgs.
For most visitors before 1989, it would have been almost impossible to
imagine away what was perhaps the most striking feature of the two Germanies:
the fiercely guarded frontier running down between the Germanies from the
Baltic to the Czech border with southern Germany, dividing not only East and
West Germany but also East and West Europe, communism and capitalism,
democratic centralism and liberal democracy, symbolising the international rifts
of the second half of the twentieth century – in Churchill’s phrase, the ‘Iron
Curtain’. This border not only snaked down along miles of frontier between the
two Germanies, with a no-man’s land dividing formerly close communities,
cutting them off from natural hinterlands; it also cut right through the very heart
of that former magnificent metropolitan centre, the erstwhile capital of Prussia
and of Imperial, Weimar and Nazi Germany, and now again of Germany since
1990: Berlin. Heavily armed guards monitored the highly restricted flow of
traffic at the limited crossing points and ensured that no East German citizen left
without permission. West Berlin, economically dependent and highly subsidised
by the West German government, was also a city of self-advertising capitalism:
vast department stores, bright lights, extravagant cultural performances,
international conference centres, patronage of the arts. The old, turn-of-the-
century slums, built as the Imperial capital rapidly expanded, by the 1980s
housed not only the still surviving working-class Berliners, but also a large
number of foreign ‘guest workers’ as well as a range of groups cultivating
‘alternative’ life styles in a variety of ways. In amongst all this, there was the
inevitable pervasion of military presence – Berlin was still formally a city under
four-power control – and even when escaping to the remarkable natural
resources of the lakes and forests in West Berlin, there was the omnipresence of
the Wall. Only a few yards away, across the Wall, there was a very different
Berlin: ‘Berlin, capital of the GDR’, as was so proudly proclaimed on every
signpost. Less empty of traffic than in earlier decades, East Berlin covered the
heart of the old Imperial capital: new East German public buildings, as well as
mass-produced apartment blocks, jostled with the crumbling splendours of the
old political and cultural centres. Whatever the East German attempts to promote
a comparably – but differently – attractive image to that of the west, in areas
such as the modern Alexanderplatz, much of East Berlin had a drab, dusty, old-
fashioned air. The two Berlins, in extreme forms, epitomised and symbolised
many of the strengths and weaknesses of the two socioeconomic and political
systems for which they served as representatives.
Dostları ilə paylaş: |