While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer

Author:Bruce Bawer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385517591
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE HUGE WOODEN DOOR of the pension opened, and a young man with a Mediterranean appearance—Turkish, I guessed—eyed us steadily. “Deutsch? English?” he asked. “English,” I replied, and after introducing himself he walked us through a small, dark dining room—the tables already meticulously set for the next day's breakfast—to our room. “You can check in,” he said, unlocking the door, “after you've settled in.” He left, and I made a beeline for the TV set, finding CNN Europe just in time to hear an anchorwoman say that they were now switching over to CNN-US for live coverage of Ronald Reagan's funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington.

Though we hadn't planned our trip to Berlin so that its timing would be symbolically appropriate, that was how it turned out—multiply so, in fact. For one thing, there was the funeral of Reagan, a pivotal force in the events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then there had been the commemoration, a couple of days earlier, of the sixtieth anniversary of D-day. For the first time ever, German leaders had been invited to participate in the official memorial events—a reflection of establishment politicians' desire to de-emphasize the transatlantic alliance and prioritize pan-European solidarity. Finally, there were the EU elections, scheduled for Sunday. They would test the degree of public commitment to the future of the EU, whose largest and most important member is, of course, the German Federal Republic. *18

As I sat there watching the first moments of the Reagan funeral, however, my thoughts were not on the future but on the past. Berlin had starred in the two nightmare dramas of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. The United States had helped deliver it from Hitler, airlifted supplies when Moscow tried to cut it off from the free world, protected its western half from Stalin and his successors, and played a pivotal role in the liberation of its eastern half from Communist rule. Berliners had much for which to be grateful to America—and, especially, Reagan. Or so one would have thought.

The next day we came up out of the S-Bahn at Potsdamer Platz to see before us a breathtaking panorama of large, shiny new buildings of glass and steel, their architecture astonishing in its boldness and imagination. I felt like Dorothy beholding the Emerald City. And the spectacle wasn't complete yet: to our right, on the opposite side of the street—Ebertstrasse—a sea of cranes seemed to stretch to the horizon. (I later learned that this immense site was that of the future Holocaust Memorial.) The opening lines of an old Marlene Dietrich tune flooded into my mind: “Amidst the ruins of Berlin, / Trees are in bloom as they have never been . . .” Dietrich sang those words in A Foreign Affair (1948), set in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That, too, had been a time of rebirth for the city, at least its western half. Now, nearly sixty years on, Berlin's eastern half was catching up.

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