Friday, Oct. 11, 2002 | 3:16 a.m.
THE VIEW from the other side.
The Brandenburg Gate is Germany's most famous landmark. It was completed in 1791 and is the only one of the 18 original city gates in existence. It has witnessed much in its 300-year history; French and Prussian victories, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and almost a half century of the Cold War in which it stood not very proudly in the middle of no-man's land -- stuck between the tyranny of the East and the freedom of the West.
Late last week, in a ceremony marking the 12th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people of Germany celebrated the unveiling of a newly refurbished Brandenburg Gate. Close to a million people, mostly young, crowded in the killing fields where Communist-controlled East Germans were shot to death as they sought freedom in the West, to bear witness to the re-emergence of their gate.
For untold reasons, it was a night my wife and I and those with whom we travelled will never forget. The enthusiasm of those young people, some of whom helped tear down the Berlin Wall in 1989, is a scene etched indelibly on my mind because of the contrast to a Germany I had only imagined.
The Germany I knew was one that murdered 6 million Jews. That's all I ever had to know. Under that madman Hitler, others who didn't conform, Gypsies and homosexuals to name but two groups, were also slaughtered in the name of racial purity. Even today the remnants of that obscene hatred seem to have taken root in a rebirth of anti-Semitism and intolerance, in Germany and its neighboring countries.
As if that weren't enough to consider, the fact that our president, George W. Bush, had been giving the cold-shoulder to Germany's newly re-elected chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, because of his refusal to climb aboard the Iraqi war train, made the visit that much more disconcerting.
Myra and I were travelling with former President Bill Clinton, who had been invited long before the blowup over Iraq to participate in the ceremonies that celebrated the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was from our vantage point, up close and personal, that I confirmed what I had always known: there are at least two sides to every story, usually three of them.
The German people were never opposed to taking Saddam Hussein out of the picture. Even though that country and others have done business with him over the years, there is no brief for his kind of tyranny and no concern for his existence when the lives of their own countrymen could hang in the balance.
What I heard from the Germans with whom I spoke is that they were not convinced that our own President Bush was acting against Iraq for pure motives. In short, unlike Americans who heard and then quickly ignored the advice of President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, that talk of war was good politics for the administration, our friends on the other side of the Atlantic were convinced -- rightly or wrongly -- that politics had overtaken rational sense when it came to the question of Iraq. And they did not want to risk war just to advance someone else's political interests.
This was a case in which perception -- based on Rove's own words of advice to the president -- were stronger than whatever reality President Bush could articulate.
Over here, of course, Germany was a bad friend for not supporting us. It was, frankly, no friend at all until our president finally relented and made nice-nice a few days ago. But, over there, they saw just the opposite. They saw an adventuring George W. Bush acting alone and without good reason to further his own political interests.
All that is behind us now. Just like what Germany did 60 years ago should be behind us. With the caveat, of course, that we should never forget.
But there was an irony or two in the events of the past few weeks that cannot go unnoticed.
First of all, the Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, is gay. And very open about it. Just a few decades ago, people like him were sent away to the death camps by Hitler's intolerant Germany. Today, Wowereit has been elected overwhelmingly by the children and grandchildren of those murderers.
Secondly, does it not strike you as ironic that the snit in which Bush and Schroeder found themselves had, at its roots, two men seeking some political advantage in their attitudes about war?
On this side we had a president preaching war to a nation committed to peace, while on the other side, we witnessed a chancellor preaching peace in a country known for its ferocity and dedication to the art of war.
I thought about that irony as Myra and I followed Chancellor Schroeder, Mayor Wowereit and President Clinton from what was the communist East, through the Brandenburg Gate and into the freedom of West Berlin.
Today it is all Berlin and it is all free. That made me think about about how far we -- and the rest of the world -- had all come in just those very few steps.
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