Berlin
Our hostel in Berlin was next to a river near the center of the city and it was really cheap – only 11 euros a bed per night. We walked to Potsdamer Platz, a main square that was previously undeveloped because the Berlin wall ran through there but now it has lots of brand new skyscrapers, a mall, IMAX, and ice rinks. We got some brats, walked through the mall and across the river, through a park and got kind of lost so we went got on the metro and went to the hostel.
On Saturday we decided to take a free walking tour of Berlin. The free tour was advertised everywhere and lots of people showed up. The tour guides are young people living in Berlin who speak English (or Spanish – there was a Spanish tour too) as a first language. They split us up into two groups – our tour guide was a history grad student from Australia who has lived in Berlin for almost a decade. They attract lots of people and do really good tours so it seems like they make good money from tips alone. We started at the Brandenburg Gate, where lots of new hotels and embassies have gone up in the last 16 years because the land was previously undeveloped since it was the no-man’s land along the Berlin wall. The gate and the parliament building, the Bundestag or Reichstag, were really cool so we went back that night to see them again. We walked down a street nearby that has a line going down the side of the street. The line is two bricks wide and very subtle – it marks where the Berlin wall once stood. There is a 110 meter section of the Berlin Wall still standing, surrounded by a fence to protect it. We learned lots of little trivia from the tour and came away amazed by all the history that Berlin has, especially the incredible turmoil of the last century.
One amazing place we visited was a square that has the Berlin opera house, a church and some buildings of Humboldt University. In the middle of the square is a small square of thick glass placed in the cobblestone. Underneath this glass floor is a deep, well-light room full of empty bookshelves. It is the memorial to the famous Nazi book burning incident where thousands of books, mostly by Jewish authors, were burned in that square. Our guide explained how Humboldt University was one of the world’s best Universities in the 19th and early 20th centuries and that before 1933, one third of all Nobel Prize winners were German, and one third of those German Nobel prize winners were Jewish. Germany was at the forefront of the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and in the 19th century it was a leader in science, medicine and philosophy. And then they turn around and burn thousands of books. Knowing that history of Germany makes the book burning and attacks on intellectuals in the 1930s even more mind-blowing.
Hearing about the fall of the Berlin wall from our guide was also really captivating – he gave a really detailed account of how the East German Immigration Minister read the new visa guidelines one day that would allow East Berliners to travel outside of East Berlin. Everyone was in disbelief, most Berliners didn’t expect to see the reunification of Germany within their lifetimes; no one expected communism in Eastern Europe to fall so suddenly. It is hard to imagine such a physical and forced division like the Berlin wall, a wall that prevented East Berliners from visiting parts of their own city for decades. And now it’s just a narrow line of weathered bricks in the street.
We went to the Reichstag, the parliament building that night. There was a long line to get inside because of the tight security, and for some reason there was only one metal detector so it got really backed up. Once inside, you take an elevator up a few floors, and then walk up a ramp that winds around inside the huge glass dome. At the base of the dome, there is a small exhibit explaining the history of the Reichstag -- it was the parliamentary home for the Weimar Republic in the early 20th century, then was damaged by arson in the early 1930s and reopened after WWII. The dome was added in the 1990s and the national parliament was permanently moved back into the Reichstag in 1999 when the German capital was returned to Berlin after reunification. There is a glass ceiling that lets you see into the parliament room and a huge cylinder of mirrors above it. Its weird looking because the new addition is all glass steel and the rest of the building is still the original stone and marble. At the top, there is a 360 degree view of the entire city.
On Sunday we decided to do a tour of Sachsenhousen, a concentration camp 35 km north of Berlin. It was the first concentration camp and the camp that served as a model for the others. The tour was through the same company as the free Berlin walking tour that we did, but this one cost 10 euros. Most of the original buildings in the camp are no longer around; there is a wall with the silhouettes of some of the barracks that once housed tens of thousands of prisoners. Some of the buildings have been rebuilt to show what life was like in the camp and the place was filled with memorials and large blank gravestones where bones and ashes were found buried in the ground. The main SS training facility was there, and the camp was used to practice and perfect the tools and techniques for torture, executions, and control for the other concentration camps built later on. The prisoners were communists and socialists, Poles, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies and POWs. They were used for manual labor to make bricks and cut lumber to build and expand the camp, and to make shoes, weapons and equipment for the German army.
