I should just start writing about the trip though, before you get totally bored with my summary. On the flight home, I started writing a letter to my parents, but it was already 5 pages long when we landed, and my hand was so tired, and my handwriting so unreadable, and I only got through something like a third of the action, that I decided to just post it here on the blog for everyone to read. I have also asked A. to contribute some commentary. I apologize to those readers who know and love Berlin and will find this blog post so dull... but the rest of us have been so clueless to its charms!
Dear Mums and Dadums,
I am on the flight back from Berlin, so I thought this would be a perfect time to write you a letter, since I actually have something interesting to talk about.
Berlin is awesome! It clearly is the city in Europe that is the most interesting at the moment. I think it's partly to do with the history there, but also because it's incredibly cheap and has attracted a young artistic and fun crowd that really loves the city and is happy to show it off.
My German is ridiculously bad. Most of the time when I would try to have a basic conversation, half the words would be Dutch, or a random mixture of Dutch, German, and English. But that is not a problem at all in Berlin! In Paris, if you even ask if someone speaks English, you automatically lose several notches in their esteem. In Berlin, people seemed more than willing to help us out, and, even if they thought it, they typically didn't show that they thought we were totally stupid. They also (in nearly 90% of our experience) spoke unbelievably fluent English. The only bad experience was the taxi driver who lectured me for most of the ride home when I misstated the name of the street we were going to, and then proceeded to explain why what I said was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. I knew enough German to pick that much up. Unfortunately that experience has not ameliorated my irrational fear of taxis.
The best thing about the trip, though, was meeting up with my friends Svanur and Naomi (and meeting a bunch of her awesome friends - yay German Fulbrighters!) who took us to some wacky places we would never have found by ourselves. But we will describe some of those moments later.
We stayed in a hotel on the Western side of the city, in a chic neighborhood near the Tiergarten (a huge wooded park in the center of Berlin). The first night we were walking around in the rain and came upon this church that looked nearly destroyed, except that there were lights all over the inside (thanks to the Festival of Lights that was going on last week. Oddly there were also a lot of lasers in the sky). As you can see, instead of windows, there are just holes and the steeple/bell tower thingy is half gone. It is actually the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, a monument of the Hohenzollern imperial dynasty that was mostly destroyed by a bombing raid in 1943, but was left mostly as it was (not torn down or rebuilt) as a peace memorial. After they war, they built a chapel and bell tower on either side that are almost entirely made of blue stained glass.
There is also inside a 'Coventry Cross,' which is a small cross made from nails found in the rubble of Coventry Cathedral. We actually saw another one in the church near the Berlin Wall Memorial, so there must be a few of them floating around. My guess is that Dresden has at least one.
While much of that area was totally destroyed, it later became the center of West Berlin so most of the buildings there date from the early 1950s and aren't all that interesting.
The day after we arrived, I made poor A. walk all the way across the city just to prove to some random unnamed detractor that Berlin was a walkable city. It kind of is. It's probably about as big as Paris in terms of distance across, but walking across all of Paris isn't all that much fun either (sorry to everyone who I made do that). But we walked through the Tiergarten, which was planted after WWII in a natural forest way (since they didn't have money to make fancy French manicured gardens, I heard) and is a fantastic park. Apparently in summer, lots of American tourists are shocked when they accidentally happen on the nude section - that would be fun to see!
The Tiergarten has a huge boulevard running through it that leads to the Brandenburg Gate. In the middle of the park is the Victory Column (celebrating originally German victories in the various Prussian Wars of the 19th century) with the big gold statue of the winged victory that you might remember from the German film Wings of Desire that we watched several years ago; the angel in the film sits on top of the column and watches over the city. It is also where Barack Obama spoke last summer and drew a crowd of 200,000 (and according to my journalist friends, Berliners never turn out like that!).
