Ghosts on the Platform

Last weekend I was in Munich and it was great. It was my fourth trip to Germany, and each time I go I like it more. The beauty of her cities, friendliness of the her people and  the wonderful sense of order and cleanliness appeal to me. For a while, I had felt a bit odd (guilty?) about liking it so much, because no matter how you look at it you cannot separate Germany from a particular part of its history: the violence of the Nazi government and the horrors of the Holocaust; and I think that the Germans will be the first to admit that is true.  The evidence and memory of the time remains, through museums and memorials, but also (and sometimes less obviously) through the actual places where significant events occurred.  In my trips to Germany, I have visited several memorials to the Holocaust, but also the place where Hitler's bunker was (now on the spot, there is a rather drab block of flats), the site of the SS headquarters and the plaza that witnessed the book burning of 1933.  These have all had their effect on me, and I had expected them to.  

However, what I had not expected was the absolute sadness I feel at train stations.  This very ordinary aspect of German life is, in its very ordinariness, almost distressing.  For me the feeling of sadness is palpable and heightened by the the fact that the stations remain fulfilling the same purpose they did seventy years ago, moving people from place to place.  The former concentration camps are now memorials, their original purpose for ever transformed.  Hitler's bunker has been demolished and built over.  The former site of the SS headquarters in Berlin is a barren place that houses an exhibit, the Topography of Terror. But, there at the train stations are — if not exactly the same rails — the same routes and places of departure not only for those trains that set out for the east, but also for those trains which set out for far more hospitable destinations and in far greater comfort.  From the same place departed trains for holiday destinations and also for places far less innocent and far more sinister.  And there is something extremely poignant about that.

I still love Germany and want to visit often, but every once in a while as I am myself riding on one of the newer trains there, I spy an older train car on an unused bit of line and wonder....