The tour guide told us lots of little stories about life in the camp, the horrible things that the SS guards would do to the prisoners, how the prisoners would try to escape or commit suicide, and what went on there that no one in the small town nearby ever knew about. Some of the sobering sights we saw were the displays showing prisoner uniforms, piles of human hair and dentures, the cramped and dirty washrooms in the prison barracks, the execution trench where firing squads killed thousands of prisoners, the gas room and crematorium (now just the crumbling building foundation), and the infirmary’s autopsy tables. Sadly, the Soviet government secretly re-opened the camp and used it after WWII for years to hold Nazi war criminals and political prisoners.
But in the 1960s it was closed for good and the Soviet government built memorials and a small museum there to honor the “victims of fascism.” The Soviet built museum is still there, along with a new museum built by Germany in the 1990s. So the Soviet memorials and museum that are still there were really interesting to see them because they only honor the communists victims of the camp, and glorify the valiant struggles of the communist prisoners. The little Soviet museum quietly ignores all the victims of the camp who were imprisoned for reasons other than being communist supporters. The truth is sort of fudged and the place reeks of propaganda; the prisoners (and the Soviet troops liberating them) are all portrayed in murals and statues as strong, loyal communists. The drawings of the prisoners don’t show the reality of Sachsenhousen – the prisoners aren’t frail and malnourished (like they are in actual photos shown in the newer museum) because the USSR wanted people to see the prisoners as strong and healthy communists. Anyways, the communist propaganda was interesting to see. And its ironic that the Russians fought hard to defeat fascism, only to then become a state just as authoritarian as the Nazis, that ruled in a similar way, through censorship, propaganda and sticking political prisoners in labor camps or killing them. The history of the camp as a Soviet prison for political prisoners is also ignored by the Soviet built museum, but is well documented in the newer one.
That night we went to the Europa Center nearby, which is a big mall, but most of the stores inside were closed because it was a Sunday night. We saw the Kaiser-Wilhelm church, which is a famous symbol in Berlin. It’s a huge old church that was badly damaged in WWII but was not repaired in order to show people the effects of war. Half of the dome is missing, as are huge chunks of the pillars on the side of the church. The enormous circular windows that once had stained glass are now empty gaps. We looked for a grocery store, but they were all closed. We went to the Sony Center near the Potsdamer Platz, where most of the stores were also closed. The huge theater there had an IMAX movie in German and a bunch of other movies in English with German subtitles. There was nothing we wanted to see so went back to our neighborhood to a famous jazz club. There was no live jazz music so we went to the hostel. Another slow Sunday.
On Saturday we decided to take a free walking tour of Berlin. The free tour was advertised everywhere and lots of people showed up. The tour guides are young people living in Berlin who speak English (or Spanish – there was a Spanish tour too) as a first language. They split us up into two groups – our tour guide was a history grad student from Australia who has lived in Berlin for almost a decade. They attract lots of people and do really good tours so it seems like they make good money from tips alone. We started at the Brandenburg Gate, where lots of new hotels and embassies have gone up in the last 16 years because the land was previously undeveloped since it was the no-man’s land along the Berlin wall. The gate and the parliament building, the Bundestag or Reichstag, were really cool so we went back that night to see them again. We walked down a street nearby that has a line going down the side of the street. The line is two bricks wide and very subtle – it marks where the Berlin wall once stood. There is a 110 meter section of the Berlin Wall still standing, surrounded by a fence to protect it. We learned lots of little trivia from the tour and came away amazed by all the history that Berlin has, especially the incredible turmoil of the last century.
One amazing place we visited was a square that has the Berlin opera house, a church and some buildings of Humboldt University. In the middle of the square is a small square of thick glass placed in the cobblestone. Underneath this glass floor is a deep, well-light room full of empty bookshelves. It is the memorial to the famous Nazi book burning incident where thousands of books, mostly by Jewish authors, were burned in that square. Our guide explained how Humboldt University was one of the world’s best Universities in the 19th and early 20th centuries and that before 1933, one third of all Nobel Prize winners were German, and one third of those German Nobel prize winners were Jewish. Germany was at the forefront of the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and in the 19th century it was a leader in science, medicine and philosophy. And then they turn around and burn thousands of books. Knowing that history of Germany makes the book burning and attacks on intellectuals in the 1930s even more mind-blowing.
Hearing about the fall of the Berlin wall from our guide was also really captivating – he gave a really detailed account of how the East German Immigration Minister read the new visa guidelines one day that would allow East Berliners to travel outside of East Berlin. Everyone was in disbelief, most Berliners didn’t expect to see the reunification of Germany within their lifetimes; no one expected communism in Eastern Europe to fall so suddenly. It is hard to imagine such a physical and forced division like the Berlin wall, a wall that prevented East Berliners from visiting parts of their own city for decades. And now it’s just a narrow line of weathered bricks in the street.
