Posted by Carlos
 
This is an unusually personal blog. In addition to the millions who have succumbed to this deadly virus, the world over has been struggling with COVID-19 in a multitude of ways for more than a year now. What stands out is when we help our fellow human beings. Of course, there are the applauded yet overworked and underpaid heroes in our healthcare systems; however, even when not on the frontlines, everyone can make a significant difference within their own remit. Located in Berlin’s western district of Charlottenburg and priding itself in being ‘the hotel with a difference’, Pension Peters is a case in point.  
 
In what is now a decade of working as a guide, I have been fortunate to travel Europe and to meet a kaleidoscope of characters with one thing in common: a genuine openness to strangers. This comes as little of a surprise in the case of Pension Peters, given Johanna and Olga Steiner’s Swedish and Czech heritage. The two sisters own and run the hotel in its second generation, with an affinity for art and sustainability. They take a genuine interest in their guests, whose check-ins resemble less a formal procdure than they do a conversation among old friends who have not seen each other for years. The hotel supports local, still unknown artists by adorning their corridors with paintings and hosting an exhibition at least once a year. The Steiner sisters share their knowledge and passion for Berlin as well as any guide could. It is not least for this reason that the Hotel Pension Peters has worked with Rick Steves even before his fame reached dizzying heights.
 
Of course, the Hotel Pension Peters has been affected dramatically by the pandemic. With tourism being one of Berlin’s most important industries, the economic ripple effects of Corona have been real and tangible. Over a hundred fellow guides, many of whom are friends, have lost their livelihoods. In the absence of tourists, small businesses, such as hotels, bars and restaurants have been struggling to stay afloat.  
 
This backdrop makes the story I was able to witness particularly moving. Johanna and Olga had been receiving and looking after an ailing guest since the beginning of 2019. Working in Switzerland, this guest repeatedly had contracted cancer and sought treatment in Berlin each time. Staying at the Pension Peters placed her within walking distance of her oncologist and close to her son, who lived nearby. In addition, she got to know the Steiner family well and enjoyed long conversations about history, theatre and life in general with the sisters’ mother Annika.  
 
Spring 2020 saw difficult times descend upon this guest. Until then, it had appeared as though she would remain cancer-free, having undergone a mastectomy a few years before and passing all check-ups with flying colours ever since. She had looked forward to returning to her home on the other side of the Atlantic and dividing her retirement between there and Berlin. After sustaining a fall, her visit to the doctor bore worse news than a broken sternum: she had contracted breast cancer for a fourth time; and this time it was incurable.  
 
The Steiner sisters stepped up to help their guest and her family in this time of need. They already had struck up a friendship with her from the outset. They now allocated her a room on the ground floor, which was otherwise sealed off to guests, and gave her access to kitchen as well as the usual facilities hotel guests enjoy. They provided her son with a spare key so that he could visit and look after her on a regular basis. Soon the guest suffered from further complications, notably liquid filling her lungs. This required her to spend several stints in about half a dozen of Berlin’s hospitals over the summer. In this time, the Steiners maintained her room and supported the family all the same. When she was released from hospital and returned to the hotel, they served as the “eyes and ears” of her son while he worked as school teacher during the day. The hotel became a temporary caretaking station in which the guest’s son could act as a de facto nurse for as long as the situation required.  
 
Alas the situation was tenable only for so long. The guest’s condition worsened. Metastases had spread from the lungs to the skin and chemotherapy was added to an already strenuous treatment. The concern was now a threefold one: she could succumb either to her illness, her physically frail condition or to Corona. The availability of a suitable nursing home in November provided a sigh of relief. Being ensconced promised to save her from all three lethal threats. Medical transportation to and from the oncologist for chemotherapy could be arranged for as well. 
 
However, literally every body has its limits. By the beginning of December, the patient had undergone nine of ten sessions of chemotherapy. Her final appointment had to be postponed as her condition worsened. After appearing to be on the mend from this setback, she took both the nursing staff and her family by surprise. She passed away peacefully in her sleep on a Saturday afternoon.    
 
