Berlin 3

On my final full day in Berlin I went to Schloss Charlottenburg (upcoming post) and then met Hannah and members of her program at the national television and radio station in Berlin. One of the students' host dads works at the station and he got the group in. The tour was in German so you will have to ask Hannah what was said.

The main takeaway point for me was that the station building was filled with transparent elements. The hallways were made of glass, the stairs were clear, the bridges between one side of the building to the other were glass or something very strong and also clear. Hannah and I had a running joke going about all the "transparency" in German architecture. It is quite the symbol. The government buildings are all filled with giant windows and clear walls, as is the Reichstag with its glass dome from which you can look down on the politicians as they legislate. As you might guess, the transparency is a physical symbol of the "transparency" that the Germans want to emphasize in all their public entities--particularly the TV and radio stations and the government. After what has happened in ther country, they are understandably skittish about secrecy and opaque walls. Although, if I remember correctly, Hitler was fairly open about what he was doing...so I am not sure how appropriate this emphasis on transparency is. Regardless, every time that the guide mentioned "transparency" or "openness" or commented on the symbolism of the open architecture, Hannah and I grinned.

I liked the bright colors in this television studio. It sure photographs well (wonder why?).

After the tour, Hannah and a few friends and I headed to the Reichstag, or the German Senate buildings. We were hoping to take a tour and walk around the transparent dome (grin) but the line was very long. So instead we just posed for pictures and headed for dinner.

Hannah and Cameron:

We chose sushi for dinner and were excited to see a two-for one deal at a restaurant. We all ordered two different rolls...and then the food arrived. Instead of getting two rolls, with one roll free, they had outsmarted us and given us two of each...so we got twice as much food and paid twice as much as we wanted. But it was still yummy and a fun dinner.

Then we headed to Checkpoint Charlie, sort of by accident. We meant to go in the other direction, but it was nice to see it at night without all the people.

Next it was off to the Sony Center in the middle of Berlin. It is a huge entertainment complex with restaurants, a semi-outdoor area with a fountain, a movie theater, shops, etc. The roof is really cool and partially open (grin.)

Here is the courtyard.
So much of Berlin is modern and still being built. I guess that is what happens when 90% of the city is smashed by bombs and then half of it is Communist. That tends to retard growth.

We were there for an international party recommended to the group by one of their professors. We met some interesting people--some Germans, a British woman working in Berlin, (whom I later saw in London getting off the Heathrow Express!) and various other people that we met very briefly. I applaud Hannah and her friends for jumping into Berlin and speaking German and being willing to meet and talk with all these different people, instead of staying in an American bubble.

After we had reached our threshold of awkward small talk (both in English and German) we headed to a jazz club. That jazz club was so packed and smoky that, after watching the chef make crepes for a little while, a group of us left to find a quieter, less crowded place. A small, partially underground bar served our purpose very well.

We sat around a tiny table with our exotic beer and talked. It was wonderful to speak English, especially to Americans! I didn't have to confine my words to basic ones, my sentence structures to simple ones, my speech speed to turtle, or my enunciation to non-regional crisp. It is interesting how living with people who are either learning English (the boys) or who speak fairly well but miss the more complex words/sentences has affected my speech. I am really careful, especially with the boys, to use words and phrases they know while mixing in new ones slowly and hopefully painlessly. So it is a pleasure to speak to native English speakers every once in a while!

In the morning I partook of my last included breakfast and headed to the train station. I was three hours early, due to worries about the journey to the station taking a long time plus a basic fear of missing my train. Fortunately, the Hauptbahnhof is new, shiny, and clean. It is essentially a train station inside an upscale mall. There are three floors of shops with the tracks in the middle, where the food court or carousel and Santa's Workshop usually are. So I wandered in and out of the shops to pass the time, pulling my little rolling bag behind me.

My extreme earliness gave me time to comparison shop for a Berlin shot glass. I began collecting shot glasses at an early age, about seven or eight. At that point I thought they were just small cups, and as I was obsessed with anything miniature, (maybe because I was so small) they were the perfect collectible. Tiny tea sets, mini jam jars, small bottles of ketchup...I loved it all, but especially shot glasses. Now, I wonder what the people at the cash register thought of the small eight-year-old girl purchasing shot glasses. Probably, "Her parents should be ashamed."

But I was innocent and just liked the pretty, city-specific little glasses. I have about twenty-five of them now. They are an excellent souvenir since I have never been to a place that didn't have shot glasses for sale. Last week, my mom told me that she was horrified by the number of shot glasses and the dust collecting in them as they sat on my shelves at home, so she boxed them up and put them away. Not cool, Mom.

