03:46 pm
Checkpoint Capitalism
George Santayana famously said that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But in our consumer-driven culture, another aphorism is equally true: those who market history turn it into a 
farce:
Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall crossing place that came to symbolize the Cold War, has denigrated into a seedy tourist trap which uses actors posing as border guards in a failed attempt to recreate its legendary past. . . .
[A] key historical site that in the 1960s witnessed the only direct confrontation ever between American and Soviet forces. . .Checkpoint Charlie was the scene of a number of escapes from Communist East to capitalist West Berlin. In one of the most dramatic and tragic incidents, an 18-year-old East German man was shot by Communist border guards and left to bleed to death in no man’s land. It was also the spot where Soviet and American tanks faced each other, engines running and muzzle to muzzle, for six days in 1961 only weeks after the building of the Berlin Wall.
Yesterday the site was awash with tourist buses. Street vendors proffered what they claimed were authentic chunks of the Berlin Wall, and remarkably new looking East German memorabilia including Communist Party flags and Russian army fur hats. Fast-food joints, including one called “Snackpoint Charlie,” lined the streets leading towards the checkpoint, where a replica wooden hut surrounded by sandbags has been erected to simulate the original army checkpoint. Actors dressed in fake American, Russian, French and East German army uniforms offered to be photographed alongside the hut or with visitors for 1 Euro per picture. . . .
Gavin Farrel, a student from Nottingham on his first visit to Berlin was not amused: “It’s a bit of a disappointment,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. ” I expected Checkpoint Charlie to look like something out of a Cold War spy novel, but it is more like a grotty Disneyland.”
Twenty years ago, I spent a summer in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania working for the local paper. The same phenomenon existed there: kitschy tourist traps and uniformed “reenactors”** right down the road from monuments to war dead. Making things even worse, a number of faux museums operated as fronts for useless trinkets. The effect wasn’t so much a “grotty Disneyland” as it was a particularly bad midway at a county fair.
Over the past decade, however, the town has worked with the National Park Service and a private foundation to tear down a few of the worst offenders and create a new visitors center that doesn’t happen to sit smack in the middle of the Day Three Union lines (the ones targeted by Pickett’s charge). The town’s residents and the battlefield’s stewards (who have not always been on the best of terms) have a long way to go, but it’s a good start.
Maybe the citizens of Berlin could benefit from a visit.
Photo: Planeta Roig on Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.
**Before I get mail on this, let me make clear that I am not referring to those folks who spend their weekends dressing up in period costumes and recreating civil war battles. It’s definitely not my cup of tea, but whatever blows your hair back.
Loading ...