Rob’s European Vacation 2009

So today started out good, I had ordered breakfast for the two days I was here (apparently Germans don’t like to give out free breakfasts) and came down to see what they had.  It was a nice spread, some yogurt, fresh fruits (had a kiwi and banana), some bread and nutella, some assorted cereals and the most important thing…bacon and eggs!!  YUMMY…I’ve been missing a traditional American breakfast ever since I left…

After breakfast I grabbed my camera bag and headed out on the town.  I decided to go check out the remains of the Berlin wall and Checkpoint Charlie.  Checkpoint Charlie was cool only because they had a really good informational exhibit about the changes in buildings in the area and the structure of the wall prior to the actual Wall being there.  Not only that but they detailed the confortations between the two sides including one day in which American and Soviet tanks squared off on each other from across Friedstrasse.  Very cool stuff.  The actual Checkpoint Charlie was a huge tourist trap but neat nonetheless.  It’s still crazy to imagine the area, that’s now filled with shops and has BMW’s and Mercedes flying down the street used to be the divide of what was the Iron Curtain.  It was almost surreal.  After CC, I walked down towards Potsdamer Platz and saw a remaining chunk of the wall.  The piece of wall was actually only 1 of three sections still standing.  Even more interesting was that I learned behind the wall was where the old Nazi Gestapo building once stood and there still exits some prisoner cells that are below ground.  The Germans have decided that the best thing to do is never to build on that site and to leave it fenced up, a scar onto the landscape to represent the scar on the history of the country.

After going through Potsdamer Platz I made my way back to the Starbucks behind Bradenburg gate for my 3rd Reich tour that I was going to go on.  This is one thing that kind of killed me about the tour meetings.  One meeting place was at the Dunkin Donuts near Banhoff Zoo and the other was at the Starbucks on Under Der Linden which used to be on the East Germany side.  It’s almost comical how Americanism has crept into their society…

So I signed up and joined the tour (p.s. don’t tell them that I’m no longer a student, I got a 2 euro discount!) and we departed and had an amazing tour.  I love history for one but I especially love WW2 history.  To hear and see where these major sites were and rarely still are was AWESOME.  It really put a picture to all the newsreels I had seen and all the photos I’ve studies over the years.  I loved it..we got to walk through the Tiergarten, a huge part in Berlin that used to be the hunting grounds for Friedrich, the founder of the Prussian Holy Roman Empire, and saw some cool memorials, the most fascinating one being the Russian Soldier memorial.  So some quick history, the Allies allowed the Russians to take Berlin and as they did, pretty much every building was leveled to the ground and the populace remaining was starting and had no utilities to speak of… in roll the Soviets who in the three months before the Americans arrived decided not to build homes, or buildings or anything, instead the first thing they do is build a HUGE memorial to the fallen Soviet soldiers who took Berlin.  Not only did they build that first before anything else but they built it…in the American Zone!  I guess that was their way to say hey, we’re better than you…did I mention I think Stalin was nuts?  So anyways that was really interesting.  Besides that we toured the new monument to one of the forgotten groups the Nazis mass murdered, the homosexuals of Germany.  The memorial was kind of cool, a huge cement block with a window on one side and inside the window was  a film scene of two men kissing.  Simple, to the point and a powerful statement.  After that we crossed the street and saw the Memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.  It’s a interesting memorial…and one of much debate.  You really have to see it to understand though..

After that we walked over to the only remaining Third Reich building, the Luftwaffe headquarters.   The building used to be where Hermann Goering worked!  So our tour guide said that the rumor on why this was the only building left standing was because all of central Berlin was so destroyed they needed a landmark to point to them where to bomb around, so they left one building standing and that was the Luftwaffe building.  very cool and very very Nazi like.  The architecture was quite unique.

After that we came to a parking lot next to some apartments.  Under the parking lot though was the final home to Adolf Hitler.  The Fuhrer bunkers were under there, with the walls still intact, however they demolished the roof and filled in the bunkers because the Germans feel like that is one part of history that doesn’t need to be remembered or potentially celebrated.  After the bunker site we went to the old Jewish section of Berlin and heard about the deportation of Jews in the city and the resistance.  We saw several brass squares in front of numerous buildings all designating that a Jew had lived in that building that was arrested and killed by the Nazi regime.  It really puts a name to the atrocities of the Nazis…very moving…

We ended the tour in a little park area that used to a Jewish cultural center that the Nazis took over and made a deportation center.  Nothing exists but a monument but again, it shows the impact on the land and the people.

I got an overwhelming feeling that German are actively trying to remember their troubled past yet trying to move past it as much as possible.  It’s a very interesting position that they are in, that they themselves are struggling with.  I almost feel sorry for the German people, but then I remember their victims.  It is good to remember, least we forget our past and make the same mistakes again…

Tags: Berlin, Europe, Travel

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