In 2018, I embarked on an adventure. Flying out of Newark Liberty International Airport, my excitement and curiosity shot across the Atlantic and landed in Berlin. This was my first time stepping foot into a European city, and a city that old and layered with history—over about a week, I got to see the intricacies of history and how they pan out in planning, housing, and culture. The merging of East and West, both as sides of Berlin, as ideology, and as a built environment, was ever-present and unforgettable. Berlin sprawled as an enigma, a reckoning of the past and a construction of the future.
My family and I stayed in an Airbnb in East Berlin, an apartment that stood on the perimeter of a small park where my little brother, then three years old, would drag my dad to play every morning. It seemed that every few blocks, surrounded by residential buildings, was a park with a playground. These parks functioned as a place for the surrounding community to convene, whether that be kids with their parents or adults drinking a beer. In New York City, where I am from, parks for public use are much more sparse, so such a deliberate preservation of nature, sprinkled like little gems across Berlin neighborhoods, seemed to be a beautiful way to bring people together, and reminded me of the courtyards in between massive modernist Soviet residential buildings my parents spoke of growing up with.
As we explored Berlin, I got to visit various historical sites, such as the Reichstag, the remnants of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Brandenburg Gates. Yet what stood out the most was visiting Treptower Park with my dad. The park sits along the Spree river in a quiet park of southeastern Berlin and is a military cemetery and Soviet War Memorial to the eighty-thousand Soviet Soldiers who died in the 1945 Battle of Berlin. It was constructed by Germans under Soviet supervision and was dedicated on May 8, 1949. The size of two football fields, its expanse takes the shape of a sword when viewed from above. Within the park are towering statues of Soviet soldiers and a three-meter statue of “Mother Homeland.” Carvings of civilians at war, soldiers, and acts of idealistic Soviet heroism are carved in giant blocks that line either side of the park’s center which also feature quotes from Lenin and Stalin.
Treptower Park—seen here is a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier carrying a child, his sword lowered as he stands on a crushed swastika
The sheer grandiosity of the park’s statues and space was breathtaking and mind-blowing. I felt deeply connected to the park’s imagery, which manifested itself as a misplaced and odd feeling of nostalgia for something I had never directly experienced. I grew up watching Soviet movies, listening to Soviet music, and hearing about a life far away, but the Soviet Union was always somewhat intangible simply because its memory was reconstructed by my family in the United States. Standing in Treptower Park, I was faced with a material fruition of the Soviet Union, World War II, and the question of how a park so distinctly Soviet sat on German soil.
I find Berlin inspiring for many reasons—mostly for the preservation of its past but also for its movement to the future. By melding two aesthetically distinct parts of the city, investing in culture and well-run transportation, and influence from other countries by way of immigration and trade, Berlin reinvents itself and posits itself as a city that can do it all. Just as the little parks bring people together, Berlin’s wide streets that accommodate outdoor restaurant seating and its constructed cohesion across both its Eastern and Western sides pull together the past and the present, all while suggesting that convergence makes way for the creation of a future.
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