June 26 – Berlin, Germany. We are staying at the Hilton Hotel, Berlin. It's in what used to be Eastern Berlin behind the Berlin Wall. The hotel was built in the 1980s for select members of the Communist Party and those who were traveling here with 'hard' currency. In other words no East German Marks or Russian Rubles were welcome. Remnants of the class system still remain in the building. Since Hilton took it over all the mechanicals have been replaced with reliable Western gear but the elevators tell the story. One set of elevators serves floors 0-6, the other set, on the opposite side of the lobby serves 7 & 8. The party faithful on the upper floors didn't even want to share an elevator with the riffraff on the lower floors.
Now that Germany has been reunited for a while the Eastern section of Berlin has been transformed. When we were here in 2001 the difference in the two sections was still striking. For example Unter den Linden, the main drag in West Berlin was full of shops and cafes, the street was full of people both watching and being watched. On the Eastern side it was empty. No shops, no cafes and almost no people. I'm pretty sure it looked much like it had at the turn of the century, the last century that is. Since then the change is remarkable. The area near our hotel has upscale shopping centers as well as the usual restaurants and cafes.
Right across the street from the side of the hotel is the largest chocolate shop I've ever seen. I went in to get a couple of truffles and asked the lady where the dark chocolate truffles were. She led me to a case that must have had 50 varieties of them. How to choose, how to choose. Many of them included the word 'praline'. I knew it couldn't mean the same thing that it does in Texas. I discovered they don't even pronounce it the same way. In Texas it's pray'-lene, here it's pra-lean'-a. In Texas they're caramelized sugar with pecans in it, here it means a truffle with a soft center. I prefer the German version.
We are right next to a square that has three buildings, a performance hall in the center flanked by two 'churches, the French and German Churches. They are pretty buildings and they still function as churches but that's a fairly recent practice. While it was East Berlin, not so much.
Driving away from the gate we passed a fence that had an army of white crosses attached to it and in ranks behind those affixed to the fence. When I asked about them Nic said they were a memorial to those who died trying to escape the East over the wall.
Further down the street we passed a very tall column with a gilded Winged Victory atop it. The column is atop a round colonnade with a relief circling the interior cylinder and the colonnade sets on a large base of the same stone. I believe the structure memorializes the Prussian victory over Danes, Austrians and French at one time or another. One the main column there are four bands of golden objects. As we got closer I could see that the bottom three were gilded cannons, each ring made of smaller guns than the one below it. They were standing, breech toward the base like pickets in a fence. The top row consists of stacks of five cannon balls each, decreasing in size as they go toward the top. There's a sixth gilded item atop each stack but I couldn't tell what it is. Nic said that the cannons were actually used in battle by the losers before winding up on the column.
Let it be said that Berlin Philharmonic has the ugliest home of any orchestra I've ever seen. The oddly shaped, baby-poop brown building in no way indicates the quality of the music the orchestra produces. Maybe that's the point, I'm just not sure.
Berlin has a "Hollywood Walk of Stars" with a unique twist. The stars are smaller and not all in a row but arranged in a random collection of near rows. The really cool part is that for every star there's a curved 5-foot metal stand with a Polaroid camera shaped device built into it at the top. Inside there's a hologram of the person commemorated on the star it points at. If someone is properly positioned and you take a photo through the device they appear to be standing next to the star in question. Now that's cool! All the stars I saw were in memory of actors and actresses from the Golden Era of film, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and the like.
We are heading to the Berlin TV Tower, one of the tallest, free standing structures in the world. We're going to the observation deck on floor 104 and there's a restaurant and other things above that, not to mention the antenna masts and all at the top. What a view of Berlin we had from the tower. The weather cooperated in that were clouds to keep the bright sun from producing too much contrast for good photos. I forgot to mention that we were back to our string of good travel and touring weather days. It could have been a little brighter but all in all it was just about perfect.
What was one of the first things I saw, you ask? Well I'm glad you did because right here in the center of what used to be the People's Democratic Republic of Germany, as much an anti-Capitalist bunch as there ever was, is Barbie's Dream House Experience the actual definition of consumerism at its best or worst depending on your point of view. I'm not exactly sure what it is or what's inside but it's big and it's PINK and that's probably why I noticed it. In an odd quirk of fate it's set right in front of three large blocks of Communist Era apartments. Someone has done about all you can do for them by giving them a fresh coat of off white paint with each building sporting a different color stripe down the center so the scene is not as bad as it could have been.
There are lots of historic things to see, large churches, the Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column, the old and new city halls, the Tiergarten, Unter den Linden, parks, the new Parliament building and others.
In the shopping center across the street from the tower they has a couple of unusual stores. First was a Kaiser's McDonalds. I didn't get to go over to see what that was all about but right next store was a Mannermore Wehr Meister that listed its products as ranging from XXL-XXXXXXXXL. These would be some seriously large Germans.
Our next stop was at a section of the Berlin Wall that has been preserved. Artists were invited to decorate a panel and some of them were quite entertaining. Unfortunately in the three years since this was done idiots have defaced many of the works. The panel commemorating the kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker was still fun to see but there's graffiti all over it.
