Category: Travel

I wanted to say something about my trip to Germany. I stayed in Berlin, in what was formerly part of East Berlin, a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg. Under communism it was a locus for dissidents and artists but is now almost indistinguishable from trendy yuppie neighborhoods in DC or about a dozen other cities I could think of. My college buddy Patrick has been working as a reporter over there for about 7 years, so he hosted me and gave me the grand tour.

Berlin’s a fascinating city for reasons almost too obvious to mention, with visible remnants of the imperial, Nazi, and Cold War eras intermingling alongside the modern post-1989 Berlin. Not far from the Reichstag there’s a sparkling new complex of ultra-contemporary glass and metal government buildings that spans the eastern and western parts of the city, symbolizing reunification and transparency in government. And capitalism has sprung up with a vengeance in what used to be the heart of socialist East Berlin; Communist-era apartment buildings house trendy shops and restaurants.

I spent my days on long meandering walks through the city, visiting churches and museums, gawking at Stalinist-era architecture on “Karl Marx Allee,” checking out the remnants of the Berlin Wall, eating a lot of surprisingly good Italian food, visiting the graves of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hegel, and just trying to soak up the atmosphere. The nights were spent hanging out with Patrick and his motley assortment of ex-pat reporter friends (mostly Brits as it happens) and partaking liberally of the many fine beers Germany has to offer.

On my second to last day there Patrick and I took a day trip to Wittenberg (or Lutherstadt Wittenberg, to use the official name). Unlike Berlin, which has relatively few traces of the pre-modern era, downtown Wittenberg still looks like a medieval village with its windy cobblestone streets lined with shops and presided over by the Castle hurch. That’s where Luther nailed up the 95 theses (now immortalized in bronze on the church door) and where he and Philipp Melancthon are buried. We also saw St. Mary’s, the parish church where Luther preached and where the first Protestant service was held, and which is still, I’m happy to say, a functioning parish. See pics here. We then spent some time at the house Luther and Katie lived in, a former monastery, which now houses the world’s largest Reformation museum, containing neat Reformation-era artifacts like the robe Luther preached in and a copy of an indulgence.

I’ve been reading Alister McGrath’s recent book on Protestantism, and the differences he discusses between the iconoclastic Reformed protestants and the Lutherans are well-illustrated by Wittenberg. St. Mary’s church, far from being whitewashed and bereft of images like so many other Protestant churches were, still looks like a medieval church in a lot of ways. There is a beautiful altarpiece by Lucas Cranach illustrating the principles of the Lutheran reformation as well as other highly pictoral and symbolic art around the inside of the church. McGrath suggests that Reformed Christians might have felt the nead to “cleanse” the churches of their imagery not only because of a rigorist reading of the second commandment, but to break decisively with the catholic past. However, he says, the human urge and need to use images to depict the transcendent was too strong to be suppressed permanently. Luther seems to have recognized this with his affirmation of religious art and music as both catechetical tools and means for praising God.

The last six months have definitely been a spritual dry spell for me. Pracitces of daily devotion have gone out the window, I’ve missed church more times than I’d care to admit, and there have been at least one or two times when I’d seriously considered hanging up the whole business. But I did feel a connection being there at the birthplace of Protestantism, similar to what I’d felt at the catacombs in Rome a couple of years ago: a sense of being a link in a chain stretching back centuries. I’m not sure just feeling like part of a tradition is sufficient for the life of faith, but it’s something. And Luther himself was no stranger to doubt, after all.

Anyway, the best part of the whole trip, really, was just getting to spend a lot of time hanging out with an old friend, doing the things we used to do in college: talk about love and relationships, argue about politics, and joke around. Most of my longtime friends are scattered to the four winds these days and quality time is hard to come by. I’ve moved around a lot over the last 10 years and have found, unsurprisingly, that it can get really tough to maintain those close friendships. In college in particular you spend a lot of time with your friends, an experience it’s hard to replicate in the “real world.” (I’ve even heard it suggested that the reason people look back so fondly on college is because it’s the closest most of us come to the experience of living in primate packs, which is likely the kind of social environment we evolved in.) So it was nice to relive it a little bit, even if we’re all a bit older and wrinklier than we were then.