Jan Morris in Berlin: ‘Ooh, That’s Nice!’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 11.07.07 | 11:54 AM ET
Legendary travel writer Jan Morris had a revelation about Berlin: The city “where Hitler strutted” and that had “haunted and disturbed” her all her adult life is “really rather nice.” She writes in the Financial Times: “Was it all guileless innocence? Of course not.”
She continues:
But it is undeniable that through all the years of shame and calumny, this city has consolidated its old reputation for charm. Besides, at last Berlin is itself again, a unity and a capital. It still has no absolute centre, like the Wilhelmine monarchs had built for it when they constructed their exorbitant metropolis—nowadays it is more like an assembly of towns and villages, each with its local focus. But it is a whole once more. The hideous dividing wall is remembered, more often than not, simply by commemorative lines of stones in street or sidewalk. Gone are the vast bomb-sites which, not so long ago, were inhabited by pedlars, drug-dealers and specialists in superannuated military junk.
Morris, it should be noted, began her life as James Morris and spent World War II fighting Germany as part of British Intelligence.
Related on World Hum:
* Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’: Do His Songs Still Resonate in the City That Inspired Them?
* Berlin’s DDR Museum: ‘There Must Be a Microphone Around Here Someplace’
Related on TravelChannel.com
* Berlin Travel Guide
* Samantha Brown’s Berlin Journal
Photo by extranoise, via Flickr (Creative Commons)
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
