I'm in Berlin when I see the first news of the earthquake in Japan. The earthquake will follow, in short, the tsunami that has left thousands dead and wounded and an extreme level of disasters: floods, devastated villages, buildings destroyed, cut communications and transport of food, families exterminated ... It is in the Berlin hotel where I receive the first information. On TV there are fewer than twenty channels and none of them I find movies or music. We settle in our times of rest, with the information channels of CNN and the BBC and, sometimes, the news on English TV. Since starting the series of misfortunes Japanese, that is, shortly after landing in the German city, on CNN and the BBC only report the earthquake and its consequences. More than twenty hours a day devoted to repeated images and to provide amateur footage, testimonies survivors and chats with Western tourists who are visiting or living in Japan. It seems a nightmare multiplied.
At this point in my life, I think, come together several points in time: the earthquake hit Japan on the anniversary of the March 11 bombings in Madrid and, among those seen on television news, we went to see Berlin and soak up his life and his past. We stayed at the Checkpoint Charlie, and every step that you give here is History with a capital: the division between East and West, the wall and escape attempts from side to side and popular uprisings and the fall of that frontier concrete political turmoil after World War II, the memory of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the Soviet ... While history recovered, either through the city (Berlin and scars) and recalling the recent past (the 11-M in Madrid) History also watching live TV (CNN and repetitive litany of scenes and evidence about what happened in Japan). I am full of history. And it is strange to see these images of giant waves, cars floating on water, squeezed by the current ships, nuclear leaks, which grinds black rivers all men and women who are afraid to take shelter under the desks of the offices where they work, it is strange to see the annihilation of a faraway country in a teleconference from a country that is not yours and you are passing through. We arrived tired from our visits in the area of \u200b\u200bAlexanderplatz and the Turkish quarter and put the TV and what appears on screen contains an ingredient unreal, as if the germ of nightmares, advertising a horror film in which they have done a great job in charge of special effects. But not a movie. I wish it were. View these images, it is entirely understandable why Asians have done so much horror, Godzilla, tsunami, several mutations and tragedies.
walk through Berlin and I think if you'll meet someone who is these days in Japan. Someone in Spain, I mean. Someone in Madrid. Or someone from Zamora, my hometown. Not many months ago one of my cousins \u200b\u200bwas visiting Japan. I dream about going to that country. Can not be afraid to do this: if a tragedy has to catch you, you do wherever you are, probably already written. JFK said after his visit to Berlin, that of: "I am a Berliner." It was his way of empathizing with their inhabitants. I think I am not even German Berlin and less Japanese, but these days I shake the pain of the past and present Berlin in Japan.
José Ángel Barrueco, blog Written on the Wind .
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