As a gal who’s reached that rarefied stratum of nerd-dom that compels me to study for my vacations, it was simply fascinating to walk through a city where every block has a story to tell. For the sake of time, I’ll have to break this trip up into several posts. In this one, I’ll go over some of my personal favourite stops on the tourist trail.
Berlin’s turbulent history has forced the city into a constant state of rebuilding. The result is a truly eclectic mish-mash of things to see. The centuries-long dynasty of Hohenzollern kings built classical cathedrals, museums and monuments to rival any other European city. World War II made Berlin the focus of Allied aerial bombardments, and by V-Day,90% of the city was destroyed, leaving yawning gaps to be reconstructed in each Allied zone. And when the wall finally came down in 1989, the no-man’s land of concrete and barbed wire that used to separate East from West suddenly became a blank architectural canvas for a newly reunified Germany.
To get an overview of the city on my first day, I took a walking tour conducted by Terry Brewer, a former British naval intelligence agent who has lived in Berlin on and off for 50 years and knows its history backwards, inside out and upside down.
He warns you right at the outset to leave if you don’t like history or aren’t down for, oh, 10 hours or so of walking. If you are up to it, though, you will learn more about Berlin than you ever dreamed you could in one day – that is, if you can keep up with him! His pace was certainly putting a lot of the youngsters in the group to shame.
All along the way, he is at you like a school teacher to keep up, shut up and listen. So if you don’t have a sense of humour, or you have a broken rib (as one girl indignantly told him when he chided her the nth time for walking slowly), you should find another tour. But I am sure there are very few other English-speaking tour guides in Berlin who can tell you what it was like being in an East Berlin pub the day the wall came down.
(I promise I’m not getting kickbacks to shill for this guy. The tour was just that good.)
One of the areas that consumed several hours of the tour was the main boulevard of Berlin – the charmingly named Unter Den Linden (“under the lime trees”). Clustered on both sides are venerable old bridges, churches, museums, squares… even the university where Albert Einstein taught. Basically, if you want to see the blockbuster old architecture in Berlin and glug history from a fire hose, UDL is where it’s at, yo. Here were some of my personal highlights.
Our first stop was the Lustgarten (Pleasure Garden), ringed by the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) and the Altes Museum (Old Museum), from whose steps I took this photo. Over the years the Lustgarten has seen use as a recreational park, a venue for public demonstrations, and, in its darkest days, a Nazi parade ground. Happily, in the years since reunification the square has been restored to its former beauty. For me this was one of the coolest examples of how the city has bounced back from a dark past.
Another of my favourite stops along Unter Den Linden was the war memorial. Ironically, it’s housed in a building that used to be a military guard house. It’s intended as a tribute not just to fallen German soldiers, but to all victims of war. The building is in a Greek style, and is bare inside except for the lone statue of a mother retrieving her dead son’s body from a battlefield. There is a single circular hole in the roof to let in the sun, snow, or rain – so the landscape around the statue is changing, but in any weather, the sense of futility and loss is constant. The artist, Käthe Kollwitz, was a staunch pacifist and socialist whose own sons died in the World Wars.
About a block or so west is Bebelplatz, the square where the Nazi book burnings took place in 1933, and the site of another striking memorial. Set into the ground is a plaque with this quote from German writer Heinrich Heine. He penned it more than a hundred years before Hitler came to power, but it's chillingly prophetic. My rough amateur translation is "This is only the beginning... in the end, those who burn books will also burn people." CREEPY.
And of course, Unter Den Linden famously culminates in the majestic Brandenburg Gate. The twists and turns of this monument’s fate have eerily paralleled the events of the city around it. When Napoleon marched into Berlin, he took the quadriga that tops the gate back to Paris; when the Prussians in turn conquered the French, they retrieved the quadriga and put it back where it belonged. The Nazis used the gate as a symbol for an all-powerful, unified Reich. And during the decades of Germany’s separation, the gate stood solitary and stranded in the no man’s land metres from the Berlin Wall, where East German soldiers had orders to shoot to kill.
Today, it’s once again the most well-known architectural symbol of unified Germany. My first glimpse of it was after dark. Two days before the 20th anniversary celebrations for the fall of the Wall, it was lit up with a vengeance.
That was just a handful of the countless museums, statues, and other interesting things lining Berlin’s main boulevard. Due to time constraints I had to just pass by and promise myself a return trip.
Moving just a little further into East Berlin, I walked down streets that transported me back to communist times, like Karl-Marx-Allee. Hulking, grandiose apartment blocks line this wide boulevard as far as the eye can see. I guess this is what Moscow looks like. It was hard to capture on camera how imposing these wedding cake-style buildings really look!
Some buildings in Berlin are conspicuous by their absence. During Nazi times, Hitler commissioned many grandiose new buildings, including his personal palace, the Gestapo headquarters and “courthouse”. He proclaimed that these buildings would stand for a thousand years – most of them barely lasted six. They were destroyed in the war and never rebuilt.
The city block under which Hitler committed suicide in his subterranean bunker is now occupied by a large apartment building. There are no markers, no reminders of what used to be here. The bodies of Hitler and his cronies were ignominiously burned by the Soviet victors and the ashes thrown into the river, so neo-Nazis wouldn’t have a chance to turn any grave site into a shrine.
Of course on this particular weekend, the most conspicuous absence was that of the Berlin Wall. In parts of the city, its former path is marked a trail of bricks on the ground – but it seems that mostly, the focus has been to get the damn thing down and rehabilitate the areas of the city that were part of the “death strip” separating East and West Berlin.
One such area is Potsdamer Platz, which before World War II was one of the busiest intersections in Berlin. But then the wall went up straight through the middle of it, and that was that. It was hereafter known as “no-man's land”, the area between the inner and outer walls.
It’s hard to imagine that, standing in the bustle of today’s Potsdamer Platz. As far as I could tell from the huge train station, modern skyscrapers, street festivals and general urban craziness, it’s easily living up to its exceedingly cheesy marketing slogan, “the Platz to be”. *groan*
The most famous modern building in Potsdamer Platz is the Sony Centre. When I went, the place was full of TV cameras and the red carpet was rolled out for a movie premiere. Here is its famous roof:
In quieter parts of the city, there are still bits of the wall standing. Some still look as depressing as they were years ago, and are surrounded by fences to deter souvenir-collectors. The longest remaining stretch, however, has been converted into an art project called the East Side Gallery. Running for about 1.3km along the river Spree, the gallery showcases works from international artists – some poignant, some provocative, and some humorous.
A dark piece of history converted into public art. That’s just so Berlin.
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Apart from all the tourist landmarks, there were many unique little things I noticed that made me love Berlin. There’s the fluorescent above-ground piping that snakes its way across city blocks in the east…
… the jovial top-hatted Ampelmänner (traffic light men) who almost got replaced in the rush to standardise everything after reunification. They were saved only by the protests of sentimental East Berliners who pointed out that not everything Ossi had to be changed for the sake of unity…
… and of course the random public art (official and unofficial) that today’s Berlin is famous for. Despite being the capital city of Europe’s biggest economy, Berlin is not a hub for big business. It doesn’t even really have a major airport. That’s resulted in a high (almost 20%) unemployment rate, but it’s also kept property prices and living costs fairly low, attracting lots of creative types who like doing things like squatting and painting buildings.
In the immortal words of its colourful mayor, Klaus Wowereit, Berlin is “poor but sexy”. He's right for sure. Before my visit to Berlin, I was sure I'd have plenty of adjectives for Germany's cities, but “sexy” was certainly not one I expected.
More in my next!
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