One Berlin on one pale blue dot.

Brandenburg Gate

My people’s first encountered Germans was through a young business-savvy man named Karl Peters. We know he was business savvy because he tricked chiefs into signing over their empires in exchange for trinkets and spirits. He not only tricked chiefs but also women of my tribe (Chagga) into becoming his concubines. What followed after the treaties was anything but fair business. He forced my people into hard menial labor sometimes without payment, severe beating and hanging and ridicule of traditions. My forefathers rightfully named him ‘Mkono wa Damu’ meaning ‘Bloody Hands’.

Karl Peters

Karl Peters deals clashed with other colonizers that they decided to convene in Berlin in 1884/5 to properly slice up the African piece of cake. They drew up boundaries in the name of civilizing the barbarians, even though we know the real motive was our gems and labor. Thanks to Karl Peters Tanganyika became German East Africa, marking the end of the good old days.

With such a bad history, I would be insane to visit my former oppressors, but I did hop on that bus to Berlin, for no other reason but curiosity. I just wanted to how they make sense of it all. Do they consider Karl Peters a hero? Do they tell their children about what happened in the colonies? Do they write it all off as civilizing the savages?  If so, then can our genes explain our backwardness? Questions filled my head and I hoped to answer them in my 48 hour stay in Berlin. On arrival, I was of course distracted by everything Berlin has to offer. I mean, who I am to resist German desserts or taking selfies with statues and museums? Even more distracting were the memorials of post-colonial Germany.

Intentionally not named 'Berlin Mall' because of what it would rhyme with

Night views

My role-model Lise Meitner

distracting structures

Museum island

Couldn't resist a selfie and a friend

It all started in 1918, the exact year Germany lost the war and its colonies and when Karl Peters died. Even though the country lost an Imperial Commissioner, it gained one disturbingly devoted martyr, a young extremist Austrian born German, Adolf Hitler. He developed the most extreme version of anti-semitism, anti-catholism and pan-Germanism. It is not certain why, it could be the loss of his parents, rejection from Arts school, unemployment or all of the above. In 1919 he tried to seize power but he ended up in jail, where being the self-obsessed individual he was, he wrote an autobiography titled ‘My Struggle’. After his release in 1924 his ideas he resonated with his people who were desperate for a hero. He eventually became chancellor in 1933 and in the first 6 years, he drove Germany out of depression, abandoned restrictions from World War I and expanded the German empire to Eastern Europe.

2 years into power he officiated the Nuremberg law, the xenophobic law to exclude Jews from civil society. It started with the Jews but then extended to all minorities such as homosexuals, Slavs, Romani, freemasons, the physically and mentally disabled. By 1941, the Nazi party had grown and expanded the German empire to the Slavic countries. Some died in concertation camps where they were put in gas chambers in extermination camps, some were shot while standing on the corpses of their families, some died out of starvation due to hard working conditions, some died even before reaching the camps, some died in gas vans. It’s easier to explain a hundred or thousand victims of a terrorist attack. What is impossible to explain is the killing of 6 million minorities, mostly Jews, over a span of 4 years.  

Due to lack of explanation or perhaps to swallow their guilt, they have built the Memorial of Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin among other memorials in Europe. It was designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman to be open for interpretation. As I walked through it, I could hear their voices, their desperation as they stood up to fight in the Warsaw ghetto, the tears of a child seeing his mother die before he joins her in the afterlife, their fears, their struggles.

 

The Jewish Holocaust Memorial

Contemplating at the memorial

I could hear their voices

Under the memorial is a museum and I thought it be a good idea to see it. It was disheartening.

Holocaust victims

It didn’t make sense why a party and eventually a nation could breed so much hatred. Curiosity led me to the Jewish National Museum where I got some context of the Jewish-Europe relationship. Jews started migrating to Europe in the Roman times. They flourished in sectors of finance, administration and medical sciences, the main reason why they were protected by kings and emperors. As Christianity flourished, the Jews languished. They became scapegoats for every disaster, from murdering Jesus to the Bubonic plaque to blood libels. As a matter of fact, they had been persecuted so many times before the 20^th century holocaust.  Even though prize winning scientists like Albert Einstein and Fritz Haber are Jews, they are still regarded inferior in Europe. That’s’ unfortunately the short sighted world we live in.

The three axes at the Museum

Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum

A notable German Jew

A Muslim, a Christian and a Jew

Golem exhibition at the museum

While the Nazi were killing the Jews, the civilian Germans were worrying about the war. Even though they had early victories, towards the end it was clear that Germany was losing. Hitler prepared his last days preparing for the afterlife. He married his long time love and had them both commit suicide rather than surrender. His death marked salvation to the Jews but woo to the Germans.

Having lost the war, Germany was sliced up like how they sliced Africa. The victors; Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union each grabbed a quarter of the land and a portion of the Capital, Berlin in East Germany.  The capitalists (Britain, France and USA) united to form West Germany making the Soviet’s slice East Germany. As the Cold war progressed, walls were built, the Inner German Border (1949) and the Berlin Wall (1961). West fascists were not allowed to contaminate East Communists and vice versa. More often than not East Germans tried to cross the borders, risking the punishment of death. It even when to the extreme case where the West colonizers had to airlift supplies to West Berlin because the Soviet refused them to use the Berlin harbor. Once again, the fate of families and businesses lay in the hands of egocentric politicians.

Checkpoint at the Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall strip

The silver lining appeared after the fall of the wall in 1989. It’s safe to say that it has gone uphill from there. Many good things are associated with German now, like fancy cars, a female chancellor, German desserts, compound nouns, remorse among others.

I have to admit, walking through German history feels like reading an unfinished novel. It makes you realize how much inhumanity we are capable of and wonder if at all justice will ever be served. I know there were Germans who were rooting for African independence and Jews’ lives, but acted indifferently to protect their lives. It might have served them well but they will go down on the wrong side of history. It’s not just them we should be pointing fingers at, I think the other fingers should be pointed at ourselves. This will go down in history as the era of Syrian civil war, Somali hunger, Trump regime, tech revolution etc. Which side will you be on?  

 “The earth is a very small stage in the vast cosmic arena, think of all those rivers of blood, spilled by generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph, they can be momentary masters of a fraction of a dot… Our planet is a lonely spec in the great enveloping cosmic dark. To me it underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the only home we have ever known… the pale blue dot.” -Carl Sagan