Truth be told, a lot of time last weekend was spent on the train. It is about a 8-9 hour train ride to Berlin from Luxembourg, so I had a lot of time to catch up on reading for class. Anyways, we got into Berlin around 10 at night and met up with some friends who were able to catch an earlier train. We had gotten an eight person hostel room all to ourselves, and it's always so much nicer to know every person in the room you're sleeping in. Needless to say, we were pretty tired after a long day of traveling, so we went to bed with the intention of getting up bright and early the next morning for a FREE walking tour at 9 am.
These free tours happen in a lot of cities. You just tip as much as you want at the end, which is super nice for us poor traveling college students. The tour met outside Starbucks, which was a great incentive for getting up so early. On an unrelated note, Germany is SUCH A GREAT COUNTRY. Where you can buy Starbucks. So, Starbucks in hand, we met our Irish tour guide, Barry. He had moved to Berlin to be a tour guide and he was absolutely hilarious. We started out a the Brandenburg Gate and the US Embassy. The US Embassy was like… fortified. It was intense. The Gate was really impressive, and it had a statue on it that Napoleon stole awhile back. It's supposed to symbolize peace and was looking up into the sky, but now it's holding a scepter instead of an olive branch and its faced was changed so that its staring pretty pointed at the French embassy. Pretty funny. We saw the Reichstag (government building) from afar and then headed over to this area.
This large area of blocks was the Holocaust Memorial. It was a really profound place because it really makes you think, and the way you feel while you're inside it is hard to explain. The idea behind the memorial is that the Holocaust is talked about so much that it doesn't need more explanations; instead the memorial creates a confused or uneasy feeling when you walk through it because it overwhelms you. It was probably one of the best parts of the tour.
After that we saw the location of Hitler's bunker, which was entirely different because it is completely unmarked. The place where Hitler died is now covered with a parking lot and apartment buildings. So that was that.
Next we saw the old Nazi Air Force building, ironically one of the only buildings that never got bombed during the war. It was later converted into a Soviet building, complete with a socialist realist mural along an entire wall depicting the Communist ideal. In front of the building is a long photograph covered with glass of an actual protest during the period, and the people certainly did not look as happy as the mural. The guide said that this particular strike was one of the turning moments when people in East Germany started to realize that socialist ideals probably weren't going to work out. Even though it has all this kind of awful history, they still use the building because it would be too expensive to knock down (the Nazis built really solid, big block type buildings). It's the tax office (like the IRS) now! Still evil!
:: socialist idealism. look at those smiling faces! ::
Then we saw a remaining section of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall is a pretty crazy concept. The top was rounded so people couldn't grab on to climb over. On the other side of the wall where we looked at it was also the location of the Nazi headquarters apparently.
Next we passed by Checkpoint Charlie, which has a really interesting history as the check point between the Soviet and American sectors of Berlin, but wasn't all that cool to look at. At this point, I was FREEZING because it had been raining all day and I forgot socks, so we stopped for a break in a little restaurant. See how great this tour was? Breaks.
The second half of the tour wasn't as interesting as the first. We saw a few more memorials. My favorite was the memorial for the books that the Nazis burned, a glass plate on the ground that looks down into a white room of empty bookcases. The other one was a memorial for any and all victims of war and tyranny. We ended on museum island, where it would have been cool to see some museums if the lines hadn't been so long. Instead we went inside a restaurant to warm up for awhile. We tried to see the Reichstag later in the day, but the line there was sooo long too. That was one thing I really wanted to see because of the large glass dome thing on the inside that I've seen in some of my friend Eric's pictures from the summer. It would have been neat. Oh well.
:: friends in front of the Reichstag... that we didn't go inside ::
After that we headed off to the other side of the city to see a mural painted on part of the remains of the Berlin wall. It was a really awesome gallery and I would have loved to walk along the entire thing, but it was really long and it was STILL raining.
:: East Side Gallery on remains of the Berlin Wall ::
That night we went out to a few bars and I FINALLY got to go to a club after 3 weekends of planning to but never getting around to it. I really missed dancing, so that was fun. It was a good time… until we got home at 3:30 and had to wake up around 8 to catch a train back to Luxembourg.
Everyone should also know that on the way to the train station in the morning I saw ROCKSTAR being sold in two places and DIDN'T BUY ANY. Isn't that incredible? But I was glad just to see it anyways. Another reason Germany is a great country.
The title to this entry, a quote by Karl Scheffler, is actually significant to my experience in Berlin... One very interesting thing I've noticed about Germany and especially Berlin is their huge attachment to the past - because so many huge events in the last century used Berlin as the centerpiece - while not being held down by their past. Apparently the place is constantly changing. Berlin is one of the most modern-looking cities I've been to in Europe. They have their old buildings, but apparently they're not afraid about knocking them down, or modernizing them like with the Reichstag and the giant glass dome in the middle of it. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that they've had to build it up so many times. It's very different from in Rome where they have been building a new subway for years because they keep hitting ancient ruins and no building is higher than the dome of St. Peters. Part of me really likes that about Rome, but another part of me (probably the more American part) really appreciates Berlin's forward thinking. All in all, I really enjoyed Berlin and I really wish we could have stayed longer than one rainy day. Hopefully I can get back there some time in my life!
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