Not too far from there is the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. This stark, grey, construction is designed to isolate the individual who enters it, leaving them alone with their thoughts. It' covers a large space, about half a city block. It consists of blocks of dark grey granite a little larger than a coffin in length and width and of varying heights. Some are mere inches tall, the tallest appear to be about 12 feet high. They are set in a strict row and column grid layout with only the height varying. They do not vary in any particular order but the closer you get to the center of the grid the taller they get in general. The entire display is set on ground that slopes toward the center of the display so from the middle any way you go is up and from the perimeter any way you go is down. There are no diagonal paths they all intersect at right angles. Near the edge you can still see over them but as you move toward the center you are slowly precluded from seeing anything except the path ahead and behind and the slab of granite on each side.
The paths are uniform in width, just a bit wider than my shoulders. It's not possible to walk side-by-side. When approaching the center you are pretty isolated but not closed in as you can always see ahead and behind. I have to admit that it does produce an odd feeling as you move between the blocks. It manages to give the illusion of order and yet injects a feeling of chaos or unease that overrides the order. It's as though it is saying, "The world may look orderly and safe with a casual glance, but just below the surface lurks the unthinkable."
Just across the street about half a block away is the site of the bunker where Hitler died. It's under a parking lot and is not real easy to find as they don't make a big deal of it. The bunker was part of a very large underground complex of bunkers that housed some government and military functions. Just next to the parking area there's a small section of the Berlin Wall that has a copy of the photograph taken of an East German border guard jumping the barbed wire to escape over the wall just days before the wall came down. It's an image I remember well.
From the place where Hitler died we went to the place where the plot to kill him was organized. The Bendlerblock is a building complex in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, Germany It was built in 1914 to be the HQ for part of the German Navy. The NAZIs made it larger and used it as an Army HQ and center for the German Military Intelegence (the Abwehr).
It was here that some officers in the German Army plotted to assassinate Hitler by placing a bomb in the Wolf's Lair. The most recent film on this subject is the movie Valkyrie with Tom Cruise. The leaders of the plot were arrested here and executed by firing squad in the courtyard. There's a plaque and a wreath at the spot. It was very controversial but eventually the moviemakers were allowed to film the scene where it happened. One member was allowed to shoot himself and the last one was tried so they could have a public spectacle and sentenced to death. That event took place just 24 days short of 70 years ago today. Hitler survived mainly due to the German penchant for overbuilding. The table the bomb was placed under was made of stone and so strong it protected Hitler from the blast.
From this sad site, the NAZIs seem to have generated a great multitude of those; we went to a relatively new display, opened in 2010, the Topography of Terror. The location is the site of the old Gestapo and SS headquarters. These buildings were so badly bombed at the end of WWII that all that's left are the foundations. These have been excavated and along the front side they are enclosed in glass and are the backdrop for a chronological display of the city of Berlin under the Third Reich. It starts out slowly with the election of Hitler as Chancellor and ends in persecution and terror for a large multitude of people. To those who think it can't happen again, it already has in a great number of African nations and in the Balkans. Might have been on a smaller scale but those persecuted in those areas are just as dead. I hope no one reading this believes that it can't happen in the USA.
Current Events Note: Right now, here in Europe, people are outraged at the disclosure that the current cabal in charge of the executive branch of our government is spying on them. What did they think? That he would only spy on journalists and his political rivals? If he'll use unmanned drones to spy on US citizens, he'll use them anywhere. I mean, the man and his attorney general lost a religious freedom case in the US Supreme Court by a vote of 9 to 0. With the court as it's currently constituted to get all nine to agree on an issue it must be pretty clear. Yet our president and his legal staff were on the wrong side of it. Respect for the law, and our county's long held freedoms, is very scarce in the government as it is currently constituted. I'm not entirely sure any of them have actually read our constitution and if they have, more's the pity, because they certainly didn't understand it. Oh well, at least his mask is now off in Europe and they are beginning to see him for what he is. I wonder what he'll have to do to get the deluded portion of our citizens to finally see that the emperor has no clothes. But I was talking about NAZI terror, not the misguided, wrongheaded antics of our country.
That's the outside portion of the exhibits. Inside they have photos and documentation of the steps taken in imposing the will of the NAZIs on the entire country and then most of Europe. It's chilling to see pictures of simple ceremonies installing someone into an office when you know what he did while serving there and the misery and death he inflicted on so many. Whether it's Hermann Göring, Reinhard Heydrich, Klaus Barbie, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels or any of a hundred others, any post they held after 1938 was used and misused to the detriment of human dignity and honor. Gosh, don't let me get started on this topic. It always leads to more notes in italics.
In striking contrast to the Topography of Terror displays right next door is the former decorative arts museum. Reliefs on the façade show people at work in the arts. In each there's a older person mentoring a younger one. Potters, weavers, woodworkers, metalworkers, glassblowers, jewelers and others all busy creating useful and decorative items right across from the architects and builders of one of the most destructive mechanisms ever seen on earth. Daily, while arriving at work the members of the Gestapo and SS units passed these scenes. I doubt they ever gave the irony a second thought or even a first one. I have no pictures of this place. Just didn't seem right to take any.
It was back to the hotel with a lot to think about.
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