It's Not Real 'Til It's Real

 

Covid forced me in the fall of 2020 to find something new to add to my life. So I started my study of the German language. At the time, I could not imagine that several years later, I would be walking along the shore of the Bergwitzsee in Kemberg, Brandenburg, Germany.

 

It is January 2024, and it is my second time in Deutschland.

I am hiking through small cities and towns. Today I am in Treuenbrietzen. I need a stamp from the town hall for my pilgrim’s pass. They don’t speak English. Grammar lets me properly express my desire, need, want or emergency. Without grammar my request would be “I would stamp need passport of the pilgrim, here receive can I?” Understandable, but offensive to the ears of a native speaker. 

I need to order food in restaurants. I need vocabulary to order Hähnchenschnitzel (chicken schnitzel) for protein or Brezel mit Salz (a salted pretzel)  for carbs or eine Bier to sate my thirst. 

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In 2022 when I hiked along the Bavarian Alps foothills, it was about the walk. If something was historical, then it was a plus. 

As I followed the root-lined, leaf-strewn paths up and down the foothills, I paid attention to two things: the beauty of the forests and meadows, and second, a safe landing for my feet so that I didn’t break a leg. Bavaria had little to do with my life back in Rochester. It was a nice, but not a fulfilling experience.

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This time on landing at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, I am through-hiking to explore history, and through history, an itinerary for self-reflection. However the rationale for being in East Germany in 2024 is emotionally and spiritually and cognizently different from Bavaria in 2022. I am here on a deliberate choice to explore things in myself that I had not touched in years, if not decades. 

One of my must-go-to’s is Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate: back in the day, it was the symbol of a divided Berlin into East and West - the marker of two distinct worlds with two distinct visions. Everything is black and white.

While hiking ten to fifteen miles each day, I have lots of alone time. I fill the mental space, thinking about the changes over my twenty-two years in the military: radio maintenance, Forward Air Controller support, light-wing attack aircraft crew chief and finally Russian interpreter in the Naval Security Group and National Security Agency. 

In the Navy, I had a home.

Each job had at its heart, facing off against the Soviet Union and its proxies. For twenty two years my military assignments were about defending against the existential threat of a nuclear war with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

Today - thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, this cause and these missions sound so static and devoid of significance. I have to know why.

Walking into towns like Schlunkendorf, Brandenburg, through the morning fog, is the perfect time to think about things. I’m on my own with no distractions.

What I have with me are memories of:

• friends with whom I got blindingly drunk before getting up the next morning to report for duty,

• friends with whom I argued and fought and yelled over the duty shift,

• friends with whom I spent the night waiting for some ache to be filled, like a feeling for home, standing with hand over heart as the American flag is raised in some foreign country,

• friends to share being alone, sharing a brotherly love that I would die for them, and they for me,

• and friends with whom I nearly died several times. The next morning I was always amazed that I was still alive.

On an eight-hour hike in the Dübener Heide nature park, thoughts of past friends and missions, past loves and losses, and gains like a son and grandchildren, and new loves like my partner are some of the things on my mind.

Today I am exploring the East Side Gallery, part of the former Berlin Wall, turned into art. I walk along the people-filled, transportation-hectic streets.

The artist words are, “Those who want the world to remain as it is, are those who want the world to not remain at all.”

I walk along a greenway that once was a killing zone, a shooting gallery for the East German border guards. In German class I couldn’t care less about this place, but now it makes me tear up.

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In the early 1990’s, I am only a viewer to the world-changing events, glued to my TV, watching CNN as the wall falls. In front of that TV, I suspect that my life of the past twenty years has been propelled to an inflection point. The new world order is just around the corner.

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The Berliners have no idea why I am by myself, and need to be by myself. I can’t do this in a group tour. I would lose the freedom to feel what I need to let go of.

I suspect the residents of Leipzig have an idea of their past, but have no idea of what being in their city means to me. I can tell most of them weren’t even on the planet yet, when the Deutsches Demokratisches Republik (German Democratic Republic) collapsed. So many are so young.

I walk the walk of the Leipzig protesters in 1989 from St Nikolai Church to Karl Marx Platz, following their footsteps.  They marched to demand the freedom to live their lives.They marched into a police presence, designed for intimidation. I don’t know what it was like, but I try to imagine the tear gas and batons of the police. Would I have walked with them? I don’t know.

The Leipzigens have no idea why the significance of these pasts protests make me stop on the way to the former Karl Marx Platz. I stop in front of a church or a wall or a plaza or a memorial in order to gather my composure. These protests started the end of the world as I experienced it. The West won.

The Leipzigers only see my hands go to my eyes, and rub like I have a piece of dust trapped there.

I remember being young and invincible, then slowly getting older. For the first time, I actually feel old.

In Berlin I walk into a protest. The same protest that I have seen in Wittenburg, Bad Dueben and Leipzig. The farmers are marching, blocking traffic. The press is saying “10,000 Farmers. 5000 Tractors”. The public transportation workers are on a limited-strike.

As a young boy, I had read a sci-fi novel called “The Mote (that’s M-O-T-E) in God’s Eye” by Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven. I don’t remember the plot, but I do remember trying to understand the concept of something tiny and insignificant being a distraction or a hindrance to the greater power or flow around it.

I want to be that mote in both Berlin and Leipzig. But I am sure that I am no interruption to the pace of life around me. My emotions are not a mote in God’s eye.

I want someone to ask me why I am there. And in the final contradiction, it’s too many people and too much sensory input. I want to be alone. But of course, I don’t leave the crowds … I just blend in.

Towards the end of my trip, I see a doughnut in a supermarket. It’s called “The Berliner”.

This is the famous doughnut of which John F Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”, which translates as “I am a jelly doughnut.” He meant to say “Ich bin Berliner”, that is  “I am a citizen of Berlin.”

I am so desperate for a sugar and salt fix that I buy the super-deluxe version\. “Ich bin ein Partyberliner.” Today, “I am a Party Berliner.”

I’ve still got so much to think about that I need to laugh.