When they take old Berlin

Whilst taking a stroll through mainland Europe once more, we decided to drop in on the German city we hadn't seen in our earlier tour of the Vaterland: Berlin. Also, we had some friends who lived there, so we had free lodging (which has been known to draw me like a magnet from distances up to 500 miles).

The view from the ground

We began by going on the (free) New Berlin Tour (no relation to the small Illinois town of pretzel fame) offered by Sandeman's, which I highly recommend. Our guide was half-Swedish, half-Japanese; she'd lived in London for a while but found it too expensive so she moved to Berlin. This is one aspect of the city that recommends it to cash-strapped 20-something hipsters looking for a good time: it's cheap. If you live in the Turkish neighborhoods, you can pay very little for rent or delicious kabobs.

Jumping the Gate

Another thing that stuck out to me over the course of the tour was the city's inherent sense of narrative (granted, that was built into the tour, but it's very present in the monuments, universities, churches, etc.). It's easy to just think of 20th century Berlin's story, and no doubt there's quite a lot of that. But after taking in all the history of the previous centuries (Holy Roman Empire, Frederick the Great, Franco-Prussian War), 20th century Berlin has a lot more context, even if it still seems incredible. You can see some ancient buildings, but most of them were destroyed during WWII. There are 'bomb gaps' between residential buildings, where an older building was spared but its neighbor was demolished and has been replaced by something newer. Small metal plaques on the ground commemorate Jews who were removed from their homes and killed in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust memorial, a valley of 6,000 marble slabs of various heights, is disorienting and overwhelming (each slab stands for a thousand Jews killed) to walk through. But my favorite postwar addition to the city is the new Reichstag building, where the German parliament meets. The building was subject to a fire which was blamed, probably spuriously, on communists. Hitler and the Nazi party used the public outcry to gain special powers for the detention of suspicious characters. This, of course, led to Dachau and all the later concentration and extermination camps. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Reichstag began to be renovated. The new design allows anyone to walk up to a large glass dome above the Bundestag, the chamber where the parliament meets. This philosophical idea of "the people watching the government" is omnipresent in the new design, and it lets you get a nice view of the city as well.

View of the Brandenburg Gate from the top of the Reichstag

Across the street from Humboldt University, there is a large open square called the Bebelplatz where the Nazis organized the students of the University to take part in a book burning. The memorial to this is simply a glass panel on the ground that opens into a lower room full of empty bookshelves. Accompanying the memorial is a quote from Humboldt poet Heinrich Heine, who predicted in 1820 that when people burn books, it will not be long before they burn people.

Though distinctions of East and West are less important now, it's interesting to realize where some of present-day Berlin's icons would have resided when the Wall was still up. Potsdamer Platz is an encouraging example of Western commercialism building modern glass-laden business centers on what had been the desolate no-man's-land between East and West Berlin. Alexanderplatz contains the TV tower, the tallest structure in Germany. Built to flaunt the triumph of East German engineering, the tower later annoyed the atheist East Berlin government because the sun's light projects the figure of a cross onto the tower's glass.

The cross, known as "The Pope's Revenge"

Ronald Reagan later referenced this phenomenon in his "Tear Down This Wall" speech. Speaking of the wall, large portions of it are still available (now as cool artistic murals) in the East Side Gallery, located in former East Berlin.

Hey, that's Laura's birthday! And something else...

All in all, an incredible city. This was my second time there and I feel that I've barely started to see it. 9.0/10.0