The train: Train travel is not as romantic as it once was. (But is any travel as romantic as it once was?) I was rather hoping for roomy seats, a jolly witch pushing a food cart loaded with chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, a sparkling interior, clean windows, and a cheerful Club Car. Instead I got stained, small seats, no food cart, (magical or otherwise), and a general dinginess with gross bathrooms and a cheerless Club Car with surly attendants. Where is the charming Club Car from White Christmas, with the white tablecloths and sparkling wooden bar and malts and club sandwiches? (I like to say "club car" really fast and precisely, emphasizing the hard C, as the train ticket man with the peculiar voice says to Wallace and Davis in White Christmas after learning they don't have tickets for a sleeper compartment: "You can sit up all night in the ClubCar.")

So the train wasn't lovely. But it got me back to Prague by way of Dresden and Decin. The train actually curved its way along the same riverbank where I had taken pictures of locomotives in September when I was in Decin with the family. And now I was a passenger on those very tracks...

Auf wiedersehen, Berlin!

Berlin 2

First, I would like to thank (and link to!) my wonderful friend Julie's wonderful blog, At Home With Myself. She is the Julie who has often appeared in my blog posts, and without whom my time in the Czech Republic would have been rather grey. Here is a picture a nice stranger took of us today in Prague. Thanks for sending it to me, Julie!

Her blog, like Julie, is awesome, lovely, witty, and profound so you should take a gander. She gave me an award that was first given to her, the Lemonade Stand Award. I am very excited and touched to be given this award, many thanks!

We just enjoyed a four hour brunch at Cafe Cafe, followed by a leisurely stroll through Prague and across the Charles Bridge. As I am very busy procrastinating submitting my graduate school applications (last night I actually sat down in front of the glass porthole of the washing machine and watched my t-shirts and towels swirl around and around in the suds...for fifteen minutes) this morning/afternoon with Julie was especially welcome! Plus, besides her dazzling conversation and overwhelming kindness, people are nicer to me when she is there! Waiters and shop people, I mean. She speaks to them in Czech and suddenly they don't treat me like an annoying, stupid American anymore. Today we even got free cake!

And now for another method of procrastination--blogging! Here is the other post on Berlin that I promised.

On the way to Museum Island (an actual island, though criss-crossed with bridges,) that houses several museums in Berlin, I passed this monument to victims of war. Inside was a rather forlorn statue of a woman bending in grief beside the body of her husband or son or brother or father. Sort of a Pietà. Too sad. I liked the angels on the outside of the building, the way that they are carved in the round and emerge from the entablature.

Nearby is this huge church. Apparently King Leopold couldn't decide what architectural style he wanted, so he just threw everything up there.

Notice the sphere of the television tower between the dome in the middle and the baby dome on the right. You can barely see it through the fog. It wasn't a very sunny or warm day.

Across the street from the church is a large empty lot where a palace used to stand. I believe it was built by the East Berliners (we are in East Berlin now) or perhaps it was just used by the East Berlin government? Anyway, they tore it down. But now they are going to rebuild it. They only tore it down a few years ago, so the whole thing seems rather silly. To the left of the bus you can see a billboard with what the lot will eventually look like.
One of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Peters, writes a great series of funny mystery thrillers about a female Egyptologist in the early 20th century. (Peters has a PhD in Egyptology so she puts a lot of cool historical and archaeological information into the plots.) She also writes a series about a Minnesotan woman with a PhD in medieval art who works at the National Museum in Munich. In the latest novel, this woman goes to Berlin to the Alte Museum to talk to a colleague and march in protest on the steps of the museum. I had just finished this novel on the train to Berlin, so I had to go see the museum. A little odd, perhaps, to go to the museum primarily to see where a fictional character went...but it was awesome. Here is the museum.

And those columns are where Vicky and her rotund German boss Schmidt and her dashing reformed(?) jewel thief boyfriend marched with their sign painted on a bedsheet, and where they confronted the crooked Jan Perlmutter. Love it.

Next stop was the Pergamon Museum. I took some Greek Art and Archaeology classes at Duke and I have always had sort of a fascination for archaeology and greek art so I had to stop by this museum. It houses monumental ancient art and is awesome. The museum takes its name from the Pergamon Altar which is its showpiece. It was built in the 2nd century BCE, so only 2,200 years ago. Only.

Taken from what is now Turkey, the altar is a massive staircase surrounded by almost life-size friezes and huge columns with an altar on the top. They let people take pictures (hurray!) so here are some images.

The staircase--see how big it is? The altar is through the doors at the top.

