Berlin: Back for more

I first set foot in Berlin last November, timing my visit to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It didn't take very many hours wandering its patchwork of neighbourhoods and monuments to realise that I was at one of the real epicentres of modern history. For better or for worse, the fate of hundreds of millions of people has revolved around this place for over a hundred years.

And yet Berlin is no crusty museum of a city. At no point in time do you ever feel that it's anything less than a real metropolis with real people, real personality, and its own unique set of charms and problems.

I packed a lot into my first visit (highlights included the best falafel of my life, and seeing Mikhail Gorbachev in person), and yet I left with the feeling of having barely scratched the surface. So the second time around, I gagged the complaints of my bum hip with anti-inflammatories and determined to wander as far and wide as it would consent to take me.

We stayed in Friedrichshain, previously a neighbourhood of East Berlin. It definitely feels rougher around the edges than Schöneberg, the leafy, quiet suburb I sayed in during my last visit. Apart from the wedding cake Soviet architecture of the iconic Karl-Marx-Allee, and the East Side Gallery (the longest remaining section of the Wall, now converted to an art gallery), it's mostly big old communist-era apartment blocks (these days rented by Berlin's student population), and the rumble of trains chugging in and out of the Ostbahnhof, where I met Sean at the end of my train ride from the airport.

We dropped my bags at the hostel and walked to Boxhagenerplatz, the hub of the neighbourhood's student nightlife. Being Friday night, it was buzzing with activity. We stopped at a kebab shop for some late night sustenance, then ducked into a 24-hour convenience store (after a year in shut-at-8 Bavaria, I'm infinitely more grateful that such a concept exists), picked out some beers from the fridge, and took them out onto the street to drink, stroll and people-watch.

Being able to drink in public places is actually one of the things I'll miss about Germany. Not to say I walk the streets with a beer in my hand every day, but it's nice to be able to take a beer down to the lake or river in summer to accompany your swim or picnic, or cradle a hot mug of glühwein at the Christmas markets. I read that there have been moves in Germany to ban public drinking, and while I can’t speak for the rest of the country, my experience in Munich has been that the practice doesn’t seem to cause too much trouble. I live in a student area and see intoxicated people fairly often, and can’t say I’ve ever seen things get further than exuberance and high spirits. Overall, people here seem much better at handling themselves with alcohol than in other places I’ve lived.

The next morning we crossed the pretty Oberbaumbrücke over the River Spree into the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg. Our ultimate aim was to reach Tempelhof Airport, the airfield used by the west during the Berlin Airlift, but I was just as eager to see Kreuzberg itself, which from several friends’ descriptions seemed like it could potentially be my favourite Berlin neighbourhood.

As we zigzagged across town, we noticed that the traffic light men kept changing. For a few blocks we’d be seeing the jaunty, top-hatted East German Ampelmännchen, then a few steps later we’d be waiting at a normal West German traffic light, and then we’d be at an Ampelmann again. Berlin has blended back into a seamless continuum so well in this part of town, that it’s impossible to tell at any point whether you’re in the former east or west, like a scar that’s miraculously healed without leaving a physical trace. At the same time, this hit home to me what a shock it must have been for Berliners to wake up one seemingly normal Sunday morning and find a militarized barrier running through their previously unified city. I screwed up my eyes and tried to imagine a wall dividing the block in front of me from the one behind me, and simply couldn’t. It was unfathomable.

I loved Kreuzberg every bit as much as I expected. It’s a neighbourhood of contrasts and variety. There are a few square blocks known as “little Istanbul” – crammed with Turkish restaurants and grocery stores and delis whose tantalising displays made me want to stop for a second breakfast of breads and spreads and falafel. Oh, and I found some pretty kick-ass sunnies.

Once we crossed the idyllic Landswehrkanal, a peaceful stream plied by narrowboats and framed by graceful bridges, the blocks took on a distinctly West Berlin feel, with leafy playgrounds and gorgeous old pre-war apartment blocks, their wrought iron balconies filled with flower pots. This was one of the few areas of Berlin that was somewhat spared in the final hellish days of World War Two.

