Berlin: History alive (part 4)

The East- West border is always wandering,


sometimes eastward, sometimes west,

and we do not know exactly where it is just now:

in Guagamela, in the Urals, or maybe in ourselves,

so that one ear, one eye, one nostril, one hand, one foot,

one lung and one testicle or one ovary

is on the one, another on the other side.Only the heart…

(by Jaan Kaplinski)                                                       The Wandering Border

And I didn’t know which side my heart was. But it was really aching. The most memorable part of our Berlin tour was the journey from west side to east. We took a s-bahn to Ostbahnof. The s-bahns are surface trains and U-bahns are underground trains. These form the main transport system of the city.

The s- bahn we took had to cross the river spree to reach the eastern part of Berlin. The journey was quite enjoyable. I remember that there was a man in the train singing with a guiter; and a very old lady was sitting beside me who compensated her overall palor with a bright red dress and very bright red lipstick.

The change of view is so obvious and striking that you need no guide to tell you that you have entered the eastern part of Berlin. It was gray. And it bore the memories of its war trodden past all over it, much more than the western part. It actually seemed a completely different country. The fields were gray, the streets looked forlorn and the houses deserted. Once outside of the Ostbahnof, the crowd in front of Hauptbahnof, the busy faces, the shops and restaurants and all the color seem to be stories from a different country. Here life seemed grim and gray.

We went on walking. The eastside gallery on Mühlenstrasse was what we came to see. It was colourful and some of the graffiti was really good and many were real works of art. Though most of it were damaged by people and weather and the paintings sure needed restoration, one could clearly see the passion of the artists who boldly spoke against the partition through their colors.The paintings actually lifted my spirit.

The reunification of Germany and the breaking of the Berlin wall has always seemed to me to be a dream story…too good to be true. I am myself from a part of the world where we have long sighed across borders but still can’t reach our brothers and sisters on the other part of the boundary. Our own ancestor’s land is a foreign country to me. I have never seen it and as a child have always hoped to see it without crossing a border. My father comes from East Bengal, present Bangladesh and I am born in modern India. But I can never forget that the country they call Bangladesh is a part of my own history. I have never seen the land where my ancestors lived, where my father spent his childhood.

So while I was looking at  East Berlin, which was not East Berlin anymore, lying there gray and sad, I was feeling an incomprehensible pain, love and a bonding with these people devastated by the whims of a few statesmen who have played with their allegiance, their future and their pasts.