You can’t fly from Tempelhof anymore. The airport closed down in 2008. It has since become a Berlin phenomenon. It is the only place in the world where you can have a picnic in the middle of an airstrip formerly used for the take off and landing of commercial passenger jets. It is a burst of space so large that the air lifts on its outskirts and the smell of the city disperses as you arrive, replaced by the smell of earth and the sounds of shrieking hordes of birds. It is a place where you can cycle on a Sunday evening and watch kites above a skyline of autumn orange, dodging as you do rollerbladers, skateboarders, walkers, kite boarders, and hovering clouds of weed smoke.
Tempelhof is where Berliners go to hold off the end of the weekend. The scaffolding of the coming week is in sight, but it is ignored. It is the theatre of this field that matters on a Sunday evening. There are many stages too. Allotment gardens on one end, for example, and a vast field of tall grass that acts as a bird sanctuary. Beer gardens and a baseball pitch where matches have been played the day before. Each runway is a riot, with every person moving across it as if they are secretly thinking they might suddenly take off and fly. There is a kind of alchemy of space and movement that occurs amidst all these Berlin creatures, who swerve and dodge around one another, almost never colliding.
Last night I arrived there at dusk. I thought, how can it be Autumn of 2018 already. In the misty evening light, there was not one thing that wasn’t in motion. Even the groups of people picnicking were gesticulating and drinking and eating with such intensity that they hardly seemed stationary. As I rode up the main runway, faster and faster, I turned to my left and saw the Alexanderplatz TV Tower in the middle distance, mooning over Mitte. In the shimmering autumn air, it seemed to be dicing with the old Tempelhof Radar Tower on the field, no longer bound to the ground. I passed a man as he scooped up his running child and when a kite swooped low over our heads I too became one of those people who genuinely believed that any second I would take off and fly.
The only thing solid in all this flux is the airport building behind me, with its square, heavy sign saying ‘Berlin-Tempelhof’. It was placed there in the 1930s when the Nazis made Tempelhof the biggest airport in the world, and a fitting staging ground for their dark pageantry. In the dying days of the war, Albert Speer flew out of the airport with a raving instruction from Hitler to burn and destroy every bit of Germany that was left, because the country no longer deserved to exist. Four years later British and American planes flitted in and out over that sign, taking off and landing every three minutes during the Airlift of 1948-1949. They were delivering supplies to West Berliners who had been cut off by Stalin in his final attempt to gain control over the entire city. The British and American planes were feeding the same population they had conquered four years earlier, because Berlin, that spinning top of history, was now becoming the most potent symbol of the Cold War and its survival was essential to the west.
All around Tempelhof , West Berlin did indeed survive, increasingly somnolent and derelict as the years of the Berlin Wall passed. In West Berlin’s isolation, the airport was a window out of which those lucky enough to be able to travel freely could fly. There were other airports in West Berlin, of course, but history loves an evocative name, and in Berlin history, ‘Tempelhof’ is just that.
I turn my back on the sign with its heavy symmetry, and set off again at speed. I think, how the view from its vantage point has changed over the years. The markers of war have vanished, the swastika never allowed to fly there again, the planes gone with their loads of supplies, their weaponry, their passengers from all over the world, craning to see the city as they arrive, the Alexander TV tower no longer in another country but a friendly eye to be met, and no more the marching, marching, marching that so haunted the airport’s past.
Now, there is all that space and sky around, and every day of the week that passes brings it closer to Sunday, where in a communion of colour and sound, Berlin itself seems no longer tethered to the ground.
© Lauren van Vuuren 2019
Lauren van Vuuren 