BERLIN — A line of cobblestones in the street marks where the
Wall once ran through the middle of town. Just on the East German
side of Friedrichstrasse, in an empty lot, is a field of crosses
honoring those who died trying to escape the totalitarian rule of
East Germany.
A few yards from this memorial was Checkpoint Charlie, the entry
point from the Soviet sector of East Berlin to the American sector.
A museum there remembers 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who on August
17, 1962, was shot scaling the Berlin Wall in a bid for freedom.
The guards let him bleed to death.
The crosses honor dozens of others, who tried climbing the wall
or crossing the sea. One cross, easy to spot from Friedrichstrasse,
remembers Uwe Joachim, who died crossing the Baltic on August 14,
1987.
On that same day in 1941, Catholic Priest Maximilian Kolbe died
in Auschwitz. Guards there had put Kolbe and nine other men in a
starvation chamber in retaliation for some other prisoners who had
escaped. Kolbe, in fact, volunteered to take the place of a father
who had been selected by the guards.
Just yards from Joachim’s cross and the place where Fechter bled
to death, tourists can buy kitschy Communist Party paraphernalia,
mock uniforms, and Soviet hats, just like the ones worn by the
guards on the East German side of Checkpoint Charlie.
You could probably guess that they don’t sell kid-sized Nazi
uniforms at Auschwitz.
We know that Nazis are not funny. When are we going to learn
this about Soviet Communism?
Josef Stalin was responsible for the deaths of an estimated
eight to 20 million people during his rule. You can buy a Stalin
poster or tee-shirt at Checkpoint Charlie today — and people do.
Tourists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe can be seen on the
streets of Berlin sporting their Stalin clothes.
I imagine most of this is ironic humor, mock-celebrating the
idols of a failed system. The German reverence (or display of
reverence at least) for Adolf Hitler also reached absurd levels,
but little German kids don’t sport their Führer gear around
the city.
Humor is a necessary outlet of fear and anger. Sometimes the
only way to deal with terrible things is to joke about it. We joke
about Osama bin Laden even though the thought of September 11 makes
me clench my jaw. Mel Brooks’ The Producers is full of
Hitler humor.
Dictators and terrorists have a funny aspect: they are
ridiculously self-important in a way that deserves mockery. But we
also know that joking about mass-murders shows disrespect to the
murdered.
You can drink in a trendy bar in West Berlin where exotically
dressed attractive women sip $10 martinis that young men in $800
suits bought them, and a mural of Mao Tse-tung covers the back
wall. Mao’s “cultural revolution” resulted, too, in countless
deaths.
This phenomenon is hardly confined to Berlin. As columnist
Bernadette Malone pointed out about New York:
New York City practically invented “sensitivity to
victims” and “historical awareness,” yet its elite party the night
away in clubs like Pravda in Soho and KGB in the East Village,
where Soviet flags and paraphernalia decorate the
atmosphere.
We could speculate endlessly about why it is so. Perhaps we can
blame this, too, on liberal bias. The New York Times,
after all, spilled gallons of ink defending the Soviet system, and
so they have trouble putting it on the same plane as Nazism, even
after the facts are out.
But even without examining the reasons behind this phenomenon,
we should be able to resolve to change our ways and stop pretending
that mass murderers are cool or funny. In that way, we can start
paying tribute to the men and women who died at the Wall, or
anywhere else, at the hands of Communist dictatorship.
