Berlin Express

After supper I watch television. I am too tired to do anything else. Well, I’m old; that’s my excuse. Don’t younger people who work hard all day feel the same way?

Charlie climbs on my lap, and that’s a comfort. For a while the cat will keep his eyes turned on the tv; then he turns his head to me as if to say, “Isn’t this a bore?” Then he goes to sleep.

I struggle to stay awake until bedtime. One night I was reduced to watching a two star movie on Turner Classics. “Berlin Express” is a clumsy black and white thriller made shortly after the end of World War II, with the brave American rescuing the beautiful Merle Oberon from wicked Germans, who were still Nazis secretly trying to settle old grudges.

The movie was full of footage made in Berlin at the end of the war, showing the total destruction of the city, mile after mile of ruins, every building a hollow shell, streets filled with rubble. The theme of the movie was that Germany had been destroyed so completely that the nation would never recover.

I made my first trip to Germany in 1978. I was amazed. I saw no signs that there had been a war. Yet when I went to New Mexico in 1984, I met a former Army man who had been sent to Germany about the time this movie was made. He was convinced that German cities were still bombed out shells and that the German people were starving. Nothing I said could change his mind.

I have not seen the many modern buildings which transformed Berlin in the 1990's. My brother Don, a mechanical engineer, worked on some of those skyscrapers. He says Berlin is one of the most beautiful cities in the World.

There will always be people who see something – or learn something – and are so stuck in their minds that they cannot see change. “I saw it that way, so it must be so.” A hundred years after the Civil War, my grandmother still believed, “The South shall rise again.” We evoke the past like an old black and white movie. That should not prevent us from seeing today’s World on a 42-inch plasma tv in vivid color – or now on a device the size of a cigarette pack which brings the World into the palm of your hand.