Germany - Berlin

Hello all, Fraser here. Mo and I met up in Berlin on Saturday, June 12^th. At almost 5 weeks it had been a long time since we had seen or even talked to one another. Thank heaven for text and email. We stayed three nights at a lovely hotel in East Berlin called Circus. It was clean, modern in design, and the staff were extremely helpful and courteous. In the afternoon of our arrival we walked around East Berlin a bit to orient ourselves. We met up with a free walking tour at the Starbucks near Brandenburg Gate (yes, there are Starbucks everywhere here - and they are virtually identical to those at home). Our tour guide Alex was from Liverpool and was both extremely knowledgeable and very interesting. The first thing she showed us was a Deutsche Bank building right in front of the Brandenburg Gate that was designed by Frank Gehry (go Canada!). It is right next to the ritziest hotel in Berlin, the 5 star Adlon Hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his son out the window.

The Deutsche Bank building by Frank Gehry

The Brandenburg Gate

After walking through the Brandenburg Gate we walked by the seat of German government, the Reichstag. There is a beautiful glass dome above it but the queue was several hours long to get inside. It has only been used for the government again since 1999. A little further on we came to a building in East Berlin that is one of the few remaining pieces of architecture in the Nazi style. It was used by the Luftwaffe in the Second World War. You may remember it if you have seen the movie Valkyrie with Tom Cruise as it was featured quite prominently. It caused a bit of a furor (no pun intended) during filming as they installed all of the swastikas and Nazi insignia as they had been. It is now illegal to display the swastika in Germany. The building is now used by the Finance Ministry (for taxation) so it is still a hated building. It still shows bullet and shell damage from the war. In this location the Berlin Wall is literally across the street and if you walked along the street on one side before the wall fell you would have been shot.

The Luftwaffe Building:

We saw what was left of the Berlin Wall in a few places in the city. The wall went through about 4 phases of development starting as simply a wall and developing into an entire zone with two walls separated by a so-called death zone where the guards were given orders to shoot to kill. This death zone varied in width from the width of a street as it is here behind the Luftwaffe Building to areas where the “death strip” was over 50m wide. Note the rounded top which was placed in one of the later generations of the wall. The East German government found that the original barbed wire allowed people to claw their way over so the rounded top was placed to make it difficult to grasp. Here is a picture of Mo standing next to a remaining piece of the Wall.

Berlin has an incredible amount of gorgeous architecture. Mo and I toured the Berlin Dome, a beautiful Lutheran cathedral with a stunning interior. They regularly hold concerts there. The Dome is on the so-called Museum Island, a small island in the centre of the Spree river that is home to 5 internationally famous museums including the Pergamon - which houses an incredible collection of Mediteranean and middle eastern artifacts. Its two crowning glories are the Pergamon Altar (from the town of the same name) and the Ishtar Gate which stood at the entrance to Babylon. The word altar does not do it justice as it was actually an entire building

The Berlin Dome

Part of the Altar in the Pergamon

Berlin has memorials everywhere. You literally step across them in the street. Many of the houses and apartments have small brass plaques set into the sidewalk in front listing the names and particulars of the Jews who had lived there prior to being deported to the concentration camps. We also visited this Holocaust Memorial. It was very simple in design yet still quite moving. A series of granite blocks set out in a grid pattern reminiscent of grave markers all standing to different heights. Once you enter the memorial the ground is uneven, sloping this way and that. The center is quite depressed so that you cannot see out. The blocks muffle all of the city noise making it eerily quiet in the center. There are no inscriptions, nothing to break the seemingly endless series of blocks just a sense of the enormity of the tragedy.

Fraser in the Holocaust Memorial

Berlin, particularly East Berlin, is a curious mixture of grand old architecture, Soviet-era utilitarianism, blatant tourist pandering and brand new American-style development. This photo shows a faux Checkpoint Charlie where you can pay the “guards” to have your picture taken with them. Note the McDonalds right beside it. The real Checkpoint Charlie, or rather the location where it once was, is about 1 block away. It did not look like the recreation pictured (at least not since the 1950’s) but resembled a typical drive-through customs port not unlike any along the Canada-US border but with more guns, barbed wire and barricades.

The hotel had several Segways (battery-powered human transporters) so we spent part of Sunday and Monday cruising around town. We visited a cemetery (of course) as well as the Tiergarten, a large public garden reminiscent of New York’s Central Park.

Us on the Segways

From Berlin, we took the train to Dresden. Stay tuned.