Wandering Where We’ll Be

“Dem Deutschen Volke” is the inscription we see on the Reichstag.  It means “to the German People”.  The Reichstag is the German parliament building.  All the buildings around it were bombed flat during WW2 and it sustained heavy damage but it stands today intact with a glass dome top that we went into at night.  There were beautiful night views of the city.  A quirky side note; Hitlers sham government never used this building.  They met in an opera house during the time of the 3rd Reich (3rd empire).

A chariot drawn by 4 hourses and driven by an angel -all of it a statue- heralds the next sight we saw on the same night as the Reichstag.  It’s the Brandenberg Gate.  This edifice is on a road leading out of the city that leads to Brandenburg…thus the name.  The statue has been re-effixed to the gate after it was given back by France…since way back when, Napoleon took a liking to it and decided a better location for it…France…would be ideal for his conquering self.  Walking under the gate arches and looking up, we saw friezes of Hercules doing Herculean things in each arch.  Continuing down this street, called Unter Den Linden, we, of course, see many linden trees lining a center walkway down the middle of the street.  These trees are a big thing to the German people.  During Hitlers time, he got rid of the trees and replaced them with flag poles being graced by the Nazi swastika.  Popular uprising forced him to replant the trees where they were and lose the symbol waving poles.  A good choice since these trees are lit up with blue lights at night and really are a wonderful sight.

Museum choices on museum island greeted us the next morning.  We opted for the Pergamon Museum.  It is named after their highlight display.  About half of the Pergamon, an alter from the Acropolis, resides within the building.  Imagin the front of a big Greek building with dozens of pillars and about 30-40 steps leading into a small courtyard with friezes both on the front of the building, in the building and lining the room the building is in.  Statues are on the front of the building too.  It was big.  By the way, a frieze is a long, carved 3-D picture.  Its kind of like an old version of a comic strip only of important stuff.  In this case, it depicted Hercules fighting with the gods against the monstrous giants.  Another highlight in the museum was the Gate of Ishtar.  This is a rebuilt gate from Babylon.  Imagine bricks but with porcelain tile glazing on the front of them built into a huge arched gate and big square “turrets”.  It was awesome.  It was also the “smaller” of the 2 gates of Ishtar.  They couldn’t rebuild the larger one into the museum because it was too big.  The rest of the building had other castle walls, Moslem rugs, porcelain, paintings, Koran book art, temples, burial tombs, pillars, mosaics and literally tons of other statues.

The memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe came next…morning because it had just closed when we got there.  3000 blocky pillars on wavy ground in a close, grid-like pattern.  Most were very tall.  Near the edges of the display, they were shorter.  All were different heights and not necessarily squared on the top.  It was quiet and strange walking amongst them.  As if you are walking in your own world where you are the only one.  In an underground building, part of this memorial, are several rooms explaining what happened to people “specifically” during the Holocaust.  As an example, when people were sent to Chelmo (I think I spelled that right), their ultimate fate wasn’t a big poison gas chamber or starvation or being shot in a firing squad like many of the other camps; it was burial after being poisoned by exhaust fumes in the back of an enclosed van enroute to the mass burial ditch.  Later, many of these bodies were exhumed and all remains burned so no evidence of this atrocity would remain.  But why got rid of the evidence if you think you will be the winner of the war?  These exhumations happened in 1943 and about this time and later, Hitler focused more and more on the deaths of those considered undesirable.  It made me wonder if he knew he was going to lose the war in 1943 and began to just prolong it as long as possible to “deal with” as many undesireables as he could.  Scary!  The memorial also had examples of letters and postcards thrown from trains heading to death camps or sent from the death camps secretly in some way.  These people knew what was going to happen to them.  They discussed “rumors” and fear, trying not to believe what they knew was true…the end of the ride was the end.  In the last room of the exhibit, they had 1 individual name projected onto 4 walls.   A brief history, about 3 minutes, was given about them before the next name would appear and the history of that person.  It was explained that it would take over 6 years of reading 24 hours/7 days a week to go through all the names of those known to have died in the death camps or enroute .  Many are unknown.  Nothing remains of their name, possessions or people who knew them.  They are gone.

