Berlin Journal August 2009 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com

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Thursday was our day to go to Wannsee, a part of Berlin where comfortable homes were built in the early 1900s. Wannsee has a lovely lake on which motorboats are not allowed. So we saw lots of picturesque sailboats and even a kayak or two. We took a combination of the U-bahn (subway) and taxis to get around all day. Our main target for the daytime was a visit to the home of Max Liebermann. The home was lovely, and the gardens were especially wonderful. The site on the lake was picturesque, and lots of beautiful homes built by other Jewish families were nearby. These families only had a two or three decades to enjoy these homes before they were gathered up and sent to concentration camps. Max quit the Prussian Academy of the Arts when it stopped exhibiting works by Jewish artists. That was in 1933. In 1935, he died. In his last year of life, the Nazi forbade him to paint and removed his works from museums. Martha, his wife, lived on for a while. She was forced to sell the villa in Wannsee to the National Post in 1940. In 1943, she took an overdose of sleeping pills to commit suicide just hours before the police were to come to take her away to a concentration camp. After learning about the circumstances of her death, I was overwhelmed to the point of tears. The angst had been building already since our arrival in Berlin, but this was a point where angst gave way to overwhelming sorrow. In the late afternoon, we took a taxi to the home of Arnold’s charming friends, Klaus and Karen. Klaus and Arnold are friends from engineering school days, and Karen is a former flight attendant, so she speaks English fluently. Their home has an even more beautiful garden than what we’d seen earlier in Wannsee. They served champagne from Jean-François Plener in Bouzy, France. This is a vintner whom Arnold and Mareen took us to meet years ago. After a nice visit and tour of Klaus’ and Karen’s perfect home, we all piled into Klaus’s car and went to their favorite Italian restaurant. The food was very, very good. A taxi delivered us to the door of our hotel but we decided first to have drinks on the terrace of the Pakistani restaurant next door. We got into a fascinating discussion about the European Union and its potential (or not). In discussing the meaning of the union, we compared to the union of the U.S., and attempted to explain to Arnold the significance of the American Civil War in defining what we are. An understanding of the Civil War is absolutely fundamentally important to understanding what America is, and I don’t think Europeans get it most of the time. Arnold confirmed that they do not study the American Civil War in school. He said “but we saw Gone With the Wind, so we know about the Civil War.” We explained that that was Hollywood, and the true significance of the War, the defining strength of the Union, is not conveyed at all in that movie. Sigh. The bloodiest, most devastating war of our history and Europeans don’t know it. I remember a German man on Sanibel once telling me that America has never been invaded. I replied, “you tell that to anyone in the South and they will correct you on the spot.” It will be interesting to see if the European Union can evolve into a true union. Arnold said it was different for us because we had only one language, English. Tom corrected him about this. There was a point, early in our history, where German could have become the official language. There are other languages in the U.S. In fact, there is no official language in the U.S. Arnold didn’t believe us. Here he is, talking to a distinguished professor emeritus of American Studies and Literature, and he won’t believe him. What can one do? ←Previous Next → Sign my guestbook. View my guestbook.

Thursday, August 6, 2009 The Max Liebermann home in Wannsee. View of the Wannsee lake from the Liebermann home. Fischkutters restaurant in the Ka De We department store in Berlin. The Omega Watch Apollo Landing display. Tom and Arnold with the Arnold Activities Plan, in front of the Apollo Crew Activities Plan.