Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 23
lots of Trabants on the road, people queuing outside banks and then
we listened to the news.
Overnight Checkpoint Charlie had changed with streams of
people arriving from East Berlin, people were clapping their arrivals
either on foot or by car, the guards seemed more human and
Marlborough were there handing out cigarettes as a welcome to the
West. There was a relief in the air that it had all happened so
peacefully.
Sue Lieberman, Edinburgh, Scotland: Biker for two days Hiker
for one Day
It was my fourth time in Berlin. My first visit there was for a few days
at the end of December 1989. Late on that New Year’s Eve I was
hauled up by excited hands to join a throng of drunken, jubilant
Berliners teetering unsteadily on top of the Wall. This could have
been my first experience of a Large Group.
On my second trip some six years later, the whole of central
Berlin had become a building site, yielding nothing recognisable from
that earlier visit. 17 years on, friend Sheena and I spent five days in
the city, at a time when I was recovering from wrist surgery and
feeling delicate. I had just finished writing After Genocide, and much
of our time was devoted to visiting sites embodying this part of
Germany’s heavy past: the Holocaust Memorial, the Holocaust
Museum, the Jewish Museum. Even the new glass tower that rises
over the Reichstag, Sheena told me, had been intentionally placed so
that the Bundestag and its federal politicians would always overlook
these painful reminders. Unified Berlin is, for the moment,
conceptually inseparable from the unsettling reality that underneath
even the most cultured exterior can lurk the most destructive and
murderous hatred.
Now it was time for another perspective. The Symposium
theme of crossing borders, cycling and hiking the commemorative
route of the old Wall, would, I imagined, present ways of absorbing
the impact of other dimensions of Germany’s turbulent and difficult
recent history on lives past and present.
Theo von der Marwitz, Bremen, Germany: Biker
My personal motivation to join the trip was the chance to come
together with all these unknown people willing to approach this
congress in this specific way: from the remainders of history laying
around everywhere in and around Berlin, from the periphery to the
centre.