In the aftermath, the Pension Peters remained true to itself. Johanna and Olga allowed their late guest’s son to retain her belongings in her room for as long as he needed. They initially refused to accept anything more than a token sum that would amount to less than an average monthly rent in Berlin in exchange for almost half a year of support. It had been their guest’s wish that they accept a multiple of that and so they had no other reasonable option but to take more.  
 
As a guide, I often hear both from guests and operators how important it is to support local businesses. We tend to romanticise their worth and politicians across the Atlantic have an affinity for putting them on a pedestal on campaign trails. Life’s stories and realities lend more strength to this position than any romanticism ever could. As this terrible year draws to a close, a good new year’s resolution would be to make a start with the Hotel Pension Peters and its genuinely humanely beautiful owners, once it is safe to travel again.

Over the last six to seven weeks (or has it been longer?), I have made a point of isolating myself physically as well as possible. The challenges one faces in this ongoing process are by now almost commonplace. With the dramatic decline of travel we are witnessing, guiding tours is, for the moment, a thing of the past.
 

​And yet: small, unexpected things bring me back to my “past life”. A friend pointed out a building I have cycled past on many occasions in our neighbourhood, saying it looked strikingly like a building of the National Socialist era. This was a good excuse to mount the iron horse once more and embark on a small fact-finding mission.
 
Just a few blocks away from Rathaus Schöneberg – the town hall where John F. Kennedy once uttered his famous words Ich bin ein Berliner – stands the Berlin School of Economics and Law. While the upper parts of its buildings clearly have been rebuilt, the bullet holes on the outside walls of the ground floor clearly indicated that this had been constructed before the Second World War. Originally constructed for the Reich Economic Chamber in 1939, today's House B became home the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht the following year. The German Army housed its Abteilung Kriegsgefangenenwesen (Department for Prisoner of War Affairs). The rules and regulations for treatment of prisoners-of-war (POW) were determined here. As one can imagine, these varied according to the nationality of the prisoner in question. A Russian POW, for example, would have been deemed belonging to the Slavic ‘race’ and therefore sub-human, whereas a different set of rules would have been applied to a French, British or United States POW.  
 
This reminded me of an issue that is often raised on my concentration camp memorial tours of Sachsenhausen. Located north of Berlin in the town of Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen was more than a concentration camp during the Third Reich. Among the adjacent facilities was the Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps, which coordinated the entire camp system on German and German-occupied territory. It had moved from Berlin to Oranienburg – the city in which Sachsenhausen stands – in 1938. One finds houses that had been built for camp guards and members of the SS (the elite paramilitary unit of the National Socialist Party in charge of the camp system after 1934) on the street leading to this building. In spite of efforts by the former director of the memorial, these houses are still privately held.
 
After a long and intense visit to the memorial, visitors often ask how one can live in places like these. This is an understandable question to which, having grown up and lived in Germany, I sometimes offer a simple answer: if you want to avoid living in a place tainted by the National Socialist past, Germany is not it.
 
There is a little more to this. The past is something one cannot escape, especially when it comes to dictatorship, global war and genocide in the twentieth century. There was no way for German society to avoid the legal, economic and political consequences if it wanted to re-establish itself in the world. The question is how one deals with that past – once you come around to it – and it is answered differently from generation to generation.
 
In our day and age the past actions of the regime are still owned by places like these. While the Sachsenhausen memorial serves a civic and educational function, the Berlin School of Economics and Law does not eschew the past of its facilities either. Its website provides a history of the building and this informs its commitment to learning and cultural diversity, even though it does not offer degrees in History. At a time when there are fewer of those who suffered in the camps alive today, transferring the lessons of the past to a younger generation, which can learn how to make the best of our crisis-ridden world, is vital for our future as a society.
 
