From Golm, Germany

On Friday last week, Nirumama and I drove from Dossenheim to Luxembourg to Nishithbhai's. The Luxembourg trip has not much to write about, except that I loved the drive to and fro, and that Nishithbhai and I went to the cricket nets to chance our arms at batting and bowling after over a year. And I also discovered my new interest in chess, a game I utterly disliked before.

The realization that my carbon footprint had grown
manifold in the one week that I had arrived in Europe had already been pinching me for a while. That, despite having been mostly cycling within and around Dossenheim. In what is fashionably called "standard of living", there are no separate electric switches for lights, geysers, power sockets etc. in a bathroom. So, every time you get into a bathroom to, lets say wash your face, you end up switching on the geyser too. I wonder if having a separate switch for each appliance amounts to lowering one's standard of living. In the first email I read in Luxembourg, someone asked how I felt in "the clean part of the world"! But then, it does not take much to get used to excesses and I am definitely not always above this human frailty. My love for driving is well known to those who know me, and I decided to rent a car to drive over 600 km from Heidelberg to Golm on Monday, my carbon footprint notwithstanding.

My credit card was declined at a fuel station in Bombay a few days before I left for Europe. I called the bank and they informed me that someone had attempted a transaction worth much more than my credit limit and that they had blocked the card out of abundant caution. I was left without a credit card in Europe, as if by Providence. Car rental companies do not rent cars without having a customer's credit card details for security. Much to the relief of my swollen carbon foot, I could not rent the car and took an ICE train to reach Berlin on my way to Golm. The ICE train traveled a maximum speed of 250 km/h and the journey was as comfortable as quick. I have only used public transport since. :-)


One has to change over at Berlin to go to Potsdam and then once again at Potsdam to reach Golm. My old friend Siddhartha, whose place I am currently putting up at, who studies at Potsdam University and lives in a University hostel in Golm, had come to receive me at Potsdam railway station. All these places - a part of Berlin, Potsdam and Golm - belonged to the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. These places feel incredibly different than West Germany. The buildings here seem very regimental, without much panache, to give a feeling that everything is controlled by the communist machinery. It seemed like a place where liberty, though now recovering, might have once suffocated to the brink of death. This uneasy feeling reached a crescendo when I entered Siddhartha's hostel building. His room is at a level above ground, at the beginning of a long passageway - approximately 200 meters - with shiny, oil painted beige walls, numerous, mostly outdated posters - some promotional material of a 1995 rock show, a 2006 Mozart Requiem poster, another one for the European Union Agriculture and Rural Development - pasted all over. A number of old fashioned tube lights lined the ceiling of the passage, some lit, some flickering, and most dead. Siddhartha told me that the entire complex, used to be a training center for the Stasi - the official state security service or the secret police in East Germany - and before that, a military center of the Nazis. However, the uneasy feeling was ephemeral and soon I found this place very intriguing. Whatever happened, had happened and I felt the urge to explore the facts better. Next morning, i.e. yesterday, I had an incredibly interesting conversation about communism, liberty etc. Thereafter, I traveled to Berlin and explored but a tiny part of the wonderful city. I will resume the exploration (using only public transport) tomorrow, since I have spent most of today reading about German history.


Another regimental building, located opposite the hostel has its walls covered by creepers. Underneath the vegetation on the walls, near one of the entrances is an old sign, which reads "Zum Luftschutzraum", which means "to the airshelter". These Luftschutzraums were essentially underground structures to protect the military in case of an aerial strike during World War II. I am excerpting a passage from chapter 6 - Inside Hitler's Reich - from the book 'Conqueror's Road: An Eyewitness Report of Germany 1945' by Osmar White, which should give a vivid idea of the proportions that a Luftschutzraum could assume.


"When the place was evacuated squads of soldiers had been ordered to demolish everything that could be demolished. They had gone through the bunkers with drums of gasoline, dynamite and flamethrowers, but enough was left in the charred rubbish to see that the houses had once been luxuriously furnished.


The cellar stairs in each were labelled with the sign that one saw all over Germany: 'ZUM LUFTSCHUTRAUM'. The 'Luftschutzraum' in this case was the fortress itself.


A single floor down, and all reality was left behind. A maze of concrete passageways led down into the mountain's roots. The doors were of heavy metal with peepholes of bulletproof glass in them. There were the remains of electric eye and supersonic detection devices, and of microphones set into the ceilings of guest rooms, of innumerable escape trapdoors and recesses for sentries, and secret exits. Fear and suspicion, carried to the limits of human imagination, were the only emotions which could have motivated the design of this place. It was a place where men had prepared to hide themselves from the wrath of their fellow men in a robot world carved out of living rock. It had been ventilated, warmed, lighted and drained with insane ingenuity. The whole atmosphere was the atmosphere of an aseptic, plush-padded torture chamber - a torture chamber in which the torturer was the mind, the conscience of those who created and occupied it. Everything could be shut out - everything except fear."


I am trying to see if I can go inside this Luftschutzraum opposite the hostel, though am not sure if I'll be able to. Tomorrow, I explore more of Berlin. I am in the throes of discovery at the moment.