There are many obvious external things to savour on a first trip to Berlin, the grand old Bismarckian piles, the one remaining, graffiti-covered chunk of the Berlin Wall, the lowering Nazi presence of the long, huge Tempelhof Airport building, the sundry triumphs and disasters of post-war architecture, the Film Centre on Potsdamer Strasse where the Berlin Film Festival is sited (the annual tramping ground of so many February-frozen yet triumphant Bengalis), Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theatre (another tirtha-sthal for any Calcuttan with aantel pretensions), and so on. But what strikes you first is that this centre of Deutsche ethos is not a typical German city; it doesn’t have the money and, therefore, the sleek glitz of many other German metros. Where have we seen those ugly Stalin-blocks before? Why, at home in Calcutta, of course, except these cousin monstrosities are not covered with monsoon-green grime. Where have we seen tram-tracks before, and that too tracks with unkempt grass popping out around them? Oh, yes! The thrill of instant recognition is quite terrific. And yet, and yet, the differences between Berlin and Cal-Kol are underlined even more strongly by the few strange similarities.

Let me start with one of my favourite moments from the trip. On St Christopher’s Day, also known as the day of Gay Pride, Berlin thronged with queers and lesbians and general straight janata celebrating same-sex love in a city that has a huge gay population and a mayor who is quietly open about his own homosexuality. After spending a long and uproarious night in a buzzing gay bar on Lutzowstrasse, my host and I went to retrieve his car the next day. Hanging outside the bar window was a German tri-colour with the following phrase pasted across it: “Schwul, Pervers und Arbeitsscheu” — “Gay, Perverse and Work-shy”. Leaving aside the gay bit, I and every Calcutta molecule of me immediately connected to those words: Perverse! And lazy! Or, at least, “not crazily obsessed by work”! And damn well proud of it! What a great motto for Calcutta!

Mind you, the full significance of being work-shy can only be felt in a country that has a legendary work-ethic and, looking around Berlin, you do see the results of great and sometimes quite thoughtful hard work. At some point, the difference between Calcutta’s apathy and the Berliners’ hunger for pleasure — two fundamentally different things — began to be driven home again and again. The same happened when you compared the ongoing cavalier destruction of earlier Calcuttas against the value Berliners place on history and on preserving even the ugliest parts of their history as a bulwark against forgetting, against the repetition of grave crimes and mistakes. As you drive past the huge Tempelhof complex, once the heart of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, or as you go over the line of twinned paving-stones that mark where the Wall once stood, or as you enter the former Stasi headquarters which is now a museum documenting the systematic crimes of the East German Secret Police, you realize, once again, that there cannot, or should not, be a white-washing of a people’s history and memory. You realize that those in power who insist on protecting only the most ‘positive’ and the most ‘glorious’ parts of history are guilty of trying to rob future generations of their real past. Equally, the absence of proper spaces that celebrate the best of the present and of freshly recent history is also a kind of fraud perpetrated on citizens and especially on those citizens who don’t have the privileges of education and travel.

Wandering through Berlin, exploring some of the many museums and galleries, I made a small list of equivalent ones I would like to see in India and in Calcutta.

The aforementioned Stasi Museum is a good place to start. Inside the building, there are moments when you can easily fool yourself that you are in some extra-clean corridor of Shastri Bhavan or the Reserve Bank of India building on Dalhousie; whatever their erstwhile function, these are basically just high-ish level government bureaucrats’ offices. Offices and conference rooms with photographs, text and exhibition cases with facts and artefacts from the past. It’s only when you see the little prison cell on the fifth floor, or notice the labelled jars each containing a piece of felt imbued with the smell of a different suspect (to help tracker dogs later), or when the guides tell you about the obsessive, paranoid and cruel system that was run from here, that you viscerally realize you are in the central maw of the organization that terrorized East Germans for half a century. The thought arises: what could be similarly documented and displayed in India? Could there be a Museum of Partition in Delhi? A Famine Centre in Calcutta? How about an open and detailed Naxalbari Archive somewhere not far from Lal Bazar?

While the spymasters of the GDR ran their little empire of fear from East Berlin, just over the Wall the West Berliners tried to create an island for a different kind of civilization. One of the great symbols of this island of ‘culture’ and ‘freedom’ was the Museum of Modern Art designed by Mies Van der Rohe. The building is a classic of the mid-20th century modern style and, therefore, has a certain stateless feel to it — it is one of those beautiful boxes you could enjoy in many other places, Washington DC, Paris, Stockholm, any place where the climate is temperate. However, move it into the dry oven of Chandigarh or the braising heat of an April Calcutta and you would have a major air-conditioning problem: the glass cage would draw in heat and keep it trapped like the mother of all greenhouses. But, one can still fantasize about a spanking new building that houses great art in a hot, tropical city. There would necessarily have to be different structural cunning employed to catch light while avoiding the piggy-backing heat, there would be no great glass poems to transparency, and the traditions and modes of local plastic arts would have to be incorporated with considerable brio. But I can see one, sitting not necessarily in the over-subscribed flat-lands of Salt Lake but, say, right in one corner of the Maidan, or even right on the river, rising out of the space created by the demolished factories on the Howrah bank.

If the mind needed to be focussed on the good and nourishing, however, then the one space worth emulating in Berlin is the newer art museum of the Hamburger Bahnhof.

Taking the old decommissioned station that once serviced travel to the north of Germany, somebody has created a wonderful, light-filled, terminal for contemporary art. The feel of the old entrance hall and platforms is somehow preserved and yet the space feels like it was always meant to be an arena for the recent work of Beuys, Kiefer, and other powerful German artists who both refer to the industrial revolution and try and transcend that grid of rationality into a deeper Teutonic poetry. The thing that struck me though, while trying to imagine a space that might serve a similar function in Calcutta, is that this Hamburger-B was equally welcoming of all kinds of people. There were obviously serious students of art wandering through, as there were people who looked like they owned other works by some of the artists represented there but, looking at the people walking around, it would have been no surprise if the group of women from St Christopher’s Day — the ones dressed in the uniform of the German football team and kicking around a ball on Potsdamer Platz — had landed up here to have a walk through and then a celebratory beer in the café attached to the gallery. This was precisely a place for the perverse and work-shy. No matter who designs it and who does the building, it is only a place such as this, open and beautiful and one that can welcome all the oddballs Calcutta shelters, that will do justice to the city as a Museum of Modern Art.