My favourite shopping street was one with an old red brick church with a tolling bell, an old pre-war market hall filled with fancy cheesemongers and antipasti vendors, and dozens of unique shops and cafes lining the footpaths. If I ever move to Berlin, I already know where I’ll be going apartment hunting.

Our wander through Kreuzberg brought us to Tempelhof Airport, the site of the dramatic Berlin Airlift of 1948-9. Tempelhof ceased commercial operations in 2008 and the city of Berlin took the unusual step of converting the airfield into a vast public park. So now you can grill sausages in the long shadow of the air traffic control tower, have a bike race down a runway, or picnic under the rusting hulk of a World War Two bomber.

Unfortunately, none of the above were a go for us on our visit. Gunmetal grey clouds were already frowning down on us as we skirted the severe semicircle of the old Nazi-era terminal building. And by the time we got right into the middle of the park, just far enough to be outside sprinting distance to any form of shelter, it started to pour. Running for cover was enough of a lost cause that we simply shrugged our shoulders, accepted the second shower and began to play “Airlift”.

The weather played games with us all through our visit. It lavished sunshine on the Brandenburg Gate when we revisited it late on Sunday afternoon, brutalised us with wind and rain as we waited in line to go up to dome of the Reichstag on Sunday morning, and turned scattershot by the time we made the hike all the way out to the 1936 Olympic stadium in Berlin’s far western suburbs.

Our last stop was the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park. After the Red Army captured Berlin at the end of World War Two, they filled their sector of the city with monuments paying tribute to the Russian soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. The most famous of these is inside Treptower park, a public garden in the southeast of Berlin.

After visiting the Communist statue park in Budapest, I was expecting the memorial to be on an epic scale, and I wasn’t wrong. It isn’t so much a single monument or statue as it is a progression of themes that build up to a climax. You enter the memorial through a grand archway, ornamented with carved stone wreaths and inscribed with tributes in Russian and German to the heroes who gave all in the victory over Fascism. You then pass through a silent, green corridor of weeping willows and to the feet of a poignant statue of Mother Russia mourning for her dead children.

At this point there are some interpretive panels that describe the Soviet Union’s experience of WW2. This is a subject I didn’t know much about, and I was shocked to read that twenty-five million Soviets – civilian and military – died in the war. Twenty-five million! That’s the populations of Australia and New Zealand combined. Growing up in the British Commonwealth, I’d heard a lot over the years about how much loss of life the western countries had sustained in the war, but this was a number that hit me right in the guts.

Despite all my professed open-mindedness, I think I have grown up subconsciously thinking of Russia as simply a dark lurking force that messed up Eastern Europe. In actual fact, things would probably have been much worse had they not done all they did in World War Two. Obviously it was not an act of charity to go to war with Germany: once Hitler reneged on his truce with Stalin and decided to invade Russia, it was simply a matter of self preservation. But it’s unfortunate that the Cold War has in a lot of ways overshadowed and made a lot of us in the west ignorant of the contributions and sacrifices of the Soviet Union in WW2.

Digesting all of this, I explored the rest of the memorial in a different frame of mind – definitely not with the cynicism I felt when I visited the statue park in Budapest. By the time I reached the zenith of the memorial – a green hill topped with a massive statue of a sword-wielding Soviet soldier cradling a rescued child in his spare arm and crushing a swastika underfoot, I felt like my view of European history had become a little more nuanced.

Stalking Angela Merkel, and other adventures

The last day of my visit to Berlin was 9th November 2009 – exactly 20 years after the first border crossings were opened between East and West Berlin. The main celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate were to take place in the evening, so I spent the daylight hours hanging out with Guido, who happened to have the day off. He lent me his kick-ass fold-up bike to ride, and off we went cycling the streets of the city.

While we were breaking for lunch - I swear I would move to Berlin for the falafel alone - we happened to hear a traffic report on the restaurant’s radio. Well, to be honest, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was a traffic report. To me it sounded more like “Deutschdeutschmoredeutschreallyfastdeutschaaarrghh”. But luckily I was with Guido, who said “They’re closing off streets so that Angela Merkel can give a speech on a bridge across town. Let’s go see her!”

