I’ve been in Berlin this week for a few days with my younger daughter. I wanted to bring her to the city because she is studying the second world war for history A level, so there was half a chance I could get her into museums without a fight.
Also, I’ve been reading Joseph Roth’s writings about Berlin between the wars. The collection is called What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33. Well, here are a few things I saw. First, I saw my daughter in the brilliant Topography of Terror museum, dedicated (if that’s the right word) to the SS and built on the site of the Gestapo secret police headquarters. What a young woman she must be to apply herself so assiduously to the astounding material in there and then repair to our lodgings and pay the same rapt attention to several episodes of Made in Chelsea on her laptop. Honestly, she must have done six on the trot. What a day we had.
Perhaps because of my torment at involuntarily catching long snatches of Made In Chelsea, small communist leanings I didn’t know lay within me rose to the surface. On a sightseeing bus tour (I love those, but that’s another story) our guide pointed out a huge Coca-Cola logo structure atop some hulking, sulking building in the old East Berlin.
This, we were told with some pride, was the first bit of proper western advertising to be visited upon the newly liberated east Germans. Coca-Cola? Honestly, is that the best the west could show them, an attractively packaged but incredibly sugary drink?
Their joy must have been unbridled. If only they had known, too, that one day it would also be possible – without a knock on the door from the thought police – to lie in their beds watching absurdly privileged toffs talking tosh for hours on end.
