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| Hu,hu,hu, who says the Germans don't have a sense of humor?? XD |
We checked in, met up with Ivo (who was staying in a hostel very near ours), and we returned to a little fair area we'd passed earlier to get us some German wieners. Although there was a fabulous man wearing (literally, wearing) a complete hot dog stand, condiments included, we opted for a sausage from one of the more central stands, and my gawd, was it worth it.
From there, we made our way onwards, basically just walking towards the big looking "stuff" on the horizon. Below is the "Berliner Dom," or the Berlin Cathedral. This version (since there have been churches/cathedrals on this site since the 16th century) was finished about 1905, so this building is technically only a little over a century old (which for Europe is nothing). The reason it looks so roughed up is, of course, because like most everything else it was bombed during WWII. Renovations have been going on since the 1970's.
After dealing with the slightly snarky staff (I guess they have to deal with a lot of tourists), we finally got our tickets and were able to go inside. I was actually shocked- the outside had such a weathered look to it, stone and statues seemed so dark and intense; I think I was expecting a similar look inside, dim with intricate stonework.
Ha! Boy was I wrong. The inside was actually a bright white, originally built in the wildly ornate Baroque style with dashes of Italian Renaissance influences; it has only been slightly simplified as necessary during reconstruction.
I was interested to learn too that this cathedral was considered the Protestant answer to the Roman Catholic St. Peter's in Rome. Well, it would take a whole heck of a lot to beat St. Peter's, but you can definitely see its influences here: the white interior, the intensely grand altar area, and of course, the massive dome letting god's light into the space.
Haha, the upside to its smaller scale, though, was that the Berliner Dom was much, much easier to climb than St. Peter's!
After we had climbed the cathedral, we returned to descend into the Hohenzollern Crypt beneath. The light was a bit off in there, so I had to steal this photo from the interwebs (hence, forgive the stupid yellow numbers). The crypt though, was as fascinating as the outside facade.
There are sarcophagi here from back in the 16th century ranging up to more recent times, and this actually gives a timeline view of how burial "styles" have changed over the centuries. Above are three different ones for children (even the best medical care money could buy back then often just wasn't enough). The children's coffins were often very elaborate, despite their tiny size.
A great little story surrounding tower: The authorities who built this thing were the GDR (German Democratic Party). In short, we don't like these guys-- they were the over-controlling nutters who would go on to put up the Berlin Wall, trapping their remaining citizens in East Berlin. Their government was also atheist. Whereas (obviously, lawl) I have nothing against atheists, this random trait of a terrible government made for a pretty embarrassing scandal with the tower.
Basically, the GDR built the tower to be a big, sexy, phallic symbol of their power and pride, etc and whatnot, and even placed it so that the people in West Berlin would have to see it every time they looked at their own major landmark. Well, the joke was on them when, far too late, they realized every time the sun hit the glass ball a perfect, brightly glowing cross shape formed on their monument for all to see.
They tried eeeeverything in their power to get this to stop, painting the glass, treating it with different chemicals, but no effect. Hence, the tower's spectacular nickname: "The Pope's Revenge."
Of course we also walked by the Rathaus too, which would have been West Berlin's big landmark; this was part of why the GDR built their tower there, so it could be seen looming over the building where West Berlin's Senate sat. Once the wall went up though, East Berlin's side encompassed the Rote Rathaus (this one), forcing the Senate to move.
While we were still on our own, we also made our first attempt to find "THE" Berlin Wall, assuming that it would be covered in tourists and relatively easy to find. Well, what we found after a long walk through a cemetery was, technically, part of the wall. However, what we slowly started to understand was that the "Berlin Wall" was more of a metaphor; of course there were literal walls involved, but there were several of those, and they were supplemented with trenches, watch towers, barbed wire, armed guards and dogs-- it would later come to be known as the "death strip."
What we had found this first time were actually just a few smaller chunks of, I believe, inner walls left standing outside of Saint Hedwig's cemetery.
That first evening we hunted down a pub style restaurant with the most traditional food we could find, and did our tourist thing happily and shamelessly. Most German beer, please? Most German food? Haha, our waitress was patient and helpful though, and the meal was perfect for our first night in Germany.
