Day 19 - Berlin, the Free Tour and Ampelmann

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On day 19 we took a free tour of Berlin through newberlin. I had heard about it while doing research for our trip, and it had been talked up a lot by a few different people, so we figured it would be worth a shot. As the tour guides do it just for tips, they put a lot of effort into making the tours good! It was a very good tour, and I feel like I got so much information that it would take me a week to write it all down. I won't put you all through that - I'll try and keep this one relatively short.

We met at Starbucks near the Brandenburg Gate at 11am, and sat in the freezing cold while everyone got sorted (there were a lot of people there). We got split into groups of about 20 people and set off with our tour guides. Ours was, well, quite crazy. Think the complete opposite of me, and thats what she was. She was loud, outspoken (American!) and at first we were slightly overwhelmed by how excitable she seemed, but as soon as she started teaching us about stuff, we realised how much she loved Berlin and how much she knew about it and managed to get past her being a nutter! (She was crazy in a good way anyway, kind of like Elizabeth Cain, very overly dramatic!)

As we were walking through the square, this huge group of Policemen and many, many cars all came driving in to bring (Dad's greatest dream) the Prince of Liechtenstein to the hotel in Paris Square. This, by the way, is the same hotel Michael Jackson dangled his child out the window of. So, we were within about 5 meters of the Prince of Liechtenstein, and hopefully this will appease Dad's obsession with the small country.

Our guide told us a bit about the funny history of Paris Square (it has a different name in German, I think it is Paris Platz) and the Brandenburg Gate. Initially, the woman on top of the gate was meant to be called Irene, after the goddess of peace, as it was meant to represent peace coming to Berlin. But when Napoleon conquered Berlin and brought not peace, but his tiny little self, into the square and saw Irene (I don't know how he even saw her from down there), he was amazed by her and had his men climb up to the top of the gate, cut her off, bring her down, and he took her back to his own private collection (the Louvre!).
Years later when Berlin was freed from the Frenchies, they got Irene back, except they renamed her Victoria (after the goddess of Victory), gave her eagles wings and a trident, and they also renamed the square - Paris Square. So essentially, you put the two together and get victory over Paris. Very amusing!

On the otherside of the Brandenburg Gate was the Reichstag - the German Parliament building.
It has a glass dome on top - to represent, quite literally, transparency in Government. You can also walk up into this dome, which allows you to look down on the Politicians inside, which was something the architect wanted to do to remind everyone that the people as a whole should be over the Politicians, not the other way around.
This building was also used leading up to WWII, and it was this building that was mysteriously burned down (apparently by some guy who used to get drunk a lot and claim to have burnt down buildings that he was actually nowhere near at the time). It was lit on fire in five places almost at once, so in hindsight it seems rather doubtful that he did it. Coincidentally, because of this fire, Hitler was able to convince the President-dude (sorry, I can't remember a lot of the names and details!) to give him emergency powers of dictatorship, which he then used to imprison all of his political opponents, and get himself elected as the Fuher of Germany.

Following this we walked to the Memorial (which made me think of someone who wants to go to the Memorial-Memorial) to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It is a large open square filled with cement blocks of different heights. Our guide talked before we walked through it about how some people see it as a graveyard and all the stones are the graves, some people see it as a sort of graph that shows the levels of anti-semitism that went on, and continue to exist, and how one little boy who went through a tour with her said that he thought it represented hope, because no matter where you were in the memorial, you could always see a way out.

I saw something quite different, but it is a little bit hard to explain. Basically, I felt like I could see through the blocks somehow, and there were people inside. They were people who had died, but they weren't actually dead how I saw them, they were separated from us by the blocks, and were looking out at us while we walked through. In the smaller ones at the start, there was only one person, then two or three as they got bigger, and then in the middle, there were countless people all crammed into these blocks, but the thing that made me really sad was that the people in the smaller ones were completely alone and isolated in what they were going through. It was sad and tragic in a really confronting and obvious way knowing that there were times when enormous amounts of people were killed, but the way I saw them, they were huddled together, holding one another. I felt really bad for the people who were killed or treated badly at the beginning, because they had to go through it all by themselves, and no one really noticed them.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. It was very odd thinking these things and seeing these images in my mind as I walked through there.

We walked a little further and stopped in a carpark. As we were being told about the buildings around us ("luxury" apartments built for Nazi's during the second world war) I realised where we were. Since I had read some other people's blogs about this tour, I recognised that we must be in the spot above Hitler's bunker, where he had killed himself towards the end of the war. This was also the spot where his body was burned (quite unsuccessfully due to the miserable weather of Berlin) by his guards in an attempt to stop him from being dragged through the streets as a kind of trophy.
There was a strange feeling of satisfaction standing there. It seems very unreal that these places I have read so much about actually exist, even that Hitler was a real person, and I have probably now walked in the same places he did, and then stood above where he died. It makes him seem quite small.
The people of Berlin have been very careful not to bring any kind of honor to this carpark, and instead it is the place where they like to take their dogs walking so they can do their business on this infamous spot.

