Information Theory
I keep running into German official motorcades - one crossed my cycle path while their President was visitng Dublin and I was en route to buy train tickets (and the proverbial hundred thousand welcomes to him and all his outriders). Last week I think it was also he who went whizzing by me and my camera phone while I was on holiday in Berlin - at that point, apparently, he was hosting the Polish Prime Minister... Busy week for all, but one which certainly inspired a bewildering panacea of emotion in me. Berlin is a fascinating place: people there are friendly, charming and inclined to go right out of their way to help a tourist. Their big city bustle is charged with youthful exhilaration and über modernity cheek-by-jowl with old world chic and magisterial beauty... Cranes are everywhere: in front of your very eyes the city is growing. But, dear god, then there’s its terrifying history, and if ever a fable on the perils of extremism existed, it's Berlin, meticulously spelling out from every brick and block, blade of grass or memorial pond ghastly tales of not one, but two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century in locations which are oppressively familiar...
After a few days in Berlin, we took a train to Dresden, and that raised a whole different set of questions...25,000 people bombed in one night by the allies as the war was all but over - a night which inspired Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse Five... Then came the DDR, the Berlin Wall and, amongst many years of other horrible, cruel and pointless events, a twenty-year old kid being shot dead for trying to cross a river just before the wall came down...
Enough to make anyone despair, you'd imagine, but evidently they keep going...they really haven't had much choice...
Back in Berlin, I began to notice an unusual phenomenon about wifi in our hotel – some fellow users were called Einat, Avi and Ibraim... I asked an Israeli friend and she said, “Yes – young Israelis are flocking to Berlin… they all want to go - being there is very cool these days”.
As a sometime knitter, I can't help searching for patterns, so I got thinking that if the fact that we're all bearers of inherited DNA is true; and if I know from my own experience (and I do) that paths cross an awful lot (viz me and German motorcades), couldn't oblique intergenerational encounters occur too? Same DNA, different carriers? Proving that then there may well be justice on this earth after all. For instance, how demoralising for any remaining frgaments of Nazi DNA to witness quite how badly they failed as precisely what they strived so hard to obliterate returns to live their lives exactly as they choose. For the vast majority, heartening, but for that tiny cross section of arrogant, evil, uncontrolled narcissism, a real sickener.. Or so I hope. I really do.
Light through the open dome of St. Hedwig's Cathedral - After Kristallnacht, its canon, Bernhard Lichtenberg, prayed publicly for the Jewish people. He was sent to Dachau, but died on the way there.