Well, after all that heavy material, we took a walk though Teirgarten Park.  It’s in the center of the city and huge.  It’s alot like central park in New York.  Small lakes, “English” gardens, statues, a field with some trees…I had to frolic through that…and many other sights greeted us there.  Then came the Victory Tower.  Over 200 steps led us to a small circular view area around a central pillar and just below Winged Victory, a golden angel with a staff and laurel.  this lookout gave us great views of the entire city from a central location.  It wasn’t originally in this location however.  It used to stand in a plaza in front of the Reichstag but Hitler had it moved to the more scenic central road right thought the middle of Tiergarten Park.  This was intended to give his victory parades a more grand and dramatic setting.  This Victory Tower movement must have been a colossal job!  It’s huge and much of it is great blocks of granite (at least 50 feet long and about 15 feet high and who knows how wide).  The costs to do the some thing today would be enormous.

The Jewish Museum came next.  The halls, walls, ceilings and floors were all “off-kilter”.  It was disorienting.  They had more stuff on the Holocaust which was again personal – giving details of certain individuals lives which ended in “sent to Chelmo (or another camp) 1944”.  Since we had been to the memorial, this camp name and what happened to the person there wasn’t a euphemised mystery anymore.  I knew the details.  There was alot to this museum but one other thing stood out.  There were many Jewish exiles that got away from the Nazis and were living uprooted in countries all around the world.  The museums off-kilter design was meant to give us this uncomfortable, forboding, odd feeling to mirror what the Jews were feeling when they left a country that had, before the 3rd Reich, accepted them into all levels of society and life in Germany was a comforable, nurturing home and then, after the Nazis came to power, their home turned into a racist, death machine that destroyed every normal thing they had ever known and forced them to flee to unknown, sometimes completely different places to live.  Shanghai, Argentina, USA, England and many other “strange” lands were destinations that were often an arduous chore to get to.

After all this history, HAPPY 11TH ANNIVERSARY TO US!  We went to the Philharmonie and listened to a chamber orchestra.  We had wine during intermission and then heard more music.  It sounded great.  We had a great time!

OK, so I’ve described a lot of what we saw in Berlin but not all.  The Berlin wall went down in 1989 but it’s not completely gone yet.  The east side gallery is a section of the wall nearly a mile long that still stands.  Moreover, artists from around the world come to paint murals and graffiti all over it.  Many of these paintings are beautiful and all seem to have a point about separation or integration to make.  These murals are routinely white-washed so new murals regularly appear.  The only reason this part of the wall still remains is because of a land ownership (this is now prime property) dispute.  The rest of the wall is gone.  In its place are many new buildings and many new buildings are in process.  The east Berlin skyline has many construction cranes roosting all about.  The area is being built up so fast with buildings, restaurants, tourist traps, etc., even Rick Steves 2007 guide book is almost hopelessly out of date.  As an example, he said the “Hauptbahnhoff (the main trains station) may be done in 2007 and it will be Europes biggest trainstation.  Many services may transfer from the Zoobahnhoff to Hauptbahnhoff at that time”.  NEWSFLASH, This is old news.  It’s been built and services all transferred since officially August 2006 (I think).  East Berlin was “up and coming” as a major shopping and restaurant place in the book.  Reality: it has already taken over.  West Berlin, while still commercially viable, was somewhat of a ghost town at night compared to east Berlins light and lively neighborhood; bustling with bar hoppers and night time scene photoflashers. 

East Berlin is nothing like the picture painted in my mind during the cold war as a “black and white”, “concrete cold”, “treeless”, “lifeless”, expanse of hollow, huge, Stalin stiff buildings where people whisper as they quickly cross the street before they are caught and arrested for something.

Berlin was a blast!

Write more later,

Dan

Tags: Berlin, Europe, Reichstag

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 4:53 am and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.