A Flaneur is Born
Channel: David Tuffley
Date: 20/05/2020

An excerpt from AN AMERICAN FLÂNEUR IN BERLIN by David Tuffley.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Fl-C3-A2neur-Berlin-David-Tuffley-ebook-dp-B07GK713QC/dp/B07GK713QC/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

An American Flaneur in Berlin is the stream of consciousness account of Gabi Hartmann’s fictional visit to Berlin in the late Winter of 2018. While this is her first trip abroad, she feels a connection with that part of the world and wants to find out what that means. Her ancestors worked the land for centuries on farms outside of Eberswalde, a town 50 kilometers North-East of Berlin.

Arrival. As the last passenger disappears up the stairs, Gabi stands on the silent platform. In the half light, she sees the walls and columns are clad in red marble. It’s more like the arrival hall of a palace than a subway station.

She takes a deep breath, feeling this is the actual moment of arrival in Berlin. She revels in this feeling not only because it is a goal reached, but because behind the silence she senses something intriguing. A distant resonance more felt than heard, like thunder from over the horizon.

Now down the street she goes, looking for the hotel. Passing by an ordinary looking car park, there is a discrete sign saying that this here is the site of the now destroyed Führerbunker, Hitler’s command post.

A tour group is nearby. The guide is saying that in the final weeks of the war over a million Soviet soldiers had surrounded Berlin, and were converging on this very spot. Behind them nothing but scorched earth.

And what’s that the guide is saying about the marble in the subway? Apparently, it is from the arrival hall of the now destroyed Reichskanzlei, Hitler’s Chancellery that had also stood here, now obliterated.

She is beginning to appreciate the significance of this place she had come to; once the eye of a catastrophic hurricane in human affairs, surely one of the worst of the 20th Century. And the echoes of that still reverberate.