Monday, 20 April 2009

• Berlin, Germany: 10 - 13 April 2009

  Buzzy, vibrant, gritty, grown up – Berlin is all of these and much more besides. A polarised, dissected, ravaged city, Berlin has seen her fair share of recent 20^th century history and still she rises, still she stands.

  I have wanted to visit Berlin for a long while, and managed to score a deal with Expedia for a three night stay in a 4 star hotel and flights for under £400 over Easter. I land in the evening, and catch the bus into the city, getting in just in time for a glorious sunset behind the glass domed Reichstag and Germany’s defining monument – the Brandenburg Tor.

  
  My hotel, and the ghostly facade of Anhalter Bahnhof, the only surviving part of the railway

  My hotel, the Möevenpick, is situated by an old, bombed out façade of the Anhalter Bahnof, long ago Berlin’s foremost train station. The Gateway to the South, the railway terminus brought in guests and visitors from Prague, Vienna, Rome, Naples and Athens.

  It’s a beautiful weekend while I am there, and after a sleep in I head out to join Sandeman’s free walking tour. This is a brilliant little outfit. It started off as guides offering free walking tours because they wanted everyone to see the city, not just the tourists who could pay. You tip your guide whatever amount you can afford at the end. They also have special tours which you pay for like Berlin by bike, the Third Reich tours and Red Berlin, which focuses on the communist highlights of the city. Sandeman does free walking tours in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Paris, Madrid, Jerusalem, and is branching out to Prague, Brussels, and Tel Aviv in the near future.

   
  The juxtaposition of Stalin's TV tower and the domes of Berlin's Cathedral

  Founded in the 13^th century, on the river Spree, the city had opened its doors to the Lutheran movement, Jews, Huguenots, the bubonic plague, and the Thirty Years War by the 15^th century. However Berlin did not gain prominence until the Prussian Empire made the city its capital. Between kings, French invasions and the Industrial Revolution, Berlin gained grand royal palaces, Humboldt University, a State Opera House and a cathedral.

  World War I left the city starving. The defunct Prussian Empire collapsed, giving way to the heady, decadent days of the Weimar Republic which birthed, among other things, a sophisticated and innovative culture in Berlin. The Roaring Twenties had their heyday in this city. Dada, jazz, swing and hedonism ruled.

  
  The Reichstag, seat of Germany's parliament

  After the Great Depression, Berlin was the battleground for a number of political parties, amongst which was the Nazi party. Hitler seized the reins on the spurious claim that the German nation was under threat, and emergency powers were granted to him by Germany’s president. He was now Fuhrer. Anti-Jewish actions started immediately, culminating in the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht. This would be the precursor to Hitler’s Final Solution, but the world didn’t know it at the time. Stores, businesses and houses were smashed and ransacked, and all firearms belonging to Jews were confiscated. Synagogues burned and about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested to taken to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen. The names of these concentration camps are an awful, familiar roll call.

  The Jews who could, fled. The pogroms of Kristallnacht sparked a massive emigration of Jewish Germans, all the way to South America and China. Their story is captured in the tortured, disorienting Jewish Museum, a metaphor in itself. Three axes make up the museum – The Axis of Exile, the Axis of the Holocaust and the Axis of Continuity. There are no windows, instead black gashes in a steel clad façade provide strips of sunlight. The architecture is stunning, and more importantly, thought provoking.

  
  Inside the Holocaust Memorial; Pariser Platz with the Brandenburg Gate

  As the Third Reich gained momentum, World War II Was soon began in earnest. Hitler’s Final Solution – Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen – started an inexorable, awful extermination of the Jews. The 6 million victims of the Holocaust are commemorated in the Holocaust Memorial. Approximately 2,700 blocks of grey, somber stone stand, lean and tower over an undulating plot of land, near the Brandenburg Gate. The sculpture is interactive; sound is different in the midst of the stones, the light is shadowed and people appear and disappear from view as you navigate through it.

  
  The Jewish Museum - outside and inside

  At the turning of the tide, war came to Berlin. Allied and Soviet forces were racing to enter Berlin first. The Russians came first, inflicting war crimes on Berlin’s civilians. Hitler shot himself, and his mistress Eva Braun in a bunker underneath his Chancellery. This is now a parking lot, and his body burned to bits and scattered to the four winds, so that neo-Nazis have no shrine to worship at.

  
  Graffiti at the East Side Gallery, the Berlin Wall 

  Germany was divided into four zones – The Allieds each took a third, and the USSR the Eastern half. Berlin, firmly in East Germany, was further divided into four sectors. The Cold War began and Berlin found itself at the forefront of it. As East and West relations deteriorated, the Soviets began the Berlin Blockage, blocking all land access to West Berlin. I can just imagine Stalin sitting in Moscow chuckling to himself and thinking “I’ll have West Berlin on a platter in two weeks!” The city was surrounded by a sea of red, with thirty five days of food and forty five days of coal left.

