Mariano Picón-Salas: From dream of warlike soldiers to nightmare of flames and ashes

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Latin American writers on war and peace

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Mariano Picón-Salas
From The Ignoble Savages
Translated by Herbert Weinstock

Berlin is there on its drained Brandenburg swamp, surrounded by lakes and woods, as if awakening from a nightmare that burned out its eyes. From the Friedrichs and Wilhelms through the time of Bismarck and ending with that of Hitler, it was built as the capital of force, and it was transformed into a capital of flames and ashes during the most horrible nights in European history. Seventy-five cubic meters of rubble accumulated in 1945 on the wide avenues of former times. From the Brandenburg Gate, through which, in the imperial dream, the most warlike soldiers had marched, friezes and columns were borne away. The freezing multitudes made firewood and charcoal from the well-cared-for trees of Unter den Linden. The subway was flooded, and the bodies of the final victims of the shipwreck floated in black water impregnated with soot, dust, and sulfur.

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