Yesterday, as I was picking up my son from the Kita, I saw one of those red memorial candles on the ground beside the door. Someone had lit a candle and put some carnations in the plague that commemorated Rosa Luxemburg having lived in that building for a few years in the early 1900s.
It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of her murder by paramilitaries in 1919.
So what does a Marxist killed 100 years ago have to do with anything?
Nothing... And everything.
I don't think there's another city that goes out of its way to remember as much as Berlin does. The good bits and the bad, ugly bits. Rosa Luxemburg is just one of many brutal openers to the tragedies the city would experience. The Nazis. The War. The Holocaust. The Defeat. The Trials. The Wall.
Guilt is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Germany. But, another accurate word is courage. It can't be easy for a country to reckon with its past the way Germany does. To openly remember its history, instead of revising it.
It's both chilling and refreshing to walk along the streets of Berlin and see the golden stumbling stones that bear the names of Jewish deportees, along with their fate: liberation, escape, or death camp.You see these types of memorials everywhere. The small statue in the quiet square where the July 20 plotters were executed. The eerie stone monuments to the Soviet war dead. The concrete and steel foundation line that still runs along the path of the Berlin Wall.
In Berlin, and much of Germany, history is still a lesson you can learn from, instead of a myth that you believe in, an ideal you buy, or a grudge you nurse.
We live in a strange age where everyone lives on their own plains of reality, feeding on information that only confirms their biases. And the way things are going, that looks like it isn't going to change soon.
Being honest about our history is getting tougher. But it's good to see it's still happening in some places.