I Almost Burned Down Berlin
A Tale of Wild Boar, Damsels in Distress and the Rule of Law
Once upon time I was young and stupid. Now that I have grown out of one of those two conditions, I reflect back on the day when I almost burned down the city of Berlin.
Well, I didn't almost burn down the whole city of Berlin - only West Berlin. And then not even all of it - just the Grunewald, an urban woodland that lies within what used to be that sector of the city occupied by the French, the British and the American armed forces from 1949-1990. The Grunewald encompasses 7,500 acres - considerably larger than New York's Central Park, and significantly smaller than Yellowstone National Park. But it was heavily wooded and dark and inhabited by all kinds of furtive wildlife and, for all those reasons, irresistible to those who are young and stupid.
I was then, for some unknown reason, called a military "brat" - a dependent of my father doing God knows precisely what in the employ of the United States Government. During my high school teenage years, my father was stationed in West Berlin. Along with British, French and Germans in the employ of their respective governments (also doing God knows precisely what), my father ostensibly helped to protect what was deemed "the Free World" (which, in our comic book world, was supposed to be us, "the good guys") from the predation of "the bad guys," namely Russia (a/k/a the Soviet Union back then) along with its Bolshevik/socialist allies like China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Venezuela, North Korea and all "left-leaning" university students everywhere who protest, resist and rebel.
This childish script hasn't changed much in 50 years perhaps because (speaking mostly for myself, of course) after decades of educational malpractice, many of us are no less stupid now than then.
The Grunewald was not far from where I lived. One Friday or Saturday in 1970 or '71, four of us decided - for want of anything better to do, I guess - to hike into the woods to cook sausages and marshmallows. As I think about it, it could have been the Fourth of July and we had read or heard or believed that "Americans" did things like "barbecues" on the Fourth of July. But maybe it wasn't the Fourth, and we were, you know, just being "young and stupid."
Now those of you smirking about four teenagers - two male and two female - hiking into the deep, dark woods just to cook sausages and marshmallows on the Fourth of July - you need to shampoo your minds and understand that we were all, back then, just young and stupid. If anything, those terms describe our entire generation - but maybe every preceding and succeeding generation, too, so who knows? But, yes, indeed, such was our intention at the time - just sausages and marshmallows and a couple of Sterno cans to cook them on.
Young and stupid, as I said.
I don't remember all the details, but it could have been a Friday or a Saturday night. Or it was any night during summer vacation. In any event, it wasn't a school night. The temperature was warm and the ground was dry as was all the underbrush, which is why I almost burned down Berlin.
At that time, small two-wheelers were a thing for our generation. We four motored two up on our putt-putting cycles to a cull-de-sac at the edge of the forest. I parked my old second-hand Vespa 150 that could only be jump-started. Next to me, my friend parked his second-hand Heinkel Tourist which (when new) was the Mercedes Benz of scooters. His old Heinkel Tourist looked something like a large artillery shell on wheels. Anyway. We parked and the four of us trekked into the woods. We probably followed a trail for a while, half an hour or more, meandering this way and that, diverging from the beaten paths for however so long until we reached a small shady clearing, surrounded by large trees, where we decided to set up our cookout.
The Grunewald is always dark and shady: think Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood or any number of Grimm Brother fairy tales that take place in the dark woods with thick underbrush and stuff that goes crunch underfoot and weird trees that might have gnomes and witches living under or within them.
I don't remember what time it was. I do remember that the sun had set. It was already dark by the time we threw out a tarp. We lit the cans of Sterno and stuck the wieners on wood sticks. Maybe we had brought with us a bottle of mineral water, or wine, or bottles of beer, because 16 was the legal age for drinking alcohol in Germany. I don't really remember whether we brought a bottle or not. But I do remember sitting in a little circle around the burning Sterno cans, cooking sausage and marshmallows, telling stories, kibitzing and laughing and talking about Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood and the furtive animals that lived in the Grunewald like roe deer, raccoons and wild boar.
Then one of us - certainly as a jest - snorted softly or grunted. It was a prank like young people are wont to play, and we all laughed.
We had all seen the 1969 movie "Easy Rider." Although we were just scooter riders, we fancied ourselves riding Indian and Harley Davidson choppers. We all knew the movie scene where Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and their lady friends were jumped in the night by local rowdies who beat the crap out of them...
Ah hah ha ha! Ah hah ha ha! Ah hah ha ha ha...!!!
Schnooorrrrchhhxx!
Ah hah ha ha! Ah hah ha ha! Ah hah ha ha ha!
However, when we grinned and looked at one another by the light of the burning Sterno cans it was clear that one of us was quite the joker because no one admitted having grunted or snorted and, now that we thought about it, the sound seemed to come from just behind our backs somewhere in the darkness...
