On Rosa-Luxemburg-Strassse in a Vietnamese Cafe

Abstract

'Warum kommen Sie?' You are in your second German-language class at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. Yesterday, you mastered the answer to "Warum kommen Sie?" Where do you come from? You are tempted for a moment to be metaphysical, possibly even poetic, for the immediate answer is Leibnizstrasse, between Schillerstrasse and Goethestrasse in Charlottenburg, West Berlin. You still marvel that here they name streets after poets and philosophers. But where indeed are you from? Here you are on planet Earth in the twenty-first century in a city that has been destroyed, occupied by its destroyers, then dissected into two, West and East, each an uneasy representative of its occupier's politics. Your own father was partly responsible for the city's demolition. Nearly seventy years ago now he was high up in the night skies, his solid peasant hands, encased in their fur and leather gloves, clutching tightly the stick of his Lancaster as he kept it on course long enough to allow his bomb aimer the best chance to obliterate yet another part of the place where you now sit. He and the rest of them did their job well. The Berlin of then is almost non-existent, the Berlin of now just a rough facsimile.