One side.
A closer look at the frieze. It depicts the giants (with fishtails so they look like mermaids, ecxuse me, mer-MEN) battling the Olympian gods. Look at that drapery flow!

Some scale. The altar was a huge box, basically, with the frieze going around all four sides. They have only reconstructed the front part, so the frieze against this wall would have been on the back of the altar when it was complete. I thought this portion of the frieze was funny. How do they know that this chunk of marble went there and not three inches higher? Though I know that some very educated person with a hundred degrees probably devoted her life to positioning these fragments using all her expertise and knowledge, it still amuses me. The other holdings of the museum include this huge ancient Market Gate from Miletus (now Turkey.) This is only 1,900 years old. Thanks for the big picture, Wikipedia.

The room was specially built to house it.

It was amazing to see these monumental works of ancient architecture reconstructed instead of just pieces of a frieze or statues. Now, it would also be pretty amazing to seem them in situ...there is a lot of controversy about where these pieces should be. They were excavated by Germans which is why they are in Berlin, and they were dug up (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) before there were strict laws about what you could and could not remove, so most of these things were "exported" "legally." But.

Shouldn't they be back where they were originally built? But some of those places don't have the resources to conserve them. And it would be mean to remove them from the museums that depend on them to stay alive. But it is sort of mean for Germany to keep them when Turkey and Greece and Egypt have asked for them back. But.

If they weren't removed then there may not have been anything left of them today...

But.

Enough of that. At least until I talk about the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.

The Pergamon Museum also has the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, which was constructed in 575 BCE. It was built as a road through the city for the ceremonial processions to use. Beautiful glazed bricks make up the gate. It is gigantic and so vibrant. Here is one tower.

The gate.

They have lots of pieces of the gate and could basically build a museum just for it. Instead they have only reconstructed the smaller gate (the big gate won't fit in the museum) and some pieces of the glazed walls.

I went to the Pergamon Museum first because after six pm on Thursday nights the other museums are free, but not the Pergamon. I planned to visit the Alte Museum after six to take advantage of that free admission. Well, like Cinderella at the strike of midnight, I was at the door of the Alte Museum right at six. (That comparison is actually not very apt--there was no fairy godmother involved and no magical ball gown or shape-shifting mice. Unfortunately.)

I walked right in and asked for my free ticket. But.

The Alte Museum, like the Pergamon, does not participate in the open-late-and-free-Thursday- night-thing. I was so disappointed and flustered that I walked right back out again. There wasn't much I wanted to see in that museum anyway. Vicky and Schmidt had gone back to Jan Perlmutter's office in the museum, but I didn't think the guards would let me follow my fictional friends that far. So instead I got a picture in front of the museum and then headed to my hotel.

Here is the museum without the obstruction of me. I don't know why they light it with green. It makes it look like a basilisk lives there.

Here is the church at night.

A bit blurry, but you get the idea.

Stay tuned for more Berlin!

Berlin

Before I actually get to Berlin...here are some recent pics of the baby. Collective "awww," please.

Now that you have been lured in by cuteness...to Berlin!

I headed back to Germany about a week after spending time in Munich. I got some unexpected days off (kids went to their grandparents' house) and hopped on a train to Berlin. It was about four hours from Prague.

An awesome girl from Winston and Duke is studying abroad in Berlin with the Duke program, and she was fabulous to me when I was in the city! As soon as I arrived...well, not as soon as...I was so overwhelmed by the gorgeous, super-clean, busy, and very German Hauptbanhof (main train station) that I had to get a soft pretzel and sit on a bench for several minutes to calm myself before I could even attempt to find a map and figure out how to get to my hotel.

Eventually I found the hotel. (Fairly easy, I am getting good at metros!...even though Germany is a little more confusing because they have the S-bahn (above ground trains) and the U-bahn so there are lots of lines and some come every few minutes and some every twenty and it can get crazy.) Prague only has three lines, the yellow, red, and green:

but there are at least twenty in Berlin. It can be tricky just to read the map and follow the correct U-bahn line with your eyes since all the different colors and stops blend together in overlapping insanity.

Even so, I am rather fond of metros/undergrounds/subways/tubes. Since I tend to get very lost very quickly and lack even the most basic sense of direction, the simplicity of metros appeals to me. Once you find your line, you can go in only two directions. If you choose the wrong one, then you just get off at the next stop and try again. Usually metro stations are well marked and pretty easy to figure out with end stations and stops and transfer points. You can't start in one direction, take a wrong turn, and then wind up in some weird alley without having any idea of how to get out, as I seem to so often do when driving/walking. Of course, you can get out at the wrong stop or something, but that is very easily rectified. Just get on another train.

