Day 5- More Berlin

Berlin! The fulcrum about which a century turned!

The bringer of two world wars. The most visible symbol of four decades of tension. The city whereat a nation was united, divided, and united again. In the 20th century alone, this city has been the capital for four different collapsed governments. The city has been bombed to rubble, occupied, divided, besieged, walled and joined again.

What is it that really stands out in Berlin? What can be called the enduring image of this city that was the focal point of a century? Do any of you really think its going to be something like "chocolate bars" or "Neo-Classical architecture"?

1.) Cranes.

With the German government moving the capital back to Berlin (Lord knows why, Berlin seems to be bad luck for those in power) and with the fact the German economy is the strongest on the continent, everybody and their affiliate is moving their European headquarters to Berlin. What does that require? Headquarters buildings; gobs of ‘em. According to our guide, 80% of the working cranes in Europe are in Berlin right now. There was no word on the non-working cranes because it did not occur to any of us to ask.

2.) Bullet holes.

We were walking through a city park with various statues representing hunting scenes (bearded men sticking pitchforks through boars while hunting dogs frolic around, etc.) when Rob made the surprising discovery, "There’s bullet holes in the base of that statue!" Our tour guide informed us that those were, in fact, bullet holes cordially offered to Berlin by the Russian army as something of a memento of their visit. This was not really that surprising in itself. However, what was surprising was the fact most every stone building in Berlin was either shot up or patched up from being shot up. In fact, you could often tell where the Germans hid something important, you merely needed to look for arches, windows, columns, doorways and stairs or walls that were pockmarked like a teenager who doesn’t wash his face.

The point is, we took a splendid tour walking through the streets of Berlin, without needing to find all the landmarks on our own on a city that is very spread out, and hear the amusing anecdotes that always go along with them. I am going to relate the stories here for no other reason that I liked them and they are the most information I have on the city.

After a meeting outside the McDonald’s near the train station and freezing our rear ends off, we saw a church that had obviously been hit by a few dozen bombs. This was an old church built by some Prussian king or someone like that in order to commemorate something or another (Hey, I don’t remember everything). It was apparently some sort of grandiose, garish piece of German architecture that had been left in its post-World War II condition as a sort of reminder of the war. Apparently, older Berliners also have a theory on why it was left bombed out and crumbling, that being it is quite an improvement on the original.

From there, we headed past one of the zoos in Berlin. We were told that there are a few zoos in Berlin, as well as two train stations, two symphony orchestras, two opera houses and two museums of Egyptian antiquity. Everything one side put in Berlin, the other side needed one too. This was the only major metropolitan area divided by the borders between East and West, so both sides were showing off as much as possible.

Either way, we headed through the aforementioned park with the statues that will hopefully never be available in desktop recreations. We were told to notice the trees in the park which, despite the park being hundreds of years old, were all surprisingly young. This is because the Germans chopped them all down to heat their homes in the later days of the War. The British and Americans offered some trees to plant on the grounds, though they were not native German species; they were trees from Britain and America. I therefore assume none of the people on the tour were conservation activists, as nobody had a seizure upon hearing this.

After this, we found ourselves viewing something called the Siegessäule or Victory Column, which was a large pillar with a winged Victory atop and various reliefs at the base. This was built to commemorate a victory against the French in the German wars of unification (Germany, for those who do not know, was not a whole nation until 1871. I didn’t know. I had to look up the year). The first war was by the Prussians to subjugate various and assundry separate Germanic regions. The second war was against the Austrians to prevent their meddling in German affairs, though mostly to just make sure Prussia was top dog among the German states. The third war was waged against the French, in the words of our tour guide, "because it’s fun."

