Berlin Revisited November 2025

Rather good to be back in rainy November Berlin, visiting  friends now old, like us, in every sense of the word (50 years history and more), standing once again at the literal line that divided Europe and massively shaped both our lives.

This place connects directly to old friends. The pastor of the original Versöhnungskirche, destroyed in 1985 by East German authorities clearing the wall’s death strip, was father to two of our closest friends in East Berlin — Herbert Hildebrandt, choirmaster of the Berliner Domkantorei, in which we both sang for four years, and his brother Jörg, whom we’ve been so happy to meet again on this trip.

Herbert died some years ago, but those Monday evening rehearsals remain very vivid: Jutta and I first while I was with Reuters in East Berlin, later crossing the Wall each week from West Berlin after joining the BBC.

Jörg’s wife Regine Hildebrandt became one of the most respected politicians of the post-GDR years — earthy, outspoken, and widely loved. From her early years with the family in Bernauer Straße, she once joked that she could stick her head out into the West while keeping her backside in the East. Typical Regine…

I’ll add photos in a stack below, then add some musings rather helpfully drafted for me by my new friend and writing assistant chat GPT… The first from today: grey skies, steady rain, and my favourite Berlin water tower alongside rebuilt Ostkreuz, then tracking back to Bernauer Straße, close to the rebuilt Chapel of Reconciliation.

Switching now, with light editing, to some quite thoughtful text drafted by my friendly Chat GPT LLM, with a lot of adjusting and input from me… Some of the writing makes me squirm, but some is quite clever.

So, Berlin and I go back all the way to my first visit here as a gap-year student in 1968. A decade later, Jutta and I were here for four years, first Reuters East Berlin then BBC West, reporting for the German language service as well as output in English, and to return now is to walk through palimpsests (oh, Chat GPT, you are so erudite…) of self— journalist, husband, psychotherapist, observer of what trauma does to people and to places.

We stayed near Potsdamer Platz, that once-vacant scar where the Wall sliced through Europe. Our hotel (the very excellent Scandic Berlin) sits almost exactly where the Mauerstreifen once ran — death strip turned business district.

In the rain we followed the path of the Wall past the Topographie des Terrors. There, on a stretch of open gravel, heavy metal beams shaped like seesaws, bolted down, inert.

They look like an artist’s joke about play — a refusal of motion. No plaque, no guide, nothing but form. It felt typical of Berlin’s post-unification aesthetic: Erinnerung durch Leere — remembrance through emptiness. The idea that silence itself can be a memorial?

Berlin’s silence (so Chat GPT puts it) is deliberate. The city practises a kind of architectural psychotherapy — exposure therapy on an urban scale. It makes you sit with what cannot be undone. Those static beams are an intervention: you expect movement, you’re denied it, and the mind starts working.

It reminded me of Berthold Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation effect that forces the audience to think rather than merely feel. These installations do the same. They prevent easy empathy, reject sentimentality. In that sense, Berlin has become the most Brechtian of cities: a living theatre of memory that refuses closure. (Nice one, LLM…)

Walking here with Jutta, I felt how our own stories interweave with that landscape. Her childhood in post-war Bavaria, marked by loss and silence. My years chasing the news across the Cold War frontiers, pretending objectivity while absorbing and playing out the psychic fractures of an era. We both learned to survive through controlled empathy — she as the daughter of survivors, I as chronicler of divisions both political and personal.

Now, decades later, we return not as reporter and witness but as two ageing travellers, looking to balance past and present. The seesaws don’t move, and perhaps that’s the metaphor. Healing doesn’t erase history; it bolts it to the ground and asks you to live around it.

Berlin, like therapy, is an unfinished conversation. (Oh Chat GPT, you sometimes amaze me with your depth! Seriously!!)

In the evening with Thomas and Anne, candlelight on wet coats, the clatter of plates, the comfort of excellent wine. Decades compressed — East and West, then and now, a long road between loss and reconnection.

Later, back in our room, I thought of how EMDR speaks of bilateral stimulation — the rhythmic left-right motion that helps integrate memory. Berlin, paradoxically, achieves the same through its refusal to move: a stillness that invites oscillation inside the mind.

Perhaps that’s why we’re drawn here again and again. The city mirrors the work we do — confronting trauma not by prettifying it but by anchoring it in awareness. It’s a place that refuses to let the psyche dissociate.

The next morning, light broke through for a while. Puddles on the square became mirrors. We set off toward Bernauer Straße, past the remnants of watchtowers and the photographs of those who tried to flee. Each step felt both personal and collective. The ghosts of the divided city walk quietly beside anyone willing to notice.

To stand here now, with Jutta’s arm linked in mine, is to feel history loosen its grip — not vanish, but integrate. The balance is precarious, as always, but real. Berlin, in its stubborn honesty, offers that rarest of gifts: the permission to remember without drowning in it.