..... SCHNOOORRRRCHHHXX!!!!!
The adrenaline rush was instantaneous!
Someone shouted "WILD BOAR!" We leaped up and ran around in circles a bit, bumping into each other and into large tree trunks, because it was really damn dark and we couldn't make out anything by the flickering flames of the small Sterno cans and there was grunting and shouting and the sense of very large bodies snorting and dashing here and there, which could well have been ourselves, but who knows for sure and who wanted to find out! One of the ladies in our foursome climbed a very small tree, just a sapling, and perched there momentarily until we warned her that boar can uproot small trees. So she jumped down to join our helter skelter dash for the exit.
Wherever the exit might be.
Because it was very dark and the trail wasn't clear and we thought we heard hoofs galloping behind us... or in front of us? And there was snorting all around, but it might have been just our own heavy breathing and supercharged imaginations... or not...! And no one wanted to stop long enough to reconnoiter where we were or consider what we should do. Which, metaphorically speaking, is exactly like the present times when we all still run around like lunatics and we can't stop long enough to reconnoiter where we are or to intelligently consider what to do.
But, at least, back then, in the dark forest of the Grunewald, unlike in the 21st Century, we all stuck together in our common plight. So we ran and ran and ran as a group and we got completely lost until we ran smack into a tall chain link fence topped with barbed wire. We were saved!
Or we were trapped...
There was a very dark house behind the tall fence. It was very dark and very quiet.
Too dark and too quiet...
Suddenly, there was a light!
A door opened...
Two ferocious dogs - Doberman Pinschers, I recall, the kind with steel studded collars around their necks - emerged from the house and charged at us snarling, growling, slobbering, their teeth bared to tear us to shreds.
We froze.
We were trapped between the hounds and the hogs, between the forest and the fence. We knew that none of us were going to get out of this alive.
A light went on in the house. An older man ran out carrying what looked like a long hunting rifle or a shotgun. Was he dressed in pajamas... or in the remnants of a military uniform from the last war? I think it was the latter.
Who were we? he shouted at us through the fence in German as he pointed the gun. The Dobermans snarled and snapped and tried to jump over the fence. Were we Russian soldiers? he demanded to know!
Russian soldiers?
This happened in 1970 or '71. The last war had ended in 1945, just about 25 years before. Had he, then a young man, been conscripted into the Volkssturm, the last gasp levée en masse of the young, the old and the infirm? Back then, the Volkssturm had been ordered to defend Berlin from the rapidly advancing (and very annoyed) Red Army determined to deliver the coup de grace to the Third Reich four years after Germany had invaded the USSR causing widespread devastation and the deaths of 27 million Soviets. Was he flashing back to an old war experience... or nightmaring about a new one?
During the Cold War, West Berlin lay smack dab in the middle of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a/k/a "East Germany." Berlin was, indeed, surrounded by Soviet troops who, according to various Cold War treaties and agreements, were permitted to enter into West Berlin as easily as U.S., French and British soldiers were permitted to enter into East Berlin.
Exactly who was threatening whom back then was no more clear than today except that we were young and stupid and suffering from years of educational malpractice, and we hadn't yet learned to question everything. Of course, we were not an invading force of Russian soldiers even though I did, in those days, look a lot like a mash up of Grigori Rasputin, Arlo Guthrie and Karl Marx with long dark hair, dark beard and mustache and John Lennon wire rim glasses; and to some, therefore, I appeared to be at least mildly threatening, if not certifiably "Bolshevik."
Fortunately, as the armed and uniformed gentleman slowly emerged from his 1945 Battle of Berlin flashback into the present, he was assured of our benignity (and our youth and stupidity). He called off his dogs as he dutifully called in the police.
And the fire department.
Because, as we explained to our armed interlocutor, we had been attacked by WHO KNOWS HOW MANY Wildschwein and there was still A FIRE RAGING in the middle of the tinder-dry Grunewald which might well trigger an incendiary event that could burn the City of Berlin to the ground!
So we waited (safely on the outside of the tall wire fence away from the still snarling Dobermans) for the Berlin fire department and a battalion of Berlin police to roll up in their Volkswagen Beatles, sirens wailing and blue emergency lights blinking.
We explained, as best we could, what had happened. But exactly where we had been and where the fire was was anyone's guess.
So into the Grunewald drove the police in their Volkswagen Beatles, we four riding in the back of two separate cars and a policeman riding on the sloping front hood of each VW, feet braced against the front bumper, with a torchlight and a pistol brandished, ready for a life and death encounter with the hairy beasts (the wild boar, that is, not me and my friends). Other police officers in other cars poked loaded rifles and spotlights out the windows. The hunt was on as we tried to retrace our path of retreat.
