I first saw the Gedächtniskirche on a bus tour of Berlin in 2005 when I was twenty. It was the only tourist attraction of which I didn’t take a picture. It didn’t feel right; capturing forever on film the memory of death and destruction Hitler reigned on Europe during WWII. Although the city of Berlin didn’t care if I didn’t think the memory should be preserved, the city had already decided to memorialize the church as a reminder and warning about hate and prejudice and what it can do to a people, a city, and a nation. And now, over 60 years later, the Gedächtniskirche stands sullen, hauntingly in Berlin’s center as a permanent reminder of temporary insanity.
The Gedächtniskirche, built in the early 1890’s, was a busy church in the heart of Berlin before the start of WWII. Erected in honor of Wilhelm I, it was decorated with mosaics and sculptures that reflected his accomplishments. The building bustled with life every Sunday as patrons shuffled in to sing hymns, hear mass, and share in communion. The church was a sanctuary from the pressures of life, and with the growing tensions between political and religious groups in the early thirties, it quickly became a place of refuge.
A hollow tooth of a belfry is all that now stands of the Gedächtniskirche. Over half of Berlin was destroyed at the end of WWII, when Allied forces went on a bombing raid to prevent Berlin from becoming a concentrated area of Nazi military power. The attacks killed in excess of 4,000 people, injured another 10,000, and left 450,000 of Berlin’s inhabitants homeless. The city placed guards in the Berlin Zoo, not because the animals would escape their destroyed cages and kill the people still trapped in the city, but because those trapped would, in desperation, kill and eat the animals. As people were being shot for breaking into the zoo for food, their fearless leader was having statues, memorials, and shrines built of himself and erected throughout the city. In the end, Berlin was left in ruins, uninhabitable. To this day the city reflects the destruction it underwent from the Allied attacks.
The night of November 22, 1943, began a bombing raid that would leave 2,000 Berliners dead and another 175,000 homeless. People ran for their lives as bombs destroyed homes and buildings. Hundreds fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs to the Gedächtniskirche, to seek the safety and protection of the church. Yet the people’s one place of refuge could not shelter them from the hate and injustice of a nation at war.
As Allied forces dropped bomb after bomb over Berlin, I imagine people filed into the sanctuary of the Gedächtniskirche, covering their heads and ears as another explosion went off overhead. Young children were either screaming or crouched in pale fear, their eyes saucers. A woman cradled her infant in the corner by the front pews, shuddering at every rattle of the stained glass panes. Her husband didn’t make it out of their flat before it caved in from a blast in the adjoining building. The woman looked up to see her neighbor’s son collapse in through the tattered church doors, barely making it through shrapnel falling like rain. A group by the altar was crying out to God, but He didn’t seem to hear. Twenty seconds later a bomb fell on an adjacent part of the church, collapsing the belfry of the Gedächtniskirche and killing everyone inside.
And now, as a memorial to the horrors of war, what’s left of the Gedächtniskirche stands still and haunting in Berlin’s center, echoing the terror of the last few moments of so many lives. I couldn’t get the image of the ruins out of my mind and returned a month later to visit the caved-in chapel. As I stood in paralyzed awe on the opposite sidewalk across the broken church imagining what it must have been like for the people inside, I wondered why we continue to fight, and why we continue to destroy the lives of not only the enemy, but our own. The Gedächtniskirche may be an old, half destroyed building standing awkwardly amongst the center of luxury Berlin shopping boutiques, but it silently screams to the nations to wake up, look around, and ask why. Why do we continue the unrelenting horrors of war? I came out of my daze, took a picture of the collapsed belfry, and walked away.
