When I last left you, dear readers, my family was leaving Oxford to begin our travels through the continent with a foray to Berlin and then to larger Germany. I have little to report from the first day of our travels, since a freak storm swept through the UK that day and stranded our flight at London Luton for over four hours. (Good times.) After waiting for hours and then waiting for even longer on the plane, and with my proclivity toward hanger (for those who don't know, hungry people do not make good company) kicking in by the time we landed in the evening, we arrived at our hotel in central Berlin late that night. I was still hangry when I woke up, but a nice German breakfast and some coffee helped fix that, and then we were off to start our first day in Berlin with a walking tour of the heart of the city. True to form, my mom had called up our old buddy Rick Steves and his iPhone app, and we started the day by the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, or German Parliament building:
The Reichstag is notable for being a grand public parliament building that was later set on fire during the early days of the Nazi regime (many people think as a political maneuver for Hitler to blame the Communists for unrest in Germany), then heavily bombed but not destroyed during the Second World War. Today, it's a parliament building once again, with the German Chancellor's office close by, as well as a few memorials to German political leaders who resisted the Nazis, at the cost of their own lives, during those dark days in Berlin. The Reichstag attracts huge crowds of tourists, especially in the summer, due to its beautiful new glass dome, through which visitors can look down on the Parliament chamber, but we opted not to enter, admiring it from the outside instead.
The Brandenburg Gate, as well, is fraught with German political history. It began as the grandest of the gates to the old city of Berlin, was rebuilt in the eighteenth century as a triumphal arch, and then remained a symbol of Berlin during the Second World War, when it was heavily bombed and badly damaged. (The photos we saw of the rubble of Berlin in 1945, with the maimed Brandenburg Gate rising out of the destruction, were chilling.) It later became a spot well-known for its placement right next to the Berlin Wall (a la "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") and has since been restored after the reunification of Germany. Pariser Platz, the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate, is a bustling plaza bordered by various foreign embassies, which have been rebuilt in their original positions from before WWII, as well as some posh hotels and other shops and attractions. We took it all in (and snuck a peek over at the Tiergarten, Berlin's largest public park/garden, which we would visit later) before continuing onward with our trusty Rick Steves tour.
The next stop was Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a plot of land marked by rows and rows of coffin-sized concrete pillars. These pillars grow taller as one walks farther into the forest, so to speak, of cement, and soon I felt overwhelmed by the rows and shadows and feelings of receding light. The memorial doesn't make any overt statements, but it evokes images of labyrinths, or darkness, or grim stark nameless burials, or any number of things I can't put a name to. It is deeply somber and powerful, and I felt that way even without visiting the Holocaust museum close by. (I would have liked to, but my family has visited the excellent Holocaust museum in DC and I went to a similar exhibit in London earlier this summer -- and, anyway, if only we'd had more time.)
Whew, that was heavy. It was a feeling I would often have in Berlin -- that of feeling deeply troubled that such atrocities as the Nazi regime could have happened here, never mind the Cold War division of Germany, yet fascinated by the challenge of understanding the political currents that shaped those parts of history, and also cheered by the dynamic and buzzing new vibe of the city. There was SO much construction in Berlin, so many cranes and crews and new projects in development. The German penchant for efficiency was in action here, and I'd love to come back to see what the heart of the city looks like in a few years. After lunch we stopped by the spot where Hitler's bunker once stood, contemplated more of this history, and then walked down Unter den Linden (one of Berlin's main streets, which once led to a Prussian palace that has since been destroyed, but that now stretches out from the Brandenburg Gate to the square of Alexanderplatz) and saw various buildings from different periods, many of them reconstructed since the war, along this route. It was horribly hot and humid by the time we crossed over to Museum Island (no time to visit the museums, alas! though I saw a few of them during my last time in Berlin, in December 2010, and remember them being excellent). We took in the bombastic Berlin Cathedral, then kept walking past some more museums and memorials to Marx and Engels and so forth, and culminated our walking tour in Alexanderplatz, where we amused ourselves for a few minutes with the dynamic shops and markets and some fun public games in the square.
