October, 2017
Berlin -- Truman Plaza, the heart of the American military and diplomatic community in Berlin during the Cold War, is long gone. It was the center of U.S. Army life for the Berlin Brigade, some 14,000 troops who trained daily to repel a surrounding Soviet and East German army of 500,000, should the Soviets try to take West Berlin by force. The idea was for the brigade to sacrifice itself by ferocious fighting, to buy time for reinforcements to arrive.
When the U.S. Army left Berlin in 1994, the Truman Plaza PX, the shops, the dependent schools and recreation centers, were all sold off or repurposed. A Berlin developer has since built contemporary, white-cube housing around a pond where the PX and commissary parking lot once stood. A new "Truman" pedestrian-access shopping area, with several indoor-outdoor cafés, serves the new local population. It's nice to see the history of the site honored through the retention of the name Truman.
The old U.S. Army movie theater, the Outpost, along with the adjacent library, has been converted into the Allied Museum. It tells the history of post-war Berlin and the role of the Allies. Between the two buildings visitors can see an aircraft from the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, a French military rail car, a gatehouse from Checkpoint Charlie, a section of the Berlin Wall, and an East German guard tower that once overlooked the death-strip that divided the city for nearly three decades. Free and open to the public, the museum is a fascinating and sobering look at the Allied – especially American – commitment to democratic freedoms.
What does Germany think of America now, two and a half decades after the end of the Cold War? Roger Cohen, a New York Times' columnist, writes this month from Berlin:
The Bundesrepublik is America’s child. It was forged under American tutelage and inspired by high American ideals of liberty. President Trump therefore poses a particular problem for Germany, more acute than for any other European nation. If the United States has forsaken these ideals, if the nation of “We the people” is no longer a universal idea but projects only a pay-up-now mercantilism, Germany will one day have to think again.
Perish the thought. Surely not. I am too tied to the past, and to places like the Allied Museum, to think we could ever forget the Cold War, and to believe that Germany would seriously re-think its ties to America and the ideals of liberty.
It is more likely that the current retreat of the United States from our traditional ideals will be stemmed with the help of Germany and other western nations. An analogy from nature is apt: in the mid-19th century, France and other wine-growing areas of Europe lost their vineyards to a pestilence. Grapes resistant to the pest had to be brought from America to reconstitute the vineyards. So too may America have to reconstitute its democratic ideals, this time importing them back from Europe, from "America's child," as Cohen puts it.
This may be the ultimate legacy of America's Berlin Brigade.