But back to my original point from a while ago.

I met Hannah (my Winston-Salem/Duke friend) and she took me to a fun restaurant with a bunch of the other people in her program. The restaurant is unique because it has one hundred beers or something, and most other places only have three or four on tap. Needless to say, though I will still say it, we had fun sampling the various beers. I was very impressed with Hannah's buddies, just as people, and also in their brave enthusiasm for exploring the city and getting as much out of their study abroad experience as they can. They also seemed to speak German very well. Or at least it sounded good to my untrained ears. (I know usually one only says "untrained ear" but most of us have two ears, right?)

After dinner I got to do something I never even dreamed of doing...swing dancing in Berlin. One of Hannah's friends is really into swing dancing and has gotten involved with various clubs and groups in the city. She took everyone with her to a swing dancing club where we clumsily tried to follow the experts. It was fun! Crazy and surreal, but fun.

The next morning I enjoyed a delightful breakfast (I love included breakfasts!) before heading for a New Europe tour. I believe I have gone on and on about these tours so I shan't bore you with more info on them. Instead, I shall try and share some of the cool stuff I got to see and learn.

The tour met in front of the Brandenburger Tor, or the Brandenburg Gate, which I am sure you have seen on the news recently...

Usually the meeting point is a Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts (of which there were many in Berlin!). Here are all of the people waiting for the free tours offered in English, Spanish, and German.

One of the people on my tour looked as though he was wearing a Union soldier's cap from the Civil War. I had to get a picture so I pretended to take one of the side of the gate, but there is the Yankee at the bottom. I am really not sure what to make of it.Here is the top of the gate. The statues were stolen by Napoleon and then returned. That greedy little man.Directly to the left of the gate is the American Embassy. According to my tour guide, the embassy wanted to put the usual heavy duty barriers in front of the building, which would have meant walls and gates and guards in front of the Brandenburger Tor. (Ironically, sort of, the Berlin Wall passed right by the gate, too.) But Berlin said no, so instead the embassy built a false front onto the building. What you see in the picture below (the cream building on the left with the flag above the tour) is a fake facade. The real embassy doesn't start for another twenty feet behind the walls. Cool. Sad we have to have so much security. But still cool.Also cool is that there is a Kennedy Museum next to the Starbucks so right on the plaza by the Brandenburger Tor. Berliners seem to like Americans, which made me happy, and they seem to especially like the Kennedys.

An exhibit about President Obama is opening soon, hence his picture in the window.

One of the first stops on the tour was the Holocaust Memorial, or officially the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." It opened in 2005. The memorial covers a huge expanse of ground a block over from the American Embassy and the Brandenburger Tor. It is 4.7 acres, to be more specific, and there are 2,711 of the grey concrete slabs.

There is nothing around or on the memorial to say what it is supposed to mean or, indeed, to even say what it is memorializing. It is interesting that the title specifically references "murdered Jews" but not the other people that were killed in the Holocaust. The slabs can represent gravestones, or trains leading to concentration camps, or an ordered, right angle world lacking humanity, or a prison...etc.

You can walk amidst the blocks, which grow taller as the ground slopes down. It was eerie to walk deeper into the memorial until I couldn't see anything but the blocks. Then the ground rises again and you come out on the other side.

I mentioned in one of my posts on Munich about the different styles of remembering WWII and the Holocaust and the Nazis. In Munich they don't have a big monument like this, just small ones throughout the city. My tour guide defended this decision by comparing it to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial--she said she has seen people eating on the blocks and taking silly pictures on them and stuff, which is incredibly inappropriate. A huge, noticeable memorial can become such a part of normal life that it ceases to hold any meaning. I kept this in mind as I walked around the memorial in Berlin. I did see kids jumping from slab to slab, and people leaning on them and sitting on them. (There are signs posted about not sitting on the blocks, but they did not seem to be very effective.) It made me mad to see people acting so carelessly and disrespectfully at this very somber memorial. So I am not sure how best to remember. Although I am probably leaning towards a big memorial like Berlin's. It is out there, you can't avoid it. Even if some people are not affected by it, other people are. And in Munich it is possible to miss the memorials since they are so small, out of the way, and usually just in German.

And for happier thoughts...Sort of.

Very close to the memorial is a parking lot. And underneath that parking lot is Hitler's Bunker, or the ruins of it, anyway. When the Russians took Berlin they destroyed the bunker. So it is still under the ground, but it is exploded and crushed and impossible to visit. Aboveground is where Hitler and Eva Braun's bodies were cremated. There are no markers since they didn't want this spot to become a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site or anything like that. Crazy. So it is just a dirt parking lot in the middle of Berlin.