So we set off to Bösebrücke, a bridge over the river Spree that used to be an East-West border crossing. It was the first checkpoint where GDR guards allowed people to go west that night in ‘89. It was also the bridge across which Angela Merkel herself stepped into West Berlin for the first time (she was living at the time in the East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg). So it was very fitting for her to give a speech there 20 years later, as reunified Germany’s first East German (and female) chancellor. She’s a symbol of all the promise that night held.

Approaching the bridge, we started to see police vans and barriers set up on the streets. There were already hundreds of people standing patiently in the rain waiting for Angela to arrive. It was all very German, there was zero jostling for position, people were just craning their necks and apologising to each other if they accidentally bumped someone in the process.



Finally the chancellor arrived and as a bonus, she had brought along Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Klaus Wowereit (the mayor of Berlin), and a man who I later found out was Joachim Gauck, a former East Berlin dissident who was put in charge of all of the Stasi’s records after reunification. Quite a star-studded line-up, in other words!

As the official party, flanked by dozens of cameramen, made their symbolic walk across the bridge, people began to cheer and yell “Gorbi! Gorbi!” Although the way Nov 9th actually played out was due to a bureacratic mix-up, Gorbachev is widely credited as the politician who, in the big picture, really brought down the Iron Curtain. So he was very warmly received. There was also one particularly vocal Polish man who ran up and down the bridge waving the flag of Poland yelling “Polska! Polska!” as Lech Walesa walked by. That made everyone chuckle.

The first person to speak was Joachim Gauck. He made a very metaphorical speech in which he said that although East Germans had studied all their lives to be obedient and fearful, they had passed their examination in freedom. I was lucky I had Guido there to translate the German for me, or I would spent the rest of the afternoon wondering confusedly why that guy was talking about exams on a big day like this. Mein Deutsch ist ein bisschen schlecht. Interestingly, he also gave a shout out to Barack Obama, comparing “Wir sind das Volk”, the slogan used by pro-democracy demonstrators in East Germany, to “Yes we can!” A catch cry that appeals to the heart and the mind, he said.

Next, Angela Merkel gave her speech. She thanked Walesa and Gorbachev for their role in paving the way for German reunification. She also expressed how happy she was to see that the post-wall generation no longer identified themselves as from the east or west, but simply as Germans. It was interesting to hear that after all the Ossi/Wessi hang-ups I had heard and read about. I don’t know whether she was just being politically correct,or whether these views mainly exist among older people who lived through those times, while younger people really have less of a complex about it.

All through the speeches the crowd stood hushed and attentive, unconcerned with the rain and the cold. There was no pomp or pyrotechnics here, just a bunch of people to whom this day obviously meant a lot. It felt special to be there.




Once the speeches were done, the dignitaries started to head off the bridge. That’s when everyone lost all pretence of politeness and headed for the barrier… me included. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event for me, after all. Here is my photo proving I saw Gorbi and Angela Merkel in person :)



Oh, btw. Before the dignitaries all exit this scene, I would like to list several reasons why Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, is awesome.

1. When he announced his candidacy for mayor in 2001, he said "Ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so" ("I am gay, and that’s a good thing"). Matter closed, all stupidity pre-empted.
2. When he was leaving the bridge, someone asked for his autograph and he obliged. As he began to write the date next to his signature, he said “Uh, what date is it again? Oh… right. November 9th.” causing several hundred people on the bridge to crack up.
3. Unlike the other pollies who rushed off quite promptly after the proceedings were over (to the dismay of much of the crowd), he was stopping every few metres to pose nicely for everyone’s cameras and banter with the crowd. He was obviously basking in the attention and the interaction with people.

