Pagan Pilgrimage: Berlin, Oktober 2000

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of German reunification and the millennial Oktoberfest,
my closest comrade and I toured Berlin, the former Deutsche Democratische Republik, and
Prague. For her, an architect with a social conscience, the trip was a retracing of the
humanitarian aspirations, Nazi degradation and post-war rebirth -- with more moderate
aspirations -- of the Bauhaus. For both of us it was also a pilgrimage, to sites of martyrdom
and resistance in the country whose social struggles were so intense that they tore up all of
Europe, and beyond. Here, we marveled as we passed it, is where the first Handwerkers
Verein -- prototype of a utopian labor union -- was established in the mid-19th century; its
now full of colorful yuppie galleries, but the name is preserved in stone on the faade. Here is
the Reichstag balcony were Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the socialist republic in 1918, and
here is at the Landwehrkanal is where thugs hired by the SPD threw Rosa Luxemburg's corpse
a few months later. Here were the SS headquarters, run by the spiritual descendants of those
thugs; and then, outside of Berlin, near the little culture-soaked city of Weimar, here's
Buchenwald and its barracks and its "disinfection" stalls. And, back in Berlin, in fact running
right through the former SS headquarters, here stood the Wall.
"Es schwimmt eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal" -- "A corpse swims in the Landwehr Canal" -went a music-hall song in the 20s, referring not specifically to Rosa but to the desperate poor
who committed suicide. The canal, a shortcut for barges and now pleasure boats from the
upper to the lower Spree, is clean and usually corpse-free now. Berlin, even its eastern
sectors, seems prosperous. The Ossis -- Easterners -- are, as reputed, generally sweet natured
and polite, seemingly provincial compared to the more aggressive, hurried Wessis, their
psyches sped up by Kapitalismus. Here and there we saw ugly graffiti -- "Raus Auslnder"
sort of thing -- and there seemed to be too many big, short-haired young men with too little to
do, the kind we could imagine beating up or killing a dark-skinned foreigner just to relieve
their boredom. But we also saw, in almost every town, at least a few darker people who
mingled with the Oktoberfest crowds quite comfortably. And the anti-intolerance people are
highly visible and organized, with posters, demonstrations and art events. And, near the
palace that once housed the SED, the East German Communist Party, my dialectical
materialist heartstrings vibrated to the drums and shouts of a huge student march against
Faschismus, Rassismus, and cuts in the education budget.
My comrade and I also got to Prague, which I hadn't seen since -- well, 20 years ago, but
thats another story. We arrived just in time for the raucous street dance celebration of the
scruffy, boisterous anti-globalizers who had just trashed a Macdonalds and chased the IMF
and World Bank functionaries out of town. That too is another story, one that is still being
spun out and could go in several directions.
My personal tale is also still being spun out, Im glad to report. Our pagan pilgrimage
reminded me how it fits into the far longer, greater, unending story of struggle for equality
and emancipation.