Next was the Nazi Luftwaffe headquarters. The architecture is very Nazi, isn't it?

Oddly enough, this massive building was not bombed. Some think the Luftwaffe had an agreement with the RAF--sort of an you-don't-bomb-our-office-and-we-won't-bomb-yours type of thing. Another theory is that the building is so huge that it served as a very useful landmark for Allied bombers flying over the city and trying to bomb specific targets.

After the war it became the East German government headquarters, and now it is a tax bureau. So it has never been a popular building for Germans. I know it is awful, but I kept thinking about Colonel Klink from Luft-Stalag 13...Oh, "Hogan's Heroes!"

The fact that the building wasn't bombed is so extraordinary because, according to my guide, 90% of Berlin was destroyed in WWII. 90%.

The incredible destruction sustained by Berlin means that, except for 10% or so, it is a very modern, new city. There is no real "historic city center" (also a result of there being an East Berlin and a West Berlin--two cities, two centers.) So most of the city looks modern, and even some of the old looking parts are reconstructions.

Sometimes Berlin seemed sad and grey, especially when compared with bustling, adorable Munich. Scenes like this were a little depressing.

As Hannah so eloquently put it, "Berlin has two histories." World War II is one and Communism + the Wall is the other. The poor city was pummeled in the war and parts of it are still struggling to recover, a process severely hampered by Communism and the Cold War. In some ways Berlin felt like Prague, and I wonder if Communism is more damaging than war...I am basing this thought on Munich compared to Prague and Berlin. Munich seems to have sprung back but the other two cities are making a much slower recovery (and Prague wasn't even bombed! Well, one bomb fell by accident. But that was it.) Some parts of Berlin and Prague have a dreary feeling. Grey.

That ends the "first history" bit of the tour. Now for the second history of Berlin--the wall.

Not much actually remains of the wall. Most of it was destroyed. (Though you can buy pieces of the wall at almost every souvenir shop in the city. Pieces of the True Cross are on sale, too. Just kidding.) We passed by the second longest chunk on our way to Checkpoint Charlie. They have ironically put up a wall in front of the wall to keep people from stealing pieces.

I am still confused about the wall. I need to look at a map and figure out exactly where it ran. The whole thing is just so weird. It goes up literally overnight, and divides the city in two. So many people tried to escape and were killed. Hard for me to fathom. It is the type of thing that if you read it in a novel you would never believe it.

Here is Checkpoint Charlie.
The picture in the middle is of an American soldier facing the East. Across from him is an East German soldier staring back. The glass building on the left is the Checkpoint Charlie museum. Beyond the soldier's picture, underneath the barely visible flag, you can get pictures taken with men dressed as West/East Berlin guards in front of a fake guardhouse, for one euro. This is indicative of the whole area. Disney World does border crossing.

A sign is still there declaring "You are entering the American sector" and on the other side "You are leaving the American sector." Although I was disappointed in the carnival atmosphere at Checkpoint Charlie, (so named because it was the third and final checkpoint before crossing into East Berlin, and they named them by the Army phonetic alphabet thing--the others were Checkpoint Alpha and Bravo,) it was very cool to be there. My mom went through Checkpoint Charlie to get to East Berlin before the wall fell. It was neat to think that when she was there the city was still divided, but when her daughter visited the checkpoint was a photo-op instead of an active and deadly serious stand-off point between two armies.

We did see some lovely things instead of grim reminders of an ugly past. I believe this church is a reconstruction since it was bombed.

Next door was this building, an opera house, I think. Forgive me, but the terrible and interesting history of Berlin pushed the "This building is ____ and was built in____ and bombed in____" facts out of my brain.
I do remember this, though. The building straight ahead is a university. In the courtyard, about where I was standing when I took this picture, is where one of the huge bonfires of all the non-Nazi approved books took place. The universities and students actually led the movement to cleanse the nation of "un-German books." How awful. This university in Berlin was no exception, and burned thousands and thousands of books.

Underneath the courtyard is a memorial to the book burnings. It is an underground room of empty bookshelves to symbolize all the books that were destroyed.By the front gate of the university there was a table of books for sale. The table is always there, loaded with cheaply priced books, even when it rains or snows. The university is trying to atone for its part in the book burnings.

Grim, yet a lovely gesture.

Seeing all these places made me want to learn more about the city and World War II and Berlin after the war. The Berlin Air Lift is especially fascinating, and another thing that you would never believe if you read it in a thriller.

It seems that this post is a bit drearier than I intended. The next Berlin post will be more cheerful. I got most of the Nazi/Wall stuff out in this one.