We went to the Reichstag, the parliament building that night. There was a long line to get inside because of the tight security, and for some reason there was only one metal detector so it got really backed up. Once inside, you take an elevator up a few floors, and then walk up a ramp that winds around inside the huge glass dome. At the base of the dome, there is a small exhibit explaining the history of the Reichstag -- it was the parliamentary home for the Weimar Republic in the early 20th century, then was damaged by arson in the early 1930s and reopened after WWII. The dome was added in the 1990s and the national parliament was permanently moved back into the Reichstag in 1999 when the German capital was returned to Berlin after reunification. There is a glass ceiling that lets you see into the parliament room and a huge cylinder of mirrors above it. Its weird looking because the new addition is all glass steel and the rest of the building is still the original stone and marble. At the top, there is a 360 degree view of the entire city.
On Sunday we decided to do a tour of Sachsenhousen, a concentration camp 35 km north of Berlin. It was the first concentration camp and the camp that served as a model for the others. The tour was through the same company as the free Berlin walking tour that we did, but this one cost 10 euros. Most of the original buildings in the camp are no longer around; there is a wall with the silhouettes of some of the barracks that once housed tens of thousands of prisoners. Some of the buildings have been rebuilt to show what life was like in the camp and the place was filled with memorials and large blank gravestones where bones and ashes were found buried in the ground. The main SS training facility was there, and the camp was used to practice and perfect the tools and techniques for torture, executions, and control for the other concentration camps built later on. The prisoners were communists and socialists, Poles, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies and POWs. They were used for manual labor to make bricks and cut lumber to build and expand the camp, and to make shoes, weapons and equipment for the German army.
The tour guide told us lots of little stories about life in the camp, the horrible things that the SS guards would do to the prisoners, how the prisoners would try to escape or commit suicide, and what went on there that no one in the small town nearby ever knew about. Some of the sobering sights we saw were the displays showing prisoner uniforms, piles of human hair and dentures, the cramped and dirty washrooms in the prison barracks, the execution trench where firing squads killed thousands of prisoners, the gas room and crematorium (now just the crumbling building foundation), and the infirmary’s autopsy tables. Sadly, the Soviet government secretly re-opened the camp and used it after WWII for years to hold Nazi war criminals and political prisoners.
But in the 1960s it was closed for good and the Soviet government built memorials and a small museum there to honor the “victims of fascism.” The Soviet built museum is still there, along with a new museum built by Germany in the 1990s. So the Soviet memorials and museum that are still there were really interesting to see them because they only honor the communists victims of the camp, and glorify the valiant struggles of the communist prisoners. The little Soviet museum quietly ignores all the victims of the camp who were imprisoned for reasons other than being communist supporters. The truth is sort of fudged and the place reeks of propaganda; the prisoners (and the Soviet troops liberating them) are all portrayed in murals and statues as strong, loyal communists. The drawings of the prisoners don’t show the reality of Sachsenhousen – the prisoners aren’t frail and malnourished (like they are in actual photos shown in the newer museum) because the USSR wanted people to see the prisoners as strong and healthy communists. Anyways, the communist propaganda was interesting to see. And its ironic that the Russians fought hard to defeat fascism, only to then become a state just as authoritarian as the Nazis, that ruled in a similar way, through censorship, propaganda and sticking political prisoners in labor camps or killing them. The history of the camp as a Soviet prison for political prisoners is also ignored by the Soviet built museum, but is well documented in the newer one.
That night we went to the Europa Center nearby, which is a big mall, but most of the stores inside were closed because it was a Sunday night. We saw the Kaiser-Wilhelm church, which is a famous symbol in Berlin. It’s a huge old church that was badly damaged in WWII but was not repaired in order to show people the effects of war. Half of the dome is missing, as are huge chunks of the pillars on the side of the church. The enormous circular windows that once had stained glass are now empty gaps. We looked for a grocery store, but they were all closed. We went to the Sony Center near the Potsdamer Platz, where most of the stores were also closed. The huge theater there had an IMAX movie in German and a bunch of other movies in English with German subtitles. There was nothing we wanted to see so went back to our neighborhood to a famous jazz club. There was no live jazz music so we went to the hostel. Another slow Sunday.
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10:18 AM
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