Further on in the park, we came to the Soviet War Memorial, which is interesting mostly because of the sculpture of the Soviet soldier with his hand reaching down, and for its location. We learned a day after on our Cold War walking tour that Stalin supposedly demanded this memorial be constructed on this location because it was the spot where the last Soviet soldier died in the liberation of Berlin. Other theories are that Stalin wanted a foothold in the Allied sectors, and more interestingly, because this location was supposed to be the main square of Hitler and Albert Speer's architectural vision of "Germania" - the capital city of the mythic and victorious Third Reich. Apparently it never would have worked out anyway because Speer's "neo-classical totalitarian" style buildings would have sunk into the silty soil.
Anyway, the monument is pretty interesting, although not as interesting as the other Soviet memorial in the Eastern side, which we saw Monday morning, and that I will talk about later.
From there the Reichstag is very close, although we didn't go in because the line was too long, and the dome was closed for repairs. And the big draw there is, of course, the Brandenburg Gate. It's an interesting place. Now it is also the location of a brand new American Embassy (and French embassy too!) and several other buildings in the current architectural style (anything post-reunification is made of glass and steel). Apparently the Americans demanded a 100 meter security perimeter around the embassy (which is literally the building right next to the gate) and some hilarious person in the German government replied, "Would you like us to move the gate, or just tear it down?" Ha ha! In front of the gate, you can pay a lot of money to get your picture taken with some fake soldiers.
If you turn around, you can also see the window that the Hotel Adlon where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out of a few years ago - also an important monument! And there is now a Starbucks in the building that was apparently the Berlin office of IG Farben (who invented Zyklon-B, the product used in the gas chambers) during the Nazi years. Something ironic there perhaps...
Almost everything immediately east of where the wall stood is brand new. South of the Brandenburg Gate (and bordering the American Embassy) is the new memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is (if I remember correctly) the only major Holocaust memorial in Berlin. There is also a Jewish museum, but we were actually quite surprised with how little information it had on the Holocaust. But back to the monument - it's hundreds of slabs of concrete that are placed at different heights and when you walk inside it, it really echoes and feels like a strange sort of prison. It's quite haunting.
And south of that is Potsdamer Platz, which was one of the busiest intersections in Europe before WWII, was totally destroyed in WWII, and was part of the "death strip" between the two Berlin Walls (yes there were two!) from 1961 to 1989. Now it is home to something that looks like the Berlin version of Times Square. There's lots of glass of course.
The Cold War walking tour we did was really interesting. We walked along the edges of the wall, which is marked throughout the city by a row of brown cobblestones - you see them everywhere once you start to look for them. We also went through some ghost train stations on underground lines that crossed into DDR territory, but weren't allowed to stop - they were kind of spooky. Then we went up north to Bernauerstrasse where there is a large section of the wall still remaining (although it's clear people keep chipping more and more bits off, so it may not be there for long!) and an interesting museum. These are mostly pictures of the wall in that location.
We also talked a lot about lots of different escape attempts and how the Stasi cracked down on the East Berliners, in particular with the increasing militarization of the area between the walls and or course their insane surveillance. (We also went to a small Stasi museum in the center of town, and later on Monday to the main Stasi museum in the old office complex, which I will talk more about later!).
We walked a lot around the Eastern part of the city, which is actually called "Mitte" or middle (since it's in the middle - so methodical and logical!). There are tons of shops and restaurants and bars in this section, and is really a fun place to be. But we will talk more about our adventures there in future posts.
There are also lots more pictures posted on my Picasa site: http://picasaweb.google.com/dfontaine20/BerlinOctober2008
Stay tuned for: a night out in a DDR ballroom, Stasi surveillance gadgets, and KNUT!!!
3 comments:
Um, I believe the Festival of Lights is a Jewish holiday. Man, first they kill us and then they steal our holidays.
Do Jews normally shoot green lasers in the sky? I just thought that was tacky, so we'll blame that one on the Germans.
I must say, I do enjoy a laser light show. That's probably the result of too many fun-filled family vacations at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando though, every night of which culminated in the magic light show over Epcot.
But what is it with the Europeans and the lights? First le Eifel Tower, now this thing in Berlin. What's up with that?
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