As twilight hovered over the city  I headed to the Brandenburg Gate to get a good vantage point for the official celebrations. From Potsdamer Platz to the Reichstag, 1000 foam dominoes had been set up along the exact line where the wall used to stand. Each domino had been painted by schoolchildren or artists from across the globe. Here was one of my personal favourites (the caption says “Walls are a danger to your health”):



The climax of the evening was to be the toppling of these dominoes in a chain reaction, symbolising the fall of the communist regimes across Europe during the tumult of 1989. But this wasn’t happening for another couple of hours, and it was cold and raining. I attempted to warm myself up with some fruit punch. Germans seem to like this hot wine concept a lot, and they have the right idea in my opinion. The punch stall was lined with huge glass bowls of red and white wine, each containing different fruit mixes – melon, berry, tropical, and so on. I got some hot white wine with strawberries floating in it, which staved off the chill a little, and got me sufficiently tiddly to make the wait in the rain a little more interesting.

Waiting next to me by the dominoes was the gentleman I referred to in my previous post, who had fled East Berlin with his family as a child. After almost forty years living in West Germany and Australia, he had returned to Berlin after reunification and brought his Australian wife with him. It was quite special to spend the evening with someone for whom it personally meant so much.

Finally, things started to happen at the spectacularly lit but heavily barricaded Brandenburger Tor. Placido Domingo sang an aria. The Berlin State Orchestra played something stately. Bon Jovi played something awful (why didn’t they pick a German band?).

Big wigs from all the Allied countries – Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton and Dmitry Medvedev – joined Angela Merkel on the stage to make rousing speeches. My brain was doing somersaults as Sarkozy spoke in French and I tried to distinguish the German translation that was going out at the same time over the loudspeakers.

I have to say, I was surprised that Obama didn’t attend personally (although they screened his video address). I would have thought all this anniversary hoop-la would have been right up his alley. All that hopey, changey, inspiration-y stuff.

And finally, after a couple of false starts, the dominoes fell. Here is my video, my first ever Youtube contribution! Apologies, my filming skills leave a lot to be desired. Spielberg still refuses to return my calls.

Some really interesting news features came out around November 9th about what reunification has meant to different people (I’ve listed a selection of them below). Having grown up in a capitalist country far from Europe, I had always had seen Germany’s reunification portrayed as an unequivocally positive event. In reality there seems to be a broad spectrum of views within Germany on whether it was such a good thing – ranging from unbridled optimism, to extreme pessimism, to complete apathy.

I think in a lot of cases, what people hoped for in ‘89 was simply greater democratic freedoms for the people of the DDR – not necessarily the end of communism or the reunification of Germany. Whether the communist regime could have survived within a truly democratic framework is another can of worms I’m not going to open in this entry. I also think maybe people hoped that bringing in capitalism would be a silver bullet for all of society's ills. But no system is perfect, so when people saw that capitalism comes with its own set of problems, they got disillusioned. - My amateur theory. It's hard to get into someone's head when they've been inculcated with all the opposite theories to what you've grown up with.

History is written by the victors, as the pomp and ceremony of the official celebrations show. But it certainly looks like it will be a while before the ghosts of divided Germany are completely gone.

• Berlin Wall: voices of the revolution – fascinating interviews by the Guardian with Angela Merkel, Margot Honecker, Egon Krenz, Klaus Wowereit and more
• Homesick for a Dictatorship: Majority of East Germans Feel Life Better Under Communism – Der Spiegel article, East German perspectives on reunification
• The Myth of Deutschland Über Alles – Foreign Policy article, a West German perspective on reunification
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Negligible Anniversary – NowPublic story, a West German perspective on reunification
• The Berlin Wall Through Time – a very cool NYT feature overlaying pictures of the wall with pictures of the exact same locations today
• Transcripts of Angela Merkel’s and Joachim Gauch’s speeches on Bösebrücke – German only – crude English translations here and here

DDR-101

Omg, SO behind on the blog posts. I would like to convey my profuse apologies to my millions of diehard fans who haven’t been able to sleep at night on account of the suspense.

Ok, more realistically, I apologise to my mum and grandma. Sorry, guys! If you didn’t read this, I’d be talking to myself.