An amusing timeline (note fullness of ENORMOUS beer as night progresses):
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| Yay, Berlin! |
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| Tasty appetizer. |
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| WOOO, BERLIN! |
That night, there was a great moon over the tower view from our hostel- fortunately, I still had Ivo's camera in my purse, so we were able to *sort of* get a picture of it.
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While we were in Berlin, we were also able to catch one of the Free Tours offered there- much thanks to Tracy Cheung who first introduced me to the company! This time, we were lucky enough to get a tour guide who was currently doing his dissertation on the history of the city, so not only did he know his stuff inside and out, he really had a passion that came across in how he very thoughtfully presented everything.
Among our first stops was this masterpiece of intimidation. Yes, it was originally a Nazi building, built about 1935 to house their Ministry of Aviation. This beastly creation made it through WWII and was just too brilliantly constructed to tear down, so the up and coming Soviets removed the eagles and swastikas and turned it into office space. These guys would later, within this building in 1949, hold the ceremony bringing the GDR into official being.
A year later, the Socialist government had a mural commissioned for the long wall along the entrance- you can just barely see how long this thing is, it's painted on the wall behind those columns. It's supposed to show all the East Berliners facing the future together as a big, happy, Socialist family.
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| "Haha, yay, Socialism! ...please don't shoot me..." |
Ironically, this same location just a few years later became the stage for the massive protest which would ultimately signal the beginning of the end, despite the GDR's outrageous death throes.
Things in East Berlin got bad fast, and the government had a tendency to just take it out on the people, who were obviously not working hard enough. When you're playing Civ and smoke forms above your city because there's not enough happiness? That's what was going here, only this time with actual angry people. Well, thousands of them finally gathered outside of the government building to say "enough is enough," and at this point the government in turn revealed its true colors. Panic started, orders were given, and long story short, shots were fired into the largely defenseless crowd.
Today, set into the ground in front of the Socialist mural is an enormous photo of the crowd from that day. It's set up in such a way that it appears to be the reflection of the original mural, its true form revealed in the water. The photo is the same enormous length as the mural.
Brilliantly, as our tour guide pointed out, this building is still in use today, currently housing the German Finance Ministry (aka, the guys who collect taxes, etc). So, while they still get to use the incredible building, the German people can also continue to despise it.
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So, without further ado, the story of the wall: The East Berliners were miserable under the GDR: terrible pay, not enough food, and nobody liked knowing they'd get shot if they tried to speak out. For a few years, they did the normal smart thing: they left. They left in droves, actually, about 20% of the entire population just gone, most of these being the young and intelligent. This created a massive brain-drain leaving the work force depleted and East Berlin even worse off.
Finally, in 1961, the GDR decided on the answer to their problem. No, it wasn't to improve the economy or to readjust their political theories. It was to literally build a wall, a really big nasty wall which would *ahem* keep all those awful fascists outside from ruining the East Berliners efforts to create the perfect socialist estate... it had nothing to do with keeping their own citizens from leaving! Really! All about keeping fascists out! ...twisted, no? So that year, the GDR built the wall, and sealed off the few remaining possibilities of emigration. Literally, without warning, at midnight August 12 they began closing borders. When the people woke up Sunday morning, whichever side they had slept on, regardless of where family or friends or jobs were, that was the side they were staying on. Even telephone lines and mail service outside of East Berlin were cut.
The effect was devastating for everyone. First of all, the terror of the people must have been overwhelming. Our guide mentioned one photo that got to him, and I don't know if this is quite it, but it does give a powerful image:
The disturbing idea of being suddenly cut off from family. Grandparents unable to hold their grandchildren, friends forced to communicate through concrete blocks and barbed wire... the logic behind putting up this wall seems ridiculous to the point of hilarity, but it's impossible to laugh when you realize how many lives were lost by those who couldn't endure the separation, or couldn't take the imprisonment. While nobody can be positive about the number, reliable sources estimate something like 200 were slaughtered for "defecting" when they tried to escape from the miserable conditions within.
