Ramallah to Berlin

We decided to make an impromptu trip to the Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival, in order to see some films and hopefully become encouraged to keep working on the films we have been making. The month of January was a bit of a bust with the invasion of Gaza, Ramallah had become a city of tears, demonstrations and depression. But slowly, as everyone got back to their lives (or what was left of them in Gaza) we were trying to get back to into our work and needed some inspiration.

Going to Berlin from Ramallah we experienced a bit of culture shock, and felt that these two places could not be more indicative of order vs. chaos. Driving in Ramallah was akin to playing a video game, always on guard for an obstacle to be avoided, usually an oncoming car. In Germany, never mind the cars, pedestrian traffic is tightly controlled; stray on that bike path and you’ll be immediately reprimanded by some shrill bicycle ringing. I had also forgotten how clean Germany is. Maybe they tidied up Berlin for the Berlinale, but it was amazing, not a curry-wurst wrapper or even a cigarette butt to be found. Coming from a city where land-fill sites stand in for parks, it was a bit unnerving. Yet one thing that Ramallah and Berlin do share, is a familiarity with walls. The last time I had been in Berlin was in 1986, on a high-school German exchange program. At that time, Berlin was still divided and we passed through Checkpoint Charlie to spend a day in East Berlin, trying to spend the 25 Marks we were forced to exchange upon entry. As I recall, it was nearly impossible, and I came back with a cheaply bound complete collection of Karl Marx readers. I remember seeing the wall, impressed with the graffiti, and our teenage behaviour, waving to the guards in the towers trying to elicit a response.

The Berlin wall is now a monument in the city, revealed in leftover fragments still intact, or the inspiration for some pretty cool landscape art at Potsdamer Platz. Unfortunately, the wall we are familiar with here is very much still doing its job, and let me tell you it is a LOT bigger. We kept looking at those pieces of Berlin wall and thinking, ‘you call that a wall? I’ll show you a wall!’ I do remember the Berlin wall did have this massive zone behind it with trenches and mines etc. but now, seeing the wall itself, out of context, it looked kind of pathetic next to the Palestinian one.

It took us awhile to psychically leave Ramallah and enjoy the festival. The evening we arrived we sat watching a Michael Snow video of Panasonic speakers and simultaneously realized how far away we had been. We then made ourselves fairly unpopular at the cinema office by chastising the festival for showing a retrospective of Israeli cinema. We seemed to gravitate to the films on Israel/Palestine – ‘Rachel’ and ‘Defamation’ (1). Despite the tasty Weissbier, the shiny new train stations and excessive orderliness we just couldn’t shake the Middle East.

Eventually we did calm down and attended some interesting films that weren’t connected to the politics of Israel/Palestine: films on sheep and bricks for instance. Yet in the end, we just couldn’t help it and finished off our trip with a visit to the Holocaust Memorial, Peter Eisenman’s work of hundreds of tomb-like rectangular columns which undulated with the topography, forming a grid of blocks to wander through. The memorial was very powerful and worked both as graveyard and ghetto, sculpture and environment. It seemed to also work for some children as a play structure. Our thoughts turned back to the wall, the landscape of Palestine and we wondered when we would see fragments of the Palestinian wall left as monuments to remember these bad times.

On the plane back to Tel Aviv we read about the Israeli election in the newspaper. Livni and Bibi were tied and Lieberman was going to decide how the government would be formed. The options were a choice between a right-right coalition or, a right-fascist coalition. Palestinians were fairly disinterested in the outcome, the consensus being from those we spoke to, that it really didn’t make a difference who was in power in Israel. And as for Palestinian elections, it doesn’t look like Abbas is even planning to hold any in the West Bank.

It will be awhile before that wall comes down…

Footnotes

1) ‘Rachel’ – film about Rachel Corrie, an American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, near the Rafah border. ‘Defamation’ was a film by an Israeli director who takes a very critical look at the issue of anti-Semitism.