Still on the topic of memory and Berlin. I came across a leaflet from New Berlin Tours in, of all places, Dunkin’ Donuts (!) offering select tours which includes a pub crawl and a tour of one called ‘Third Reich Berlin, the Nazi Capital’. The latter promised to show “the profound scars still present today” left by Hitler’s rise to power and the 12 years of SS terror that followed. Twinning the hedonism of an organized piss up with such a tour struck me as bizarre but also somehow reassuring. Certainly, there’s no suggestion of glamoring the Reich ; on the contrary it seems be rendering this shadow over German’s past in almost banal terms. It surely indicates that Berliners feel confident to move on while acknowledging the horrors that preceded the current regeneration.