There are a few stories of daring escapes, and stories of those were brave enough to help. Our guide told us cars like the one on display here were used to help; people with a pass to leave would literally sew escapees into the seat cushions. There was once a 19-year old boy too who stole one of the army's trucks and literally drove it into the wall; while he was shot by the East Berlin guards, a West Berlin officer intervened, shot back, and managed to get the boy out and to safety. People built makeshift hot air balloons, drove their own cars straight through the barriers, and sometimes even simply just ran for it.
Even helping though, was a massive risk- more commonly, attempted escapees were shot and left to bleed to death along the stretch of marked land dividing the East and West. Anyone trying to help from the West side would be shot as well. Perhaps the most appalling example was the 18-year old boy who was shot and bled to death in full view of the Western media; his death became something of an impossible to ignore wake up call.
Finally, with many thousands of others also working tirelessly on the cause, the USA fully joined in with Reagon's "Tear down this wall" speech in 1987, given in front of the sealed Brandenburg Gate (below). At this point, the East Berliners are bursting out through whatever loopholes they can find, reaching escape by sneaking through Hungary or Czechoslovakia when the borders were temporarily opened. Pressure was reaching an all time high. The people, after nearly three decades of this, had reached the point where risking their lives was worth protesting.
BUT. Schabowski was nervous. He hadn't been told EXACTLY what to say, or how to present this information. Well, he makes it all the way to the end of the conference successfully, and then remembers the note. Rather than just ignore it (which he should have done, since it wasn't even supposed to go into effect until tomorrow) or just saying something about a minor change to be announced later, he simply reads the note aloud word for word. Basically (and yes, according to wiki), "East Berliners will be allowed to cross the border with the proper permission."
Dead silence in the room. A plucky journalist raises his hand. "When will go into effect?" Schabowski is still nervous. He looks down at the note. It's worded in present tense. "Well, as far as I know, effective immediately." In a matter of hours, a station in the West picks up this information, and rebroadcasts it with the tagline that the Berlin Wall is finally opening. The desperate East Berliners hear this, grab what they can carry, and run to the gates. The completely outnumbered guards, facing a city full of angry, desperate, justified people, call their superiors, but fortunately, that day no man was willing or able to give the order to fire. Again, fortunately, none of the guards had it in their hearts to fire on the crowd either. And so, the gates opened, the people poured through into the open arms of their West Berlin family and friends and fellow Germans, and the "Wall" (in a metaphorical sense) fell without any blood being shed that day.
Today, the longest remain strip of wall has been converted in the Eastside Gallery, and is a stretch of about 100 different murals. Some are terrible (ha, check out my "highlights" at the end), some were so odd I couldn't begin to guess what they were trying to say, and some were just highly stylized works of genius or beauty. There were several that did seem to specifically concern the wall itself, like the three below.
Guernica might sometimes seem a bit overused, but here, I thought it was an especially powerful pull.
Most of the murals, though, seemed concerned with freedom, equality, or justice in a larger sense. These were just a few of my favorites:
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| I can't be sure about the rest of it, but bananas were all over the wall as a symbol of freedom-- the East Berliners were constantly lining up for their food, and what was there usually wasn't that great. Bananas were never available. After they finally broke free in 1989, there were hundreds of pictures taken of East Berlin children holding a banana for the first time in their lives. |
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| A detail from "Save Our Earth" |
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| Not the most enlightening comment, but I'll say it anyway: Lizzie Czyzyk! These TOTALLY reminded me of your doodles! You could definitely do this. |
And of course, the iconic mural of Honecker (a leader of the GDR) kissing Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communists in Soviet Union). It's titled "My God, help me survive this deadly love."
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Finally, on to the last place I want to share (I swear, it's the last one).
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| Neue Wache Memorial |
Originally, this was a guardhouse for the Prince of Prussia, built back around 1816. In 1931, though, it began to be used as a memorial site. Several different memorials moved through, either ousted and replaced by new authorities or simply damaged in war. Finally though, in 1993, it was converted into the straightforward and simple yet utterly stunning memorial we see today. Specifically, it is dedicated to "victims of war and tyranny."
From the outside, there's no way to predict what you're about to walk into. The doors are propped open though, and so you just sort of wander in with a few other curious people.
