On the recommendation of a friend, I decided to take a full day tour with Brewer's Berlin Tours, a small English-speaking company here. It was 12 Euro for almost 9 hours, and it was some of the best money I've spent on the trip so far.
I knew about Berlin and its history in general, but I found I had so so much more to learn. The sheer number of significant buildings, places, people, and art in the city was mind-boggling. While the buildings are sometimes beautiful, they are always imposing and full of mystique; the city is more rambling and sprawling than the other capitals I have visited, with many levels and layers present everywhere. Above all, I get the impression that it is a city pulled in two different directions even today.
The tour was led by Robin Williams. No, seriously. He's an American, raised in Seattle, who has lived in Berlin for 6 years and is currently expecting a child. He's in his late twenties, and his extensive knowledge of the city and his sardonic wit added an enormous amount to the tour. Because of a slow (cold) day, there were only 5 of us with him today, which made for a much more intimate and private feel the whole day. We started at 10:30 and didn't stop till after 7:00, well after dark.
My mind is brimming over with all the sights and information right now, but I'll try to sketch out some of the main things we saw.
We started near the center of the city, checking out an artists' complex that was originally a squatter's palace of sorts, then all around the parliament buildings before getting on the tram to go out to the Soviet War Memorial.
I've rarely seen something so impressively laid out. Hopefully the pictures speak for themselves somewhat, but hearing about all the history and politics surrounding it was even cooler--the only reason it's kept in such good condition is that when the country reunified, one of the conditions was that all the Soviet monuments had to be kept in good condition. The white stones along the sides tell the story of WWII through frescoes and Stalin's words.
And oh yeah, it started snowing. It was snowing off and on in short flurries all day, but when Robin started discussing the Nazi's defeat in Russia at the hands of a brutal winter, big flakes started coming down all around us.
The Soviet flags are made out of red marble from Hitler's chancellor's palace, dismantled after the war.
Then it was on to a Berlin Wall watchtower and explanations of the death zone in between the wall and the watchtower.
We also saw the longest section of the wall still standing in Berlin. The longest section in existence is in Las Vegas, actually.
At one point, we passed over the bridge (it's the most picturesque bridge in Berlin) used in the movie Run Lola Run. If you've seen the movie, Robin insisted on trying to recreate it with me.
We also came to a statue of Berthold Brecht, the famous German playwright, and his theatre. This one's for Craig Kinzer, those of you who know him.
Then there was the huge TV tower, the touristic circus of Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate lit up at night, the Reichstag which I want to revisit in daylight, and endless places and squares with buildings that had almost all been rebuilt after bombing in WWII.
This doesn't look like it belongs on earth.
In the middle of one of the squares, there was an amazing memorial of the 1933 Nazi book burning held in the middle of the city.
Although there didn't seem to be much point of taking pictures, as it's just a residential street now, I stood over Hitler's bunker, now filled-in. Robin pointed out the exact place where Hitler and Eva Braun's bodies were dumped and then burned in a shelled out hole. Goosebumps like crazy.
Another moving part of the tour was the memorial to Jews killed in the holocaust. At first it was going to be a memorial for everyone, and then groups started taking exception, in depressing ways--for instance, the Gypsies didn't want to be memorialized with the gays.
The memorial is apparently criticized for being meaningless modern art, but I thought it was genius. My pictures don't really show it, but the stone pillars are placed in ground that dips in drastically towards the center, so that in the middle of the area you become surrounded by gray monoliths, with each turn yielding the same solid, unswerving paths. It's like moving into a city devoid of people. And of course, from the outside it looks like thousands of tombs.
Soon after the memorial, we went into an enormous chocolate shop. I had three of the small ones, which were filled with vodka, rum, and red wine.
I have seldom felt like my head was swimming as it was when I arrived back at my hostel and collapsed on the bed. The city is so full of history and sadness and hope and art and violence and and and....
It's been almost twenty years since the wall came down, and yet it's extremely obvious that not all is normal in the city. Robin said that unemployment in all the eastern German states is close to 20 percent, mainly because of the dramatic shift after the wall came down and the USSR collapsed. The richer West bought up all kinds of land and businesses, and then often laid off most of the workers. This unbalance is apparently a problem throughout a lot of Eastern Europe as well.
I wish that I could somehow better communicate all the things going through my head right now, and, probably annoyingly for you, so much of it boils down to me thinking that you just have to see it for yourselves. I'm beginning to think that it will be a long time before I can properly distill what I've seen on this trip.
Probably leaving a lot out...
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