So back about 80 years ago when I last updated this blog, I was talking about my visit to Berlin. I mentioned that I timed my visit to coincide with the 20th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was definitely a very special time to be in the city. There were exhibitions and events everywhere, the Brandenburg Gate was aglow with decorative spotlights, and there was a buzz about the place that was palpable. I was also lucky enough to meet some German folks who lived in the divided Germany and get their take on things, which I’ll try to weave in here.

To start off: a small history lesson for those who, like me, were watching Sesame Street when all this Wall stuff went down. Gather round, children.

It all started at the end of World War Two. When the Allied forces finally declared victory in Europe, they decided that, after two bloody world wars, it was too dangerous to let Germany be a united, self-governed country anymore – look who they elected when we let that happen after WWI, they thought. So Germany was split into four regions, each administered by one of the major Allied countries – America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Berlin was a more complicated matter. It was situated in the heart of Soviet-controlled Germany, and yet its importance as the capital city of Germany and nerve centre of the Nazis meant all the Allies wanted their share. So Berlin was also split up, into three, and later four zones. So in 1945, Germany looked something like this (that little multicoloured speck in the sea of red is Berlin):


(Thanks Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map-Germany-1945.svg)

According to the official agreements drawn up in 1945, the three Western Allies were guaranteed full air access to West Berlin, and there was an informal agreement that they could use road and rail access routes as well.

But it was only a matter of time before tension began brewing between the capitalist Western Allies and the Soviet Union. And as a tiny, vulnerable outpost of Western ideology in the increasingly repressive and paranoid East German territory, the Soviets began using access to West Berlin as a bargaining chip in their wranglings with the western Allies. The Soviet leader Khrushchev privately referred to West Berlin as “the testicles of the West”. When he wanted to apply political pressure, all he had to do was squeeze.

Eventually, relations broke down completely. After the fiasco of the Berlin Blockade, West and East Germany declared themselves as separate countries – the FDR and the GDR (or DDR in Deutsch). But as the East German economy became increasingly dysfunctional, and Western media broadcasts showed East Germans the post-war prosperity and democratic freedoms that Wessis were enjoying, people started emigrating en masse to the West. In response, the DDR government closed off the entire border with West Germany – except through Berlin. After all, you can’t just run a wall through the middle of a city that’s been functioning as a single organism for 800 years… right?

Well, you can, apparently. Despite propaganda from the communist SED party referring to the emigrés as victims of capitalist Kopfjagd (head-hunting) – implying that they had been bribed or kidnapped west as opposed to leaving voluntary – the DDR was still bleeding people through the loophole of Berlin. And it was losing just the wrong kind of people – doctors, teachers, engineers – the young, educated and ambitious. So, in 1961, the government decided to plug the leak.

Under cover of darkness on an otherwise quiet summer night, thousands of East German army personnel sealed off the entire 150km border around West Berlin. Berliners woke up to find that their brothers, sisters, children, parents, friends, sweethearts, colleagues – who yesterday may have lived a block away – were suddenly on the other side of an impenetrable barbed wire barrier watched over by an armed military guard.

Some situations created by the wall were truly bizarre. On one street called Bernauer Strasse, the apartment blocks on one side of the street were in East Berlin, while the street itself and the buildings opposite were in West Berlin. Residents of those buildings started trying to jump out the windows onto the waiting landing pads set up in the street by West Berliners. One guy was grabbed by the ankle by a DDR soldier on his way out the window, starting a human tug-of-war that eventually was won by the rescuers, who had gravity on their side. Eventually, only proven SED loyalists were allowed to live anywhere near the border on the eastern side.

Eventually, the barbed wire fence became a wall, and the wall became a metres-thick reinforced concrete barrier, to prevent cars from driving through it. The DDR installed sand traps, barbed wire, searchlights, and hundreds of watchtowers manned by soldiers carrying AK-47s. They were ordered to shoot anyone attempting to escape.