It leads into a single, dim room, floor paved in small black tiles, walls constructed of grey concrete bricks. There is only one source of light, and this comes from a literal hole in the ceiling- there is no glass, it is completely open.
The room itself is completely empty but for a single huddled statue in the center, highlighted beneath the open circle in the roof. The statue is constantly exposed to the elements; rain, snow, the beating sun all pour mercilessly through the "oculus" as the statue sits there, still and indifferent.
The one thing that I'm consistently the most impressed with in Germany are their memorials. They are often so simple, yet always beautiful, creative, and always poignant in how bluntly straightforward the message or memory is. I find myself asking how theirs, at least the ones I've seen, compare to ours, especially the ones in our own capital.
There are many overwhelming similarities, of course; to memorialize the loss of life is a human act. As our cultures and philosophy have become more complex, our memorials have become more complex, but still, humans have been marking graves almost instinctively since they first began dying. Also, Berlin is home to several massive, "we'll stomp you flat" statues too that we just didn't get to see. However, I still cannot say if we have anything in the States that is quite like the Neue Wache...
Our memorials are also stunning and beautiful, but they also often seem to consistently generate pride as well, the sweet honor in sacrifice constantly being mixed in with the pain of loss. The Vietnam wall, one of our most unique memorials, lists the names of the fallen, and reflects the living viewer in the dark marble. When we stand before this memorial, we clearly owe them something, we are bound to these names despite the separation of death; we are primed to sense the call of duty ourselves. Memorial statues in the States too, at least of what I recall, are often of soldiers in action (the Korean Memorial, the iconic Marine Corp Memorial, various statues surrounding Vietnam, the African American War Memorial). They are usually life size men in motion, or on the verge of, their backs straight and strong, moving or pushing forward, often one among them looking up... they are mortal figures who struggle against devastating odds, and this act alone makes a human heart thick with inspiration. Even our memorial buildings or constructions often reflect this "outwards and upwards"motion; the WWII Memorial in particular, with its columns set up straight and tall, seems a ring of shining white sentries.
The Neue Wache, however, huddles, and the viewer actually stands taller this time. Here is pain presented in the bluntest sense. Here is nameless loss without consolation. At home, so many of our memorials seem to involve names, faces, details. There are such memorials in Berlin as well, but while both might share in that great effort to preserve the individual, there is still in the USA this special emphasis on the presentation of all, viewer included, as part of a drawn together collective. The viewer is drawn into a sacred bond.
Our memorials, it seems, do not just "commit to memory," but also memorialize. They create an extra swelling of pride. In Berlin, and Hamburg as well when I visited, there seems less of this in the memorials. It seems more about the raw emotion of the event... "This is how it felt," they seem to say, and that is why we must never let it happen again.
Random highlights:
~One of my favorite memorials that didn't quite fit in anywhere above: it is simply a memorial to the books that were burned under the Nazi regime. It's in the ground, dug into the cobblestones in front of the university where the bonfire actually was. When you look down, it's a small square room with white, empty bookshelves. Again, another brilliant, unique memorial.
~The balcony where Michael Jackson dangled that baby? Randomly enough, I stood in front of it. Ah yes, it was truly a profound moment of historical appreciation.
~From the very interesting "down town" area:
~Probably the worst mural on the Eastside gallery... (there was a wide range of quality)
It translates to "there are many walls to be demolished." Well, ok, I see where they were going with this (since the sentiment is blindingly obvious), but... did you have to paint a wall separating four white, blonde kids from two black guys and one hilariously offensive Asian character? This one really just didn't seem up to par.
~Introducing "currywurst," the sweet, sweet love of my life. This is, unfortunately, just an internet photo, since every time there was currywurst in front of us we inhaled it too fast to even think about cameras. Think delicious sausage infused with curry, covered in a ketchupy sort of curry sauce. Oh gawd, so good. Based on my time searching the internet for a recipe, I discovered a lot of Germans kind of frown on this as fast food, and don't believe it to be a truly cultural thing. My response? "I don't care. Get me MOAR."
Jess, I WISH my doodles were that cool haha
ReplyDeleteAlso, that last mural is HILARIOUS XD