Touring Berlin

Full disclosure, I didn’t expect to like Berlin as much as I did.  I really loved our visit and would love to return.

   

We like taking the train in Europe; we love looking at the countryside and seeing the towns we travel through.  The walk from the train station to our hotel took us through parts of Tiergarten Park. After checking in, we walked over to Victory Column which of course we climbed before heading for a drink and dinner at a café on a small lake.  It was a hopping place still celebrating Oktoberfest.  People in rowboats dotted the lake and kids were playing.  It was a nice setting.

Back at the hotel we played cards on the patio and noticed an odd to us animal beyond the hotel fence.  Turns out it was Zoo Berlin!  We promptly added a zoo trip to our Berlin list.

The next morning, we embarked on an all-day car tour of the city.  Our driver was a little older than us and grew up not far from Berlin.  He moved to West Berlin when he finished university and lived there when the wall fell.  We talked about our experience seeing it unfold on the news and he shared his stories of actually being there.

The first place he took us to was the beautiful grounds of the Sanssouci Palace in nearby Potsdam.  He pointed out several interesting points along the way.

We drove over the Bridge of Spies where Warsaw Pact spies were exchanged for Western spies.  My high school world history class was coming to life. We also drove by the house where the Potsdam Conference was held in 1945 which negotiated a demilitarized and disarmed Germany that led to four zones of Western occupation.

We also we saw our first piece of “the wall.”  It’s a small piece, nothing like we’d see later.  I was surprised how small it was, I expected it to be much taller.

 

The palace was built in 1745 for Frederick the Great as his summer palace.  The great fountain was built in 1748.  The terraced garden leading from the palace to the fountain was my favorite part.  He is buried in the terrace vineyard.  Our driver explained the potatoes on his headstone: he is credited with bringing the potato to Germany.  I was surprised to learn this since potatoes are a German staple. I figured potatoes originated in Germany.

We drove past the Topography of Terror, an indoor/outdoor museum.  There we saw more sections of the wall.  Our driver told us the story of families escaping East Berlin in a hot air balloon.  It was actually two families of four.

 

Our next stop was East Side Gallery where the longest section of wall still stands. Many artists have painted different sections.  The most famous section is a painting from a picture of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker from 1979.  This was a social fraternal kiss common greeting in communist countries.  It was strange and awesome to be standing at “the wall” that we learned about.

 

We pulled down a regular looking street, our driver parked and told us we were in one of the Jewish areas of Berlin.  He told us of an artist that was painstakingly making these brass squares and placing them in the last known address of Jewish residents that were sent to the death camps.  We got out and walked the sidewalk while he looped around.  They were mostly in small groups which we knew right away that each was a family. We read about and learned about the awful slaughter of Jews, gypsies and disabled but it hit me hard to stand at their brass square, a grave marker of sorts.  We looked into this project back at the hotel.  It’s called The Stolpersteine Project that was started in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig.  There are more than 5,000 of these stones in Berlin alone.

We asked him lots of questions about life in Berlin when it was divided.  He was a young professional when we lived in West Berlin after University.  He said they could pass freely with proper papers between the gates.  He and his friends went to nightclubs in East Berlin mainly because the beer was cheaper.  He also added that you almost never got your first choice because the government’s powerful men took the good stuff.  He joked that if often took four or five tries until you got a beer in stock.

He talked about the architecture.  It was boring and boxy compared to the pretty German style.  He added that it was made with the cheapest materials and wasn’t built well.  He said development was big business when the wall came down.  People from the west bought homes in the east because the cost was much less.

 

Our last stop was the Brandenburg Gate.  It’s the famous gate operated by the Soviet Union post WW2 where President Reagan famously declared to Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in 1987.

 

We drove back to the hotel through the Tiergarten.  I asked him about the trees, they all seemed to be the same height.  I wondered if a big storm came through toppling them like what sometimes happens in hurricanes.  He said no, the winter of 1945 was particularly brutal and most of the trees were cut and burned for heat.  He also said that many of the animals in Zoo Berlin were killed in the bombings or were eaten for food so Berliners wouldn’t starve.

We had one more full day and decided to take the hotel bikes back to some of the places we’d seen with the driver.

 

We rode back through the Tiergarten and stopped at the Brandenburg Gate.

 

From there we went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  We started downstairs and walked through the living history of what happened to so many people.  There were many family pictures, wedding pictures and ordinary pictures of people with a side note of what happened to them.  We then walked among the 2,711 concrete stelae.  They are laid out on a wave like floor in varying heights that are meant to give a sense of uncertainty.  Some stelae had flowers which reminded me of a cemetery.  To call it “moving” doesn’t adequately describe it.

 

We made the obligatory stop at Checkpoint Charlie and watched a group of scammers try to get victims.  Thankfully they didn’t have much luck while we were there.

 

We toured the Jewish Museum Berlin and it was equally moving as the Memorial. We walked from floor-to-floor learning of the history of the Jewish people in the region.  I’m not sure why we didn’t take many pictures.  The Garden of Exile is outside between the old and new buildings.  It’s 49 concrete pilings with soil from Berlin and one from Jerusalem with Russian olive bushes growing at the top.  They represent the Jewish people having to flee the holocaust.

 

We stopped at Lustgarten because it was so pretty on our way back to the hotel. Bicycles are a popular way to get around in Berlin.  We saw several bikes with a children’s cart on the front.

 

After giving the bikes back at the hotel, we walked out of the rear courtyard right into Zoo Berlin. It was a cool afternoon with some rain, the animals were bounding about and the gorillas enjoyed the rain.

 

We finished our last day in Berlin with dinner back at the café in the Tiergarten and a raucous game of cards at the hotel bar.

I truly never expected to like Berlin, it was a stop to see Brandenburg Gate for me.  I ended up falling in love with it and can’t wait to go back.  I told Mark as we waited for our train to Amsterdam to depart that I could easily spend a week here.