Close shave at Berlin Christmas Market attack

JANINE SIMON MEYER

They were a part of this non-denominational liturgical choir who was in Germany over the festive season to perform at the 2016 Louis Lewandowski Festival.

The two were standing next to the last stall, when it was smashed by a truck, driven by a terrorist who ploughed into people attending the Christmas Market at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche Cathedral on December 19, leaving 12 dead and dozens injured.

The truck shrieked to a halt a hair’s breadth away from them that Monday night. The driver of the truck, Amis Amri, a Tunisian refugee, fled the scene and was eventually shot dead in Italy on December 23.

“I cannot get the sight and sounds out of my head. The truck ploughed through the market at top speed mowing down everything and everybody in its way.” These were the words all the chorale members received via What’s App soon after the first reports of the attack went out.

The Festival had ended the night before. The choristers and their families were fanning out across the city and continent on their way back to South Africa, or other travels.

My husband, chorister Jeff Meyer, and I had been with friends on a U-bahn to the suburbs, fresh from an Italian feast two blocks from the market.

Stunned we watched the live coverage of Berlin’s governing mayor Michael Müller speaking at the scene.

Just four days earlier he’d been speaking at the Festival opening in the Pestalozzi Straße Synagogue in a courtyard in Charlottenburg, welcoming choirs from Basel, Berlin, London, Leipzig and Johannesburg and the celebration of the Jewish liturgical music that is part of the city’s cultural heritage.

Listening to mayor Müller in a shul that survived Kristallnacht (the fire department doused the flames to save the adjoining buildings) had the hairs on my arms standing erect. Seventy years after being re-inaugurated in 1947, the Pestalozzi Straße Shul felt alive, familiar.  

In days after the attack flags flew at half-mast and memorial flowers spread across the pavements around the square.

When Amri was killed in Italy on Friday, December 23, the news flashed up on the U-Bahn TV. No-one around us seemed to notice; the carriage stayed a sea of earphones, septum piercings and blank expressions.  

Similarly, little seemed to change when people walked up and down carriages to beg. We asked a young Berliner why they appeared to be all but ignored. ‘Everyone knows they can get a place to stay and help from the government. They beg because they want to.

For a South African that answer was hard to compute. 

First glimpses of the remains of the Berlin Wall along the River Spree were also a surprise, showing an unprepossessing stretch of grey concrete. A walking tour and hours in the Checkpoint Charlie Mauer Museum, unpicked that perception.

A section of wall stands preserved in the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre, a place of remembrance constructed on the site of the buildings that had housed the ‘central institutions of Nazi terror’, the Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office.

The Centre’s permanent exhibition is a systematic, detailed display of the 12 years of Nazi rule. It is a gutting account of disenfranchisement, dehumanisation and slaughter.

But it makes Berlin in 2017 feel like history thought through, not hidden. And history humanised, as through the stumbling stones (stolpersteine), the small brass plaques that embed the names and fates of victims of the Holocaust in the pavements in front of their former homes.

Stolpersteine lie unannounced outside Crowne Plaza City Centre Hotel, in the mattress-littered pavements of Neukölln, south Berlin, around the street corners in Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, and outside the eclectic coffee shops and cafes for which Berlin is becoming famous.

Many of these owner-run establishments were closed for the Christmas break. Still, we hung out in a decent enough number of them to get a glimpse into hipster Berlin, where the waitrons are gentle, food is organic, and the furniture faded and welcoming.

* The non-denominational Lewandowski Chorale began its 2017 programme this past Wednesday with an open rehearsal, to enable anyone interested to experience choral singing.