Berlin's Unquiet Ghosts.(Brief Article)

Even as a New Yorker, it is hard not to be struck by the raw, often- confusing, always-compelling energy of the new Berlin. Yet exciting as the city's transformation may be, the past is a relentless intruder. A walk through Berlin becomes a living version of a college survey course of 20th-century European history. The parade grounds where Kaiser Wilhelm II, on his horse and hiding his withered arm, reviewed the troops before World War I. Pariser Platz, where Hitler's troops held torchlight parades, the Nazis burned books and Soviet tanks smashed through the Brandenburg Gate in 1945. Hitler's bunker. The ruins of the Gestapo headquarters, saved from the wrecker's ball and turned into a small museum called "The Topography of Terror." The old Jewish quarter, now one of the trendiest parts of east Berlin. The huge air terminal at Tempelhof, once Hitler's pride, then the indispensable landing field through which the Airlift saved the city, now a small commuter airport. Remnants of the Berlin Wall.

No city on earth has gone through such a roller-coaster ride--from villain to victim, from horrors to heroics, all in just the past 70 years. First the decadent (and strangely innocent) pre-Nazi world immortalized in "Cabaret." Then Hitler and the Holocaust: Berlin as the undisputed capital of evil. Yet less than three years after the Battle of Berlin, the city's Soviet liberators, by blockading it, transformed it into the ultimate symbol of the cold war, a city of heroic freedom- loving survivors. The decades that followed were high theater with Berlin often at center stage: the East German uprising of June 1953, JFK, Checkpoint Charlie, secret spy exchanges, Reagan, the night of November 9, 1989, and, finally, one last photograph for the history books, the Clintons and the Kohls walking side by side through the Brandenburg Gate in 1994 into an ecstatic crowd of more than 100,000 people in East Berlin.

"Berlin is a city that never is, but is always in the process of becoming," the noted German essayist Karl Scheffler once observed. (He added, disapprovingly, that its people are "lured by the promise of Americanism.") He wrote this in 1910. Berlin is now becoming something new: Europe's greatest showcase for modern architecture--although some Berliners, fulfilling their reputation for cynicism, like to say that the world's best architects have come here to build their worst buildings.

But even here, everything seems reflected ...