At this point it was still mid-afternoon, and my family wanted to see the Berlin wall, so I remembered my earlier visit in 2010 and led us all out to the East Side Gallery, a segment of the wall that still stands but that has become transformed into an art-filled memorial to peace, and freedom of expression, and diversity, and a unified Germany, and other such things. Even spots along the wall that used to be formidable monuments, like a guard's surveillance tower, have now turned into tourist attractions.
And all of this has happened in twenty-five years since the wall fell. Incredible. I can't say how much I marveled at what it took, to recreate Germany out of that kind of history. (Another instance of my constant desire to learn about places when I visit them: hey, now let's go read dozens of books about that!) We walked along the wall for the entire mile-long East Side Gallery, saw No Man's Land in the middle, and admired the many pieces of art that now mark this once-grim and formidable obstacle.
The weather had turned, and it was pouring rain for a while, so we wrapped up our first day in Berlin with a return to the Alexanderplatz area and a nice German dinner of currywurst and other meat-themed dishes. Now, I don't eat as much meat as I used to, but I was a regular little carnivore when I was growing up, especially where sausage was concerned (call it my German roots surfacing in me), and I loved trying those kinds of dishes in Berlin. As well as the beer, which there was also plenty of. (Because we had to pay for bottled water in Germany and some other places, pretty early on in our travels we decided to stop doing that and just drink beer instead. Yes, for every meal except breakfast.)
I wish we'd had three days in Berlin, or preferably more, but we only had two before we moved on to explore other parts of Germany, so we got up on day #2 and went straight to Checkpoint Charlie, the former crossing between East and West Germany at the American sector. This has now become a tourist attraction, too, with the old "U.S. Army Checkpoint" hut still standing in the middle of the road (by McDonald's and other symbols of capitalistic glory) and photo ops abounding. We took our own photos, visited a disorganized and information-laden and quirky museum close by, meditated even more on the import of the Cold War and what it must have been like to try to sneak across the border into freedom in West Berlin, and then moved on to explore the Tiergarten.
On the way to the Tiergarten, we passed more segments of the wall that have been left standing, plus some ruins of Nazi and Gestapo headquarters, as well as the buzzing Potsdamer Platz with its huge Sony Center. Once we got to the tranquil and lush Tiergarten, Berlin's main park, I was glad to have a few minutes to walk through the trees and unwind. It was gorgeously green and uncrowded, with joggers and small ponds and streams.
In the middle of the Tiergarten stands the Victory Column, gold-gilded and tall against the sky, but still ridded by bullet holes and shrapnel chunks at its base. Still, straight out from the Brandenburg Gate, it was something to behold.
Also, "Tiergarten" literally means "the garden of beasts," since the park started as a monarch's private hunting ground, and statues that commemorate that history later dotted the entire park. Many of them were destroyed in the war, but several still survive and grace one segment of the park with their depictions of hunting savagery (even if still visibly damaged by bomb shrapnel from long ago). A friend of mine recommended that I read Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, about the early Nazi regime in Berlin, before visiting the city, so seeing the actual beasts in the actual garden in the city of Berlin, after learning a bit about its history, was a treat. By the way, I also recommend the book...
Last up for the day before we walked out of the Tiergarten past the Berlin Zoo, and then explored some nearby shopping districts before grabbing dinner? Why, of course, we had to visit a biergarten in the Tiergarten, complete with German pretzels. Now, I'm not usually a huge fan of beer, since I prefer wine and cocktails and other types of drinks, but German beer is just so good, and sitting by the water watching the ducks made for a perfect place to enjoy it. We'd taken a whirlwind tour of Berlin, seen many things and missed many others that I wish we could have visited if we'd had more time, but at the end of Wednesday it was off to bed, then on to the next adventure. Add Berlin to the list of world's most dynamic and fascinating cities, though, and call it a place I very much hope to visit again.
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