  The Americans and English responded with the Berlin Airlift (France was occupied with her own flight shenanigans in IndoChina, enough said) – 4,000 tons of food a day, and sometimes sweets and candy for the children. These planes were nicknamed Raisin Bombers. A USAF pilot attached chocolate bars and other goodies to handkerchief parachutes to the children waiting below. When asked how they could recognise his aircraft, he said that he would wiggle his wings. At the peak of the Airlift more than 1,500 flights were made, 4,500 tons of cargo were shifted a day and one plane reached West Berlin every thirty seconds.

  Humiliated, the Soviets lifted the blockade in May, 1949. The US Air Force delivered 1.7 million tonnes, and the British RAF 541, 937 tonnes. Together, 92 million miles were flown, roughly the distance the earth is to the sun. 71 American and English pilots died, mainly due to plane crashes.

  East Berliners staged a revolution, halted only with tanks sent from Moscow. The Soviet occupied East government started to build the Berlin Wall to stop the massive numbers of East Berliners fleeing into the West. The Wall went up after midnight on August 13, 1961. Citizens of both East and West Berlin were stunned and confused. Free travel was curtailed. You could pass through from East to West through strictly controlled checkpoints. The Death Strip, on the Eastern side of the wall was mined with explosives, patrolled by guards with dogs and control towers overlooked the sandy no-mans-land. Almost 5,000 people tried to escape through the Wall – their brave attempts via car hood, car boot, suitcase, scuba dives, stolen identities, forged passports and speaker boxes are documented at the Charlie Checkpoint Museum. Most died, shot by guards or had their home dug tunnels collapse on them.

  
  The replica of Checkpoint Charlie; bright lights and high rises at Potsdamer Platz

  The world reacted with horror. International pressure and internal revolts pushed the Eastern government to allow travel again. The Iron Curtain weakened in Hungary. A surprise political gaffe on live television precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989, border guards allowed crowds from East Berlin over into the West. Crowds gathered for a wild celebration at the Brandenburg Gate. Not much of the wall remains now – I took a walk to see the East Side Gallery, where bright, light hearted graffiti adorn a 1.3 km stretch of Wall.

  The story of Berlin is rich and varied, marked with wars and plagues, unbelievable hardship, incredible courage, and filled with inspiration. Now a centre for all that is hip and cool, the city throbs with techno music, the latest DJs, and avant-garde designers. There is a laidback but nevertheless cutting edge vibe to Berlin, an exciting thrill of possibility, like anything could happen.

  
  Lewis, my "free" tour guide getting fired up as he tells us the story of how the Berlin Wall came down; standing on the Wall in my black buckled shoes.

  After all that the city and her people have been through, all the fire and death and revolution and 28 years of a Wall that cut through buildings, main streets and over underground metro lines – Berlin is reunited and reborn. There are about 170 museums in Berlin and on my last day I head to the Pergamon and the Altes museum. The former houses three amazing treasures from antiquity – the Greek Pergamon Altar, the Roman Miletus gates and the Babylonian Ishtar gates. Amazing, incredible, wondrous – a must see. The Altes museum is currently the home to the Egyptian Museum, abiding place of the most beautiful ancient queen in the Nile – Nefertiti. 3,300 years old and still gorgeous.

  There is so much to see in Berlin, from the futuristic high rises of Potsdamer Platz, the brutal spike of Stalin’s TV tower, the grand Communist era ‘palaces’ of Karl-Marx-Allee, the circus of Checkpoint Charlie (a reproduction – the original was torn down not long after the Wall came down. The name comes from the phonetic alphabet; Alpha, Bravo, Charlie).

  
  In the Lustgartens

  In Berlin, there is history everywhere, even underneath your feet. Our guide pointed out the double row brick line that marks the Berlin Wall, and the infamous tripping stones, which commemorate the Jewish victims of the city. Each stone, or plaque, is set in the ground in front of the house where the man or woman lived, and details their name, date of exile, camp and date of death.

  Berlin is an extremely walkable city, and after we have been taken through Parisier Platz, Branbenburg Gate, past the Reichstag – Germany’s seat of parliament, Checkpoint Charlie, Gendermarkt with its two almost-identical churches, the plaza where over 2,000 books were burnt during the Nazi era, past evocative monuments to soldiers, victims, women and children… after all of that I find myself completely immersed in Berlin, and not a little admiring of the city’s resilience and spirit.

  
  Symbol of Berlin - the Brandenberg Tor at dusk.  

  Tips for visiting Berlin:

  • If you intend on using the public transport a lot, get a three day City Tour or Berlin Welcome Card. These give you small discounts at certain attractions like the Jewish Museum and Checkpoint Charlie Museum, as well as hassle-free access to all S and U bahns and buses.
  • A Museum Day card will save you a ton of money. These operate in sectors e.g. Museuminsel gives you access to all the museums on Museum Island. They are valid for a day and are a culture buffs’ dream ticket to the world class exhibits available in Berlin.
  • In the tourist places everyone speaks English, but a “guten tag” and “danke” are appreciated. Other words: “bitte” means please, and “die reichnung” means the bill please.
  • Expect service to be slow and in some places a little surly. It’s not personal, it’s just Berlin. Sit back and have another (excellent) beer and chill out.

  
  Chilling out on the grass in front of the Altes Museum

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