Up until this point we hadn't seen any of the wall, but we had seen the bricks that showed the path it used to take.
We walked around a mural, intended to show how wonderful communism was, which was mirrored by a photo taken during workers riots which resulted in a few hundred people being shot to death, and thousands more being injured. This was to show the reality of what communism was.

After this we stopped at a piece of the wall which remains standing. It looks a bit pathetic, not big, picked to pieces by the scavengers wanting to make some money selling parts of the wall, and not exactly impressive. It doesn't look like it would be that effective in keeping people in or out. In actual fact, this was about the fourth or fifth version of the wall, and was actually very effective. They got rid of barbed wire as, despite causing cuts, it actually helped people get out as it gives something to grab hold of. The tubing on the top is just too small to use a grapple hook, but was too big to get your arms around. Add to this the "death strip" on the other side - dogs trained to respond to the smell of humans and to attack, and armed guards in watchtowers who were punished if they failed to shoot to kill - and you and I probably wouldn't dare to try and escape.

We stopped for coffee near Checkpoint Charlie and learned about some of the escape attempts, successful and unsuccessful.

After the break we went to a square which had both a German church and a French church, and was representative of unity between France and Germany, as it was given a name (which I have no hope of remembering how to spell) that was a combination of a French word and a German word.
This was also where I noticed the Ampelmann store - the Ampelmann is the traffic light man used in (former) East Berlin (and now in some of former West Berlin). He is the coolest ever! I took photos so you can see how cool he is. I also bought cookie cutters so you can taste how cool he is when we get home. From this point on I memorised everywhere we went so we could retrace our steps at the end of the tour and go back to buy Ampelmann souvenirs as we couldn't stop during the tour.

We went to a square next to a university and the biggest billboard I have ever seen, and it turned out to be the site of the book burning *sob*
It was very hard to see the memorial to this - a room below the square filled with empty white shelves - exactly enough space to fit the (I think) 20,000 books which were burnt. You look in through a glass window in the ground, and it gets very scratched, so it was difficult to see, let alone take photos.
This quote was there as well - "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." This was actually said by Heinrich Heine long before the book burning in Berlin, but fit what happened so well that they put it on a plaque here.

We walked from here to a building with a hole in the roof, the only thing inside was a sculpture of a woman holding her dying son. Danny and I talked about this later, and he found it much more moving than the cement blocks in the big memorial. As he is quite mechanically minded, he had gotten caught up thinking about how they have a museum underneath the big memorial, and the logistics of having it underground, how they do the piping, and all sorts of strange things. This sculpture was much more personal, as the women who carved it had actually lost her own children. It was in the centre of the room, right underneath the hole in the roof, open to the elements, and as it has been raining, all around her was wet, while the rest of the room stayed dry.
You could see the pain of the artist in the sculpture. The son was actually closer to being a man, he was almost as big as her, but she was holding him like a child, and it was so simple, but conveyed a lot at the same time. I can't really explain it, but we were looking at it so intently that got left behind a little bit because we didn't realise the rest of the group had already gone.

As we reached Museum Island it began to rain a little so we took shelter while our tour guide gave us a very dramatic re-enactment of how the wall came down. She got so into it that people were stopping to watch her!
We then paid our tip, and retraced our steps back to the Ampelmann shop, through the square where the books were burnt, where Danny was cheeky enough to respond to my wails of despair about the books, "They are only books, Skye." He then spent the next 15 minutes laughing hysterically at my reaction to this, and his own amusement at his brilliant (I say this quite sarcastically!) humour.

We did a bit of souvenir shopping, bought silly ampelmann things, resisted the urge to buy an actual ampelmann light, and headed back to the hostel.

After resting for a little while, we headed out to find dinner, which was a little bit frustrating. I (as most of you will know) am a bit particular about what I eat, and I really am not the kind of person who is comfortable just ordering anything off a menu. So when we spent 20 minutes looking without finding anywhere with English on the menu, I got a little bit sick of it and in a mood where I wanted very much to be in Australia. I had decided I was going to live off Pringles chips because at least I knew what they were, when we found a Russian restaurant that had English on the menu! Hooray!

An Australian and a Kiwi walk into a Russian restaurant in the middle of Berlin and ask for an English menu.... sounds kind of like the start of a joke.

The food was brilliant, and thus ended day 19!

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Comments

[mum]

Has Manford been watching King Kong?
In one of your photos Manford looks like he is trying to scare all the people acting like King Kong and then your last photo he looks like he is running away from a bear! Tell him he has big teeth and don't let the bear (and anything else) scare him, just bite them!! Wow what a day and so much information. I am amazed you three have not run out of steam! You must sleep well. Take care, praying for you mum and Ron.

[Wez]

Titanic
I reckon I could eat it in one sitting. Sounds like a good tour though, depressing, but good, especially for free =p