My eyes snapped open at 3:00 AM and, despite my best effort, I couldn’t fall back asleep. After an hour, I gave up. 

Gingerly getting out of bed so as not to wake my wife and daughter, I silently changed into my workout gear, made my way down the stairs, said hello to the desk clerk, and then launched into my run. As I made my way down unfamiliar streets, I marveled at how light it was despite the early hour. No other runners were out, and as I ran past empty shops and restaurants, I felt like the city belonged to me alone. 

The air was cool, and the avenues flat compared to the hilly topography of my home, so it was easy going. After a mile my legs warmed up and I picked up the pace. Running alongside the river I watched as office lights snapped on in the government buildings lining its banks as if saluting my effort. As I breathed easily in and out, I said hello to a pair of policeman standing guard. They nodded back, dismissing me as just another sweaty middle aged guy trying to slow down his body’s clock. Then I turned a corner and stopped, shocked at the massive building towering over me. 

The Reichstag. 

Being a student of history, I knew that when Russian troops assaulted this place during the Battle of Berlin, their tanks were hammered by heavy guns firing from a fortification called the Zoo Tower located in a nearby park. Even now, despite its restoration after the city became the capital of a reunited Germany, the building was still pockmarked in places from bullets and shrapnel. I also knew some of the graffiti Red Army soldiers left on the walls inside had been purposefully left in place. 

Leaving the Reichstag behind, I jogged past the Brandenburg Gate, went down the Unter Den Linden, made a right on Wilhelmstrasse, paced down a few more streets, and then stopped by a sign in front of some unremarkable apartment buildings. Seventy-nine years ago, the ground I was standing on was the site of the Führerbunker were Hitler killed himself. Looking down the street, I saw the stone plinths making up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and thought about all the men, women and children the Nazi’s exterminated with ruthless efficiency. On the plane over, I read a biography of the British actor Dirk Bogarde who, while serving as an army officer, helped liberate a concentration camp. Seeing all those decaying bodies stacked like cordwood rotting in the sun, he was never the same again. After the war, if he got on an elevator with a German who was his contemporary, he got off. 

In Berlin, you cannot escape the long shadow of history. As sweat dripped off my body, I could almost hear the clatter of gunfire and the screaming of Katyusha rockets as Stalin’s soldiers reduced Berlin to ashes. Watching lights in the apartments switching on and early risers beginning their day, I wondered how they could live with all those demonic ghosts beneath their feet. Running back along the River Spree to my hotel, I looked at the moored party boats and cafés lining the banks and remembered something a German woman who’d been young girl in Berlin during the war once told me, recounting in harrowing detail how the Russian conquerors raped every German woman they could find. “No one was too young or too old” she said, many being violated uncountable times. “The victims threw themselves into the river,” she said. “I’ll never forget all those dead women floating in the water.” Now the Spree was a tranquil tributary where people picnic, sunbathe, jog or take boat rides – but all I could see were the bloated corpses of those women bobbing up and down in the dark water. This was once the River Styx and, as I ran through Hell’s echo, I realized the words Dante inscribed on Perdition’s gate might have well been Berlin’s epitaph. 

I am the way into the city of woe.

I am the way to a forsaken people.

I am the way into eternal sorrow.

Sacred justice moved my architect.

I was raised here by divine omnipotence,

Primordial love and ultimate intellect.

Only those elements time cannot wear

Were made before me, and beyond time I stand.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Feeling thoroughly jet lagged and depressed, I went back to my hotel and took a long shower, trying to wash away the awful images filling my mind. Then, later that day, as my brother-in-law and I were enjoying coffee at a café, a sudden summer downpour caught a gaggle of school kids on a field trip as they were crossing the street. As they laughed and shrieked with youthful delight, I smiled, remembering visiting Washington D.C. when I was their age; innocent and with my whole life ahead of me, when my parents were young. With a start, I realized I was being given a glimpse of those “elements time cannot wear” which lie hidden beneath the fragile structures of the ordinary.  

Berlin has a history that cannot be ignored but, rising from the ashes of madness and war, it has become a new and vibrant city filled with life. Thinking about those apartments built above the ruins of Hitler’s bunker, I realized that they were just filled with regular people living their lives – cooking, cleaning, making love, raising children, talking around the kitchen table, worrying, laughing and, like all of us, hoping for the best. Journeying though Berlin and seeing lovers strolling arm in arm in the Tiergarten, mothers pushing baby carriages, and old people watching kids play, I was reminded yet again that life is the utmost expression of “Primordial love and ultimate intellect.” 

Sometimes, when we are filled with sorrow and despair, seeing life “just going on” can be painful – as if it’s ignoring our pain and grief – but its very inevitability is a sign that “Sacred justice” cannot be denied. Once a forsaken city of woe, Berlin was lost but now has been found. And, as I saw men and women of every color and religion walking its streets, many the very people the Third Reich sought to eradicate, I knew if resurrection could happen here, it could happen anywhere. Never abandon hope because Life, which pours forth from Love Itself, always wins. 

In a sense,“Wir sind alle Berliner.”