 
 

In better times, I made it a habit on my frequent trips to Munich to visit one of the many beautiful small towns in the surrounding Bavarian countryside. One such side trip took me to Burghausen, a town nestled, like Salzburg, in the valley of the Salzach river, with a commanding castle straddling the ridge above. If you visit, maybe during the notable Jazz festival in March, be sure to cross the river (into Austria; the river marks the border) and climb up the hill opposite the town. You will be able to take in the whole of Burghausen and the full expanse of its castle. This takes some doing: the castle is 3,448 feet long and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest in the world. However, if you go onto the castle's website, you won't see a banner headline touting the world record. Instead, tucked within a lengthy historical description, it is demurely mentioned that “Burghausen Castle, which has a length of over 1,000 metres, is one of the longest castle complexes in the world.”
As a German citizen who grew up in the United States but who has lived in Europe for twenty years, I have reconciled myself (sometimes I think: resigned myself) to being fully assimilated into German society. But every now and again I feel a twitch of my American upbringing; some negligible occurrence will strike a dissonant note that reminds me that I can't fully shed my cultural apartness. And that was the feeling I had after walking a full two-thirds of a mile from one end of the damn castle to the other only to be told in the museum shop brochure that the castle is indeed quite long and that the “Guinness Book of World Records even claims it is the longest castle anywhere.”
Claims?
You've got the longest castle in the world – the Guinness Book of World Records says so – and you want to quibble?
This was wrong. This was offensive. This was downright un-American.

I though of this recently after watching German chancellor Angela Merkel deliver an unprecedented televised address about the Corona crisis. Apart from the traditional – and traditionally anodyne – televised new year's speeches our chancellors are expected to give, this was the first time Merkel had chosen this mode of communication in all her nearly fifteen years in office. Here's the part of the address that was most frequently quoted in German media:

I turn to you today in this unusual way because I want to tell you what guides me as chancellor and all my colleagues in the federal government in this situation. This is part and parcel of an open democracy: that we also make political decisions transparent and explain them; that we justify and communicate our actions as well as possible so that they are comprehensible. I firmly believe that we will succeed in this task if all citizens see it as their task. So let me say that this is serious. Take it seriously too. Since German reunification, no, since the Second World War, there has not been a challenge to our country that depends so much on our joint solidarity.

Not exactly soaring rhetoric. Merkel's tone, even while she resorts to a, for her, highly unusual historical analogy to emphasize the severity of the crisis, remains largely sober, matter-of-fact. For a Merkel speech, however, this was a barn-burner: “We have rarely seen the chancellor speak with as much pathos as she did in her televised address,” read a column in one of the country's leading newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
In part, this has to do with Merkel specifically. She is not a gifted public speaker and has tried to turn that weakness into a strength, cultivating the image of a pragmatic doer who doesn't waste her time on empty talk. But it's not just her. Before Gustav Heinemann was elected West Germany's president in 1969, he was asked if he loved the Federal Republic whose head of state he was soon to become. He answered, “Oh please, I don't love states, I love my wife; that's it.” We are not used to our politicians stirring the heart-strings or appealing to our patriotism. We tend to be supremely skeptical of superlatives. And we certainly do not couch our response to political challenges in the language of war.
Donald Trump has called himself a “wartime president” in the face of the Corona crisis; the British “war cabinet” meets daily to discuss its response to the pandemic; French president Emmanuel Macron has declared that “we're at war” against the virus. Merkel, though she tells us we haven't faced a challenge of this magnitude since 1945, does not suggest the current challenge is like a war. Of course, there are good reasons why she wouldn't do that. The United States, the UK, and France are rightly proud of their role in what Studs Terkel called “the good war” against an evil, genocidal enemy. It is the hard-won awareness that we were indeed that evil, genocidal enemy that goes some way in explaining the reluctance of German politicians to use martial rhetoric.
And more than that: for good reasons we do not have the avenues open to other countries to commemorate the war and the war dead. To be sure, we have a national memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe and many more memorials across the country reminding us of the horrors of the Holocaust. We also have a memorial commemorating “all victims of war and tyranny.” But we don't have a Veterans' Day, we don't have a Memorial Day, we don't have an Imperial War Museum or memorials to the German soldiers who died in World War II. Those soldiers are certainly remembered – within the family and the community from which they hailed. Local World War I memorials will often have the dates “1939-1945” added to them to allow for such remembrance, obviating the need for separate (and inevitably problematic) World War II equivalents.
We can't describe ourselves as the biggest or the best. We tried that and the results were disastrous. Germany's is a political culture trying to escape its exceptionalism, because that exceptionalism (let's leave a more nuanced historical discussion aside for a moment) led to Auschwitz. Germany is a country that doesn't want to be special; it's a country that, sometimes desperately, wants to be like everybody else.