The police didn't find the wild boar. They did find our campsite, however. The Sterno cans had flipped over in the mayhem and extinguished themselves.
There was evidence that the pigs had had quite a feast - not one crumb of sausage or roll or marshmallow remained, just some empty bags, a tarp and some napkins. There were large and small hoof prints all over. A sow and her piglets, the head police officer concluded. Maybe an adult male tusker. Maybe several. One to two hundred kilos each, the police estimated. Six or seven or eight 100 to 200 kilo Wildschwein. They were long gone, however, and there was no danger of conflagration.
The police drove us back to the cull-de-sac where we had parked our scooters. We got a severe tongue lashing. And a warning. We could have burned down the entire City of Berlin, the cops admonished. But they knew that we were young and stupid. What's more, Berlin was still, you remember, an occupied city. The local courts had no jurisdiction to prosecute us anyway, being as we were "brats" who belonged to the allied military forces who, at that time in the 1970s, still effectively ran Berlin. So the police didn't press charges leaving me, ironically, a later career in law, and this true story.
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This is a true story. It is accurate, more or less, in its details as I remember them.
There are many legends and fairy tales about encounters with wild boar. The mythological fourth labor of Hercules was to capture alive the Erymanthian Boar - an enormous and dangerous wild pig whose giant tusks dripped with blood and foam.
The Russian-French author Sophie Countess Segur wrote the Children's Illustrated French Fairy Tales that were first published in 1869. In one of Sophie Segur's stories, the hirsute young hero Ourson (whose name means "bear cub" or "Teddy bear" in French) saves little Violette from the savage wild boar. This children's story was, for many years, a staple of the kindergarten set. It has appeared in various translations around the world. In the story, Violette climbed a tree to escape the boar, just like one of our own group. The picture at the beginning of this story illustrates little Violette's initial encounter with the wild animal... although, for some, this illustration might more accurately resemble someone's bad first date.
I have just a few points to tidy up the story and my purpose in writing it.
First, I did not recite this incident just to romp down memory lane. The incident, like all history, big and small, belongs to all those who shared it. One of our foursome who almost burned down Berlin about fifty years ago has since died from cancer. Other than myself, two others survive to vouch for its authenticity. The Berlin police and firefighters might still be alive, or not. The German man who thought we might be Russian soldiers has likely passed away. His Dobermans are certainly in doggie Valhalla. The wild boar? Undoubtedly long gone, although they might have passed on to future generations of piglets, reciting in their language of grunts and squeals, the boaring story of the young and stupid humanoids who brought them hot wieners and toasted marshmallows to enjoy in a dark forest meadow on a dry summer night long, long ago.
I encourage folks to record the memorable events in their own lives, both significant and insignificant. Otherwise, if no one remembers or - most importantly, retells the story - then that which happens might as well not have happened. In a post-storytelling age of cremation and digital records that can be forever and instantly deleted, there may not even be tombstones to evoke the memory of who was, let alone what was.
"What happens" is not just about super egotistical Å°bermensch fighting wars, conquering stuff and confabulating legacies of their own vanity. History is all of us, about all of us, by all of us. It is the record of movements large and small - forward, backward and sideways - in the relentless struggle to exist meaningfully.
In that vein, my second point is that, too often, we defer the record-making to others who mold it to match their agendas rather than reflect honestly what actually happened. The large publishing houses, the news and entertainment media and those who own the various "nation states" all work in concert to propagandize, to rewrite history, and to encourage our societal sense of deference, dependency, isolation and, ultimately, personal insignificance.
Thus as the world notes the 80th anniversary of the nominal end of World War II in Europe, the U.S., the U.K. and much of central Europe are lurching toward overt fascism (again). This time, it is draped with the thin cloth of tightly managed "democracy" embroidered with the false narratives that America won the war or that WW2 was precipitated by two equal evils (Nazism v. Bolshevism). As Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov presciently noted upon the defeat of Nazi Germany: "We have liberated Europe from fascism… but they will never forgive us for it."
For those of us who need a historical finger poked in the eye, or who live in a certain EU country where the display of Soviet flags or songs circa 1945 are currently "verboten," here are your open displays of hostility to your various overlords:
and… 1945 Victory Day Parade, Moscow
In many instances, I have experienced or witnessed, directly or vicariously, many important (and not so important) events that happened over the past many decades. More often than not, I recall these events quite differently than the 'official' record of what transpired, and I took away different lessons than what the 'officials' tell me I should have learned. I tend to trust my own recollection and understanding more than the official ones, as surely as I trust your superior recollections and perceptions, too.
My third point of my story is to understand where we are and how we got here.