The bleeding had been stanched. East Germans were now safe from the bribery and kidnapping schemes of the West. During the 38 years of the wall’s existence, only around 5000 people successfully escaped to West Berlin, compared with the two million who had fled in the 50’s alone. But as a dude way more eloquent than me put it:

Beneath the facade of self-congratulation… the SED state was as insecure and paranoid as ever. It was not enough that the GDR’s citizens were quiescent. They had to love the party and everything it did.
- Frederick Taylor in The Berlin Wall (awesome, awesome book)

The infamous East German security service, the Stasi, had its beady eye on everyone. There was one Stasi employee or informant for every 66 citizens of the DDR. It could be your sister, your colleague, your best friend. They kept thick dossiers on every citizen. A colleague of mine told me a story about his father-in-law who grew up in East Germany. He needed to make an overseas visit for work, so he had to go to a government office to apply for his visa. At his interview, he sat in front of a desk with a row of files about three metres long, all containing information about him. He was only 24 years old. CREEPY.

If you voiced dissent openly, or were unfortunate enough to trust a poker-faced informant with your unpalatable opinions, the Stasi was known to follow a person down the street in a non-descript van, bundle them up off the footpath and cart them off to a gulag, often never to be seen again. Some of the interrogation camps were set up on former Nazi concentration camp sites. How Animal Farm can you get??!!

In Berlin, I talked to a man whose family had fled through the Berlin escape hatch when he was a child in 1960. If they’d left it another year, they would have been trapped behind the wall. The most poignant thing he told me was that his mum and dad couldn’t even tell their own parents that they were leaving forever. They could be informants; and if they weren’t, the Stasi could come for them if they suspected they had known about the escape and not squealed. So they told them they were going to West Berlin for the evening for a birthday party, and never came back. By the time this man returned to Berlin after reunification, his grandparents had long passed away.

Of course, life wasn’t all bad in the DDR. If you weren’t on the government’s radar, you could have a pretty good life. You might not have had the latest and greatest “stuff” (there was a 12-year waiting list to get a car, for example), but you had job security, everyone earned about the same, and social services like child care were completely free. East Germans talk about the great sense of community that was fostered by the government-sponsored camps and clubs. Relationships with neighbours and friends become stronger when things aren’t always on hand at the grocery store and you need to ask around. And things were cheap. When we were in the DDR Museum, An East German guy approached us, protesting that from his memory, the Soviet-branded liquor bottle we were looking at was actually waayyy cheaper than it said on the label.

Still, people generally lived in fear of their own government. Many felt compelled to join the SED so their children wouldn’t be disadvantaged, or to deflect the penetrating gaze of the Stasi.

Over the years, a divided Germany became an accepted fact for people on both sides. My friend Guido, who grew up in West Germany and was a teenager when the wall came down, told me how his family would sometimes just drive out to the countryside to look at the border fence. As a child, he didn’t even know what was on the other side, or if there was even anything on the other side. In his mind, the wall was the end of the world.

A few times, his family went on weekend trips to visit West Berlin. Specially-designated road and rail routes still allowed FDR access to the western sectors. Guido described the road as a “highway with no exits”. You could see some quaint East German towns and villages as you drove along, but of course there was no question of stopping along the way. Once you were on the road, your safe passage was at the pleasure of the DDR soldiers on duty. Each time Guido’s family made this trip, he was instructed not to freak out if a soldier stopped them and left the children waiting in the car for three hours while interrogating the parents. It never actually happened, but it was a common enough occurrence that his parents felt the need to warn him about it.

So when the Soviet Union started to crumble under financial and political pressure in the late 80’s, and the wall came tumbling down, it was a truly monumental event in so many ways. On a personal level, it meant the achievement of long-awaited political and economic freedoms, and reunions with friends and family. On a national level, it meant the reunification of a people that had been artificially divided for almost half a century. And on a geopolitical level, it signified the end of a Cold War that had, at times, come to the brink of going nuclear.

I found this footage on Youtube of that fateful night – November 9th, 1989. It sent shivers up my spine. Do watch the whole thing if you have the time (it’s in German with English subtitles). If you only have time for one, watch Part 2.

