The view from our room in Berlin. And the Foster Trophy
That’s right, Gang, you’re getting TWO posts today. We have some time tonight (for reasons I’ll get to) so I thought I’d be a benevolent blogger and give you an “end of week one” bonus.
I don’t know what to make of Berlin and it’s somewhat disconcerting. On the one hand Berlin is a major metropolitan city. The street our hotel is on has a number of great shops and restaurants and when you come in to the Huptbahnhof (main train station) you would think you are in New York, it’s so modern and gleaming. And there are cranes EVERYWHERE as the city tries to upgrade and improve just about everything, which is a hard sell to Berliners who are still trying to pay off the reconstruction and improvement projects after the wall fell in 1989 – all necessary just to bring the city up to a western standard of life.
But everywhere you look you are reminded not only of the Cold War, but of the horror of the Second World War. The Kaiser Wilhelm church still hasn’t been reconstructed from the bombing of the 40s. Scars still mark many of the buildings from fighting in the streets and inside buildings and you can’t go a few blocks in this part of the city “der Mitte” without finding a memorial to something. This is a city very aware of its history and yet still utterly oblivious to it at the same time.
Two photos to explain:
These are stumbling stones. There are thousands of them embedded into the sidewalks around Berlin. They commemorate the victims of WWII. These three mark the place of work of the Kroner family. Parents Arthur and Charlotte, who “escaped into death” after being “abased and disenfranchised” and their daughter Meta who was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. (That’s the word used, too – murdered)
Compare this, a small monument to three people who lost their lives due to persecution and terror, with this:
That’s a recreation of Checkpoint Charlie out up by the Museum of Checkpoint Charlie. It is staffed by people wearing uniforms of American servicemen of the times holding American flags. For €2 you can pose for a picture with them, (using your own camera) and they will smile or give a thumbs up. Also, for another €5 you can get one of those fake visa stamps for your official US government document.
And the angle is intentional. That’s a McDonalds on the street adjacent.
A few blocks later (and more stumbling stones, more capitalism, and a few places where parts of the wall are still standing) you come to the remarkable “Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe”
I won’t go into detail on the makeup of the monument other than to say it is large, it is dominating, and eerily disconcerting. Our excellent guide David (and he really was fantastic) told us that the architect who designed the monument refused to make a statement regarding its point. He wanted the viewer to come to their own conclusion as to what it represented and what it meant.
It is a good testament to a thing so heinous and so large that encompassing it defies explanation. How do you create something that will be a suitable physical representation of what went on?
When out all together with the tourists (most of whom seem oblivious to the history of the things they are photographing, jumping around on, and making gestures at) it creates a strange feeling that I can’t quite describe. Part Disneyfication of history, and part reverence. It doesn’t seem to fit, and I don’t know I’ll ever make sense of it.
That was yesterday. Today we went for some lighthearted and went to the DDR museum, a place that dealt little with the atrocities of the regime and instead tried to show what life was actually like in East Germany.
The Trabant, the only car available in the DDR – it had no gas gauge, no cooling system and was made of plastic soaked fabric. Not much better than fiberglass.
This is an interesting picture (not the statues). Nursery school children were taken to the bathroom as a class. All students were sat on a long “potty bench” and they had to sit and wait until the last student finished. This was meant to teach about putting the good of the collective above the individual at a young age.
The entire museum was interactive, lots of buttons and levers. The best exhibit was one on the Stasi, the German State Security Service. The exhibition itself was a kiosk with a headset and video monitor. The monitor was snowing surveillance photos from the sixties and seventies but there was a placard asking if you could figure out what the audio was from.
Later, in the exhibit showing an East German apartment there was a very small notice (very very small) saying on careful what you said as everything said in the exhibit could be heard elsewhere in the museum. The apartment was bugged as so many in the DDR were and it was a very nice touch to a very well done museum.
We cut the day short, taking the view that this trip is a marathon and not a sprint and after about 6 miles yesterday and all the walking in London and Hamburg we were hurting. So we went down to the spa here at the hotel for a swim and a Kneipp foot bath (alternating hot and cold). It wasn’t a spa the way we expect in the States, was mostly saunas and a small pool but oh my god the naked men! There I am sitting in my bathrobe and bathing suit with my feet in a hot pool and in walks some German gentleman; et viola there goes his towel and it’s naked man time.
This happened a lot. And I gotta say, we aren’t talking Chippendales here. But then what can I expect in a place where naked sunbathing in public parks on lunch breaks is a common summer pastime for city office workers?
Welcome to Europe, people.
The best thing about the spa was a very nice woman whose grasp of English was about as good as my grasp of German, so I got to practice my German and she practiced her English. I had a whole conversation with a woman in German, Gang, and it was awesome! Check me out!
Tomorrow it’s more terror and oppression. If our legs hold out we are headed to a former Stasi prison, the longest surviving section of the wall and some ghost stations along the U-Bahn.
Until then!
PS Secret Message for Gary and Tina:
EVERYBODY CLAP YOUR HANDS!
The view from our room in Berlin. And the Foster Trophy
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