The previously mentioned base of the column with the reliefs therein showed scenes of the battle, or at least a romanticized version of it. The column, several stories high, had three stacked sections holding cannons that were captured from the French, gold plated and summarily attached. A fourth level was added by the Nazis in order to add cannons from future victories. They did not affix any, thank God. The winged Victory was, of course, defiantly facing Paris, holding something I believe to be a military standard in one hand and a laurel aloft with the other. The French are not big fans of this thing, so after WWII, they stole all the reliefs from the base. This was not enough for them, though, and they would later ask the English (in whose occupation zone the column was located) to blow it up. The English refused, probably not so much for preservation of artwork as the fact they were also big fans of anything that would piss off the French. Some of the reliefs were later returned by the French, though not all of them.

After following more of the Russian Army’s progress, we boarded a bus. Busses are free unless an inspector happens to be on the bus that day, when they cost a 200 mark fine. However, it happens so rarely that many people simply don’t pay for their fare, like our tour group. Our tour guide had spent seven years in Berlin and had never paid.

From the bus, we ended up outside the Reichstag. The Russians had removed the original dome with heavy weaponry and relocated it to the floor below, so the Germans decided to build another dome, this being a large glass one with solar panels in it or something like that. I really don’t remember the whole story; I was too busy thinking, "Wow, that big glass dome looks really out of place on a 19th century stone building." We were informed one of the hallways through which the Chancellor will travel was covered with graffiti from the Russians, who had nothing nice to say about Germans after the War. This is supposed to be humbling or something like that, but all the German Chancellor will probably think as he walks by this stuff is, "I can’t read Russian." Quite honestly, the Reichstag portion of the tour was rather a letdown.

Thenceforth, we visited the Brandenburg Gate (once in the middle of no-man’s land between East and West Berlin) and Potsdamer Platz, a large square, where the Americans are planning to return their embassy to its original location. For some reason, the Germans are very excited about this, though I have trouble imagining a situation where an embassy moving to its old location would make the front page of many cities’ "Metro" section. From there, we headed over to the general area of Hitler’s old bunker complex. I say "general area" because the German government is not saying where the bunkers are located in an effort to prevent people with morbid fascinations from visiting and/or breaking into the subterranean complex. I imagine it also prevents idiots from somehow combining Nazism with New Agism. The idea of skinheads wearing crystals and performing old druid rituals around bonfires is a subject best left existing only in The Onion (www.theonion.com).

Incidentally, the area near the Brandenburg Gate was the site of two important speeches, and probably the site of more than a few concerts by the Scorpions. The latter piece of information is unconfirmed, but it seems to make sense to me.

Not in chronological order, obviously, Ronald Reagan, upon the beginning of the policy of Glasnost and Perestroika in the USSR, challenged Mikhail Gorbachev (the guy who started that whole plan, and I didn’t have to look that up) to "tear down this wall", in reference to the Berlin Wall.

The other speech to which I refer is the famed speech by John F. Kennedy. A stirring speech in which he proclaimed the plight of Berlin to be the plight of everyone, going so far as to say, in German, "I am a Berliner". This translates to "Ich bin ein Berliner". At least it does so roughly and to anyone not that familiar with German. The correct syntax for that, if I remember correctly, would be "Ich bin Berliner," to proclaim he is a citizen of Berlin. To add the "ein" changes the connotation of the sentence, thus causing John F. Kennedy to proclaim to be the other meaning of Berliner, which is a breakfast pastry not unlike a donut.

So on from Brandenburg Gate, we head to a section of the Berlin Wall. Yes, there is still some of it standing. The wall, incidentally was not just a big wall. There were also the yards of barbed wire, minefields, steel-toothed man eating dogs (I did not make that up) and towers holding machine gun toting guards all packed into an area a mile deep in some places. Fortunately, they just left the wall up in the section we saw. Don’t worry, it was still a pretty tall wall that had been graffitied all over with such poignant slogans as, "Fuck This."

From there, it was a trip to the old location of Checkpoint Charlie (no longer there) where we heard the usual escape stories and some advice to not go to the Checkpoint Charlie museum because it wasn’t that interesting; mostly just a collection of "Escape to the West" stories. We grabbed some coffee at a nearby coffee shop because that was what our guide was doing and it was cold standing outside. So we will take a break as well because this section is already long enough.