It took me three weeks to compose this story about how I almost burned down Berlin. Generally, I write my stories in the margins between this legal matter or another - the stuff I actually do as a lawyer to get by economically. During one particular week of composition, I attended an online 'continuing legal education' seminar about The Rule of Law. The Rule of Law encompasses both the political and the legal system. The seminar was about how lawyers like me have a duty to be goodwill ambassadors to uphold the legal system to the general public. The speakers at this particular event were all senior and highly respected law professors and judges.
They did not invite me to speak.
The seminar seemed to me rather like a sermon. The speakers polemicized about the urgent need to restore an orthodox catechism of institutional faith among the people. We are approaching a Constitutional Crisis, the speakers gravely intoned. They simultaneously denied their political partisanship while implying that this crisis has suddenly appeared during the current administration. They bemoaned the people's loss of faith in the Rule of Law and the dire consequences sure to follow.
It sounded rather like Fyodor Dostoevsky's parable of "The Grand Inquisitor" (the story within the story of The Brothers Karamazov): the "miracle, mystery and authority" of the True Religion of the Rule of Law, with juristic mumbo-jumbo and gravitas, must lead the ignorant masses with the illusions of impartial fairness, equality and speedy justice for all. The speakers thus exhorted the various orders of ordained lawyers to renew their oaths of office, to engage in a professional crusade to restore our ostensibly exceptional American Rule of Law that, in the professional obedience schools for lawyers, we were trained to ingest, digest and regurgitate.
I am no fan of Donald Trump, who, I am convinced, is a cartoonish, narcissistic, and proudly uninformed political bullshitter. For the next four years, he will strut and bloviate and beat up weaker folks for the sake of political imaging, as all presidents have done. And then (if he does not accidentally provoke a nuclear war) he will disappear.
Mr. Trump, however, is no more a constitutional crisis than his predecessor and every president before that since the Constitution was ratified in 1790. America's "constitutional crisis" began at the instant the country was born. In fact, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been so trimmed or selectively ignored over the years that we might as well have had no written constitution at all. Ergo, our Rule of Law seminar which urged unquestioning fealty among the lawyer class to the Holy Texts (as interpreted, of course, by its high priests in robes or at the pulpits of law school or in the hallowed halls of political office).
The original "documents" that heralded the new American republic were steeped in fine Enlightenment theory: equality, democracy, education, understanding, opportunities for all, self awareness, and individual rights and liberties. But since then, by and large, all branches of government have given the Enlightenment excited lip service and then blithely tossed much of it aside, depending on the politics of the moment and the interests of the ruling class. Alas, the priesthood of the Rule of Law has a checkered and frequently ignoble history.
This is not news even though it jars our patriotic sensibilities. But ask someone whose ancestors were slaves what he or she thinks of The Rule of Law. Or ask Native Americans. Or immigrants from Palestine, China, Japan, the Philippines, or Mexico. Ask any protester against war, apartheid, genocide; or any proponent of civil rights, who is vilified in the press as a "terrorist." Or any poor American, any woman activist. Ask any university student with a student visa arrested and deported for having voiced a dissenting opinion. And ask anyone who has suffered the debilitating cost, the ponderously slow procedural rituals, and the contorted, untimely and unsatisfactory resolutions that favor the rich and the powerful and that mock anyone not rich nor powerful. Many of whom you ask might well consider the Rule of Law a bad joke and our political system a charade.
The seminar on the Rule of Law that I attended was not an isolated event within the Washington State Bar. It appears to be part of a nationwide orchestrated campaign - rather like the companion campaign to stamp out dissenting opinions in social media and on the web - to reestablish the public's faith in the System consistent with the official narrative... even as the lay public's faith in that official narrative is fraying.
I have seen and experienced and understood too much to want to crusade for the American version of "the Rule of Law" for I have, myself, joined the ranks of the faithless. I know well enough how to navigate the chutes and ladders, what secret shibboleths to speak, and when to invoke the magic spells of the process. But I cannot say, with a straight face, that our legal and political systems are the best or the wisest or the fairest system for social order. We make the best of them we can because they are what we've got. But we should strive for something better, not try to market old clunkers like used car salesmen.
Twas ever thus, says R. Crumb's Mr. Natural: the various institutional systems of Law and Government serve their primary functions of advancing the economic interests of the ruling class and the status quo. Whatever is left to the general public is just the proverbial lipstick on a pig.
Or lipstick on a wild boar.
Which is how I almost burned down Berlin. Or, rather, it is how NOT having burned down Berlin, a strange, twisty path has led from high school to now, yours truly, a venerable member of the Bar who thinks that we should all learn and improve, teach and share from our experiences, not just venerate ossifying institutions.
Happy Victory Day, friends, compagni and Kameraden. Or in the vernacular of the Wild Boar: Schnooorrrrchhhxx!
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Thank you for sharing! I enjoyed it.