But as Heinemann's “I love my wife” answer suggests, the sobriety of our public and political discourse goes beyond an effort to eschew the language of war. Overt displays of patriotism are generally frowned upon, as are sentimentality and pathos and exaggeration. This is true for political speeches, it's true for newspapers and the TV news, and it's true for weather reports. In Germany, we have snowstorms, not snowmageddons, snowpocalypses, snowzillas, or any of the other delightful meteorological portmanteaus a cursory Google search turns up. When a plane crashes or people are displaced from their homes by river floods, evening news programs will focus on the facts and figures, not on the emotional impact of the tragedy, not on the loss.
Perhaps this too has to do with the experience of the Nazi period and the Second World War. In 1967, the psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich published a famous study called The Inability to Mourn. In it, the authors suggest that postwar West German society was deeply informed by the loss many Germans felt at the defeat of the Third Reich. This was a regime that people had been emotionally invested in. As perverse as it seems, its collapse was experienced by many as a betrayal of a promise. And this loss, this betrayal, could not be mourned after the war in the face of a burgeoning acceptance (or at least the expectation of acceptance) that this regime was deeply evil. In short, the Mitscherlichs argued that Germans felt the need to mourn Hitler but couldn't. And how did they cope with this inability to mourn? They focused on rebuilding the country, on economic recovery. They gave precedence to the material over the spiritual.
Most contemporary scholars do not give much credence to the Mitscherlichs' analysis. But when their book was published, it clearly touched a nerve. There is a price we pay for banishing pathos and emotion from the public square, for our lack of a civil religion. A news report that doesn't address the horror of a plane crash or a flood or a pandemic just isn't commensurate with what we're feeling in a moment of uncertainty or loss. We may long at those times for our political leaders to signal to us – not just on an intellectual, but on an emotional level – that we're all in this together.


But then, it seems, we don't always know how. When pathos does venture into the public realm in Germany, the result is often awkward or it devolves into kitsch – at least from the perspective of non-Germans. If you ever watch the movie The Miracle of Bern about Germany's first soccer World Cup championship in 1954, you'll be forgiven for thinking that even the Hallmark Channel would have given it a pass. But the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder admits to having wept as he watched the dramatic depiction of underdog West Germany defeating mighty Hungary in the final.
That a 21st century movie celebrating a German triumph would look to a soccer tournament is no accident. Soccer is one area where over-the-top emotion, irrational exuberance, and patriotism can all come together. It has become a tradition to fly the German flag from cars and balconies when a major tournament involving the national team is going on. The chants at games are often wannabe poetic: “We'll go anywhere – just not home” or “We haven't seen anything as beautiful in a long, long time.” (Remarkably, they're pithier in German.) And when it comes to chants supporting your local club, exceptionalism, not to mention chauvinistic bravado, is encouraged: “Everyone but Frankfurt is shit.” (This, by the way, happens to be true.)

Soccer is the exception – albeit perhaps not entirely. Germans are, of course, attuned to American politics and American pop culture. And it rubs off. We now have presidential style debates between our candidates for chancellor, although the less-than-stellar production values and weedsy policy questions don't exactly make for riveting television. Germany produces a seemingly never-ending stream of overwrought made-for-TV romances and tear-jerkers, although often they are set in places outside of Germany that are considered more romantic, like Italy or Ireland. We also have a tabloid newspaper culture that isn't known for its reserve. After Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, the headline in the Bild-Zeitung famously read, “We're the Pope!” And while the foundation that is responsible for the castle in Burghausen is reluctant to lay claim to its world record status, the town of Burghausen plasters “world's longest castle” on anything it can.
In short, we should be very reluctant to present cultural or political norms as immutable – or the product of something as dubious as a “national character.” Instead, they are – in Germany as anywhere – complicated, ever-changing, and ambivalent. But whatever the reasons for the sobriety of our public discourse, in times of Corona, it can be comforting to have political leaders present relevant facts in a straightforward way. And to know that, in order to communicate the gravity of the current situation, they need not resort to superlatives, war metaphors, or pomp and circumstance. They can just tell us.