Famine

Chapter Twenty-Two

    The German Reichstag (pronounced rikes stock) was once again their capital building.  In 1933 it was rumored that Hiter’s thugs burned it, and Hitler expelled the communists from voting in parliament.  It lay a burned-out hulk for years.

   Jonah has a lot of time to kill, so he had the driver take him down the long street dividing Berlin.  He passed the winged victory column and Sophie Carlotta Palace and on down to their huge stadium built for the 1933 Olympic.  It was undamaged in World War Two bombing and looked in mint condition to Jonah.  There he walked to the engraved list of Olympic Heroes at the other end of the stadium. Beyond him was the huge polo field.  There he found the name of Jesse Owens, the black American runner, who won three gold medals. He taught the Nazi’s a lesson that all of their talk of being a Master Race was just that: talk. 

   Traffic was heavier in old West Berlin over a hundred years before.  Jonah noticed they they still drove like Germans.  If their cars would go faster than eighty kilometers per hour, why not go faster?  A BMW shot past them on a bypass.  Nothing had changed about German drivers, Jonah thought.

   The houses still had their passion for steep roofs, partly from tradition, but partly from the colder climate and heavier snowfall in Northern Germany.  The skyline looked much like it was in the 1870’s. Jonah once tried to get iced tea in Berlin back in 1975.  They laughed as him.  Although they long had refrigeration, they didn’t make that much ice.  Even today, Jonah was convinced that there weren’t enough ice cubes among four restaurants to fill fill a bag of ice at 7-11.

   The driver cut over and drove up Kurfueerstandamstrasse, still a main street for business.  Signs still advertised  Schultheis Beer carried in liter mugs by Frauleins on the sidewalk restaurants to waiting customers. Men still drank their beer and smoked from long curved tobacco pipes sinc a synthetic now complied with clean-air laws.  But the tobacco did’t taste very good to most Germans.

   The driver cut through a large park.  A kid was kicking a soccer ball against a monument to the composer Wagner.  Next he went down Pottsdamer Platz, now restored to its pre-World War Two magnificence.  Jonah remembered that non one was patient in Germany.  In Nuernberg, nobody stood in line to buy sandwiches and drinks from a sidewalk food stand.  They had pushed with impatience instead of waiting, but here they waited in line without complaint.  Stassenbahns traveled on tracks like centuries ago and traditional cobblestone replaced the cheaper asphalt on the streets.

   Street vendors still pushed eis wagons, selling ice cream to kids.  They loved the Italian products the best.  A sidewalk musician played his guitar.  Johnny Cash’s Train of Love was popular along with a number made popular by Choi Ping, a Chinese Folk rock star from the year 2050.

   The taxi turned by the infamous Check Point Charlie, where the old guard house once stood for over forty years.  Nearby was now a museum,  A monument there said “Nichts Mehr” or no more.  How many Germans here in their long-reunited  country ever knew that their city was occupied and divided as the result of a horrific war?

   Irony struck Jonah as he rode toward the Brandenburg Gate.  Now it was possible for him to go through.  It was once the symbolic of the barrier that separated free Germans from enslaved ones.  Near it was a piece of the Berlin Wall and a monument to those who died trying to escape from East Berlin to the West and freedom.  Now the reunited Germans had their begun to enjoy religious freedom at a time when Christians in America began to lose theirs.

   During the 1960’s war protests, Jonah had cried out for self-determination for the world’s masses.  Little did he suspect that America would have a wall of a sort.  Not one on the Mexican border, but a wall built with the bricks of ignorance and held together with the mortar of fear.  To overcome would take a great faith, greater than his, he was sure.