Part 1 – first borders crossings at Bornholmer Brücke

Part 2 – confrontation at the Brandenburg Gate – embedded below

Part 3 – Who should be held responsible for the deaths of the hundreds of escapees who were shot trying to cross the wall?

Despite the euphoria of the initial border crossings, the move to a western-capitalist system hasn’t lived up to all the fervent hopes of East Germans. After many years of stability and guaranteed employment, acclimatising to the rough-and-tumble of the global marketplace has been difficult, especially for the older generation. The sudden freedom to travel sparked yet another post-wall brain drain to the west. A lot of East Germans never learnt English at school (they had to learn Russian as their second language), and as a result many international companies continue to set up shop in the west instead of the east. Despite government programs and investment, twenty years later there’s still a huge socio-economic gap between the east and the west. Unemployment is twice as high and per capita GDP is a third lower.

And in the rush to standardise after reunification, many of the cultural touchpoints that East Germans grew up with have been lost – the familiar supermarket brands, the cartoon characters they loved as children, the puttering two-stroke engine Trabi cars. The dapper, top hat-wearing Ampelmännchen (traffic light guy) was only saved from EU standardisation by a grassroots protest movement.



As a result, there is a noticeable yearning for the past. At the flea markets in Berlin, you can buy DDR souvenirs such as army coats, uniform buttons and hats. I visited a store dedicated to selling Ampelmann-themed paraphernalia like t-shirts, keyrings and even Ampelmann-shaped pasta. You can even have East German-branded grocery items delivered to your doorstep from sites like Ossiladen. These things are popular not just among people who grew up in East Germany, but among West Germans too. Ossi is in.

This phenomenon of Ostalgie, as it’s called in German (portmanteau of Ost=East and Nostalgie=Nostalgia), has been harshly criticised in some quarters as a whitewashing of the brutality and oppression many people experienced at the hands of the SED. But it’s understandable, I think. I don’t think there are many East Germans who deny that the communist regime was ruthlessly undemocratic. It’s more that the feeling that your culture is being erased makes you cling to it all the more. And it’s natural to remember mostly the good things about the past. I know now that the Enid Blyton books I read as a child were subliminally xenophobic and pretty blatantly sexist, but that doesn’t stop me from remembering them fondly.

One of the interesting places I visited while I was in Berlin was the DDR Museum. It’s jammed with old East German artefacts like school textbooks, propaganda posters, youth brigade uniforms, even an entire communist-era apartment with original furniture and appliances – including the bathroom! While it mostly feels nostalgic, there are some sinister little touches – like the fact that in a section of the museum that displays old Stasi surveillance equipment, you can eavesdrop on the conversations of the visitors in the living room of the reconstructed apartment.

One of my favourite bits was flipping through an old children’s song book. A crazy proportion of the songs were about soldiers and protecting the state.



Here is my terribly rudimentary translation of verse 2 – dear readers, please feel free to correct my mistakes :)

The tank is so heavy
How thick are its walls
Yet it hunts in the country
So swiftly and easily

It’s kind of funny/creepy to imagine children singing this!

As you can tell by the length of this post, this whole topic fascinated me no end. Here are some interesting links if you want to learn more.

• Read Frederick Taylor’s book if you want to learn more about the events surrounding the Berlin Wall
• Ostalgie today – a 2009 poll of German attitudes towards reunification
• Growing up in East Germany - a firsthand account
• Twenty years of stimulus for East Germany - WSJ article
• Germany battles over the right to reminisce  - BBC News article
• Museum offers ‘Ostalgic’ look at East Germany - Der Spiegel article
• Berlin and the business of nostalgia - Salon.com article
• And of course, Wikipedia FTW:
• Allied Occupied Germany
• Potsdam Agreement
• West Berlin
• Berlin Blockade
• Berlin Wall
• East Germany
• Stasi

My next post will be about the 20th anniversary celebrations – stay tuned :)

If these walls could talk…

If you need proof that a city can survive plagues, aerial bombardments, financial collapse, Napoleonic wars, fascism, communism and physical division – and come out the other side even more beguiling as a result – all you need to do is go visit Berlin.

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!