Berlin/PBS documentary
My TV channel of choice for evening viewing is PBS America for its outstanding documentaries.
This was the second part of a documentary on Berlin the city.
In World War Two the Red Army was the first to Berlin and subjected what citizens were left – mainly children and women – to pillage and rape.
This was ironic as Berlin was never like Munich (a Nazi city) and both Hitler and Goebbels despised it.
In 1970 – whilst still a schoolboy -I travelled to Berlin and still retain clear memories of visiting East Berlin and, from an outpost on The Wall, viewing the barren terrain between the two cities. It proved that, whenever the two ideologies of Communism and Capitalism come face to face, the latter is the winner.
Since then Berlin has been united.
Unlike France and the Netherlands, it has not denied its Third Reich past, now with a Holocaust memorial in its centre.
However when I went back some 20 years ago there was no signs of The Wall, just empty space where once it stood. What I never realised in 1970 was how skint East Germany was. With no Marshal Aid and no economic miracle it was a hopeless economy.
Ironically, purely and simply as it was the last channel I watched, there was also a documentary on the Soviet Union in the Twentieth century.
It was narrated by another fellow schoolboy actor Jonathan Kydd – son of Sam, who appeared in so many films they cannot be catalogued – and also featured Simon Sebag Montefiore who made his name as a historian with his research into Russia.