First Time in Berlin!

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I arrived in Berlin ready to explore the next capital! I’m considering a university in Berlin too so Mia and I planned a weekend trip to see the city and the university. I flew straight from Paris to Berlin and I picked up Mia at the bus station this morning. Then we went back to the hostel really quick to drop off the bags before we got started seeing the city. The hostel we’re staying at is awesome! Huge room, wifi, pool, sauna, private bathroom with huge shower, the works. It’s part hostel and part hotel. We’re staying in the hostel part and for only 16 Euro a night! It’s called Plus Berlin and they have “plus” branches in a few major European cities like Prague, Florence, and a couple more I can’t remember. Well, that was my recommendation for today. Our hostel is in a prime location right next to the East Side Gallery, the most famous section of the Berlin Wall. It’s also really close to the metro and suburban rail lines and less than 10 minutes to Alexanderplatz on the metro. We picked this hostel for it’s location, because we wanted to stay in East Berlin, but it ended up being much more than a good location!

Actually, I have another - “Free Tours”. I’m sure a lot of travellers have already heard of this tour company. They’re not “actually” free, because they work on “tips” if you “appreciated” the service, but it was a really amazing tour. My friend Jordi in Munich first told me about them and they work in a ton of major cities in Europe and do tours everyday in a common meeting point. You just show up and tell them you want to come along. They also run specialized topic tours like visits to the concentration camp, but they have an upfront fee. The city tour is free though and it was a 3 ½ hour walking tour through Berlin. I wanted to go with a tour, because I really love learning more history about WWII and the Cold War and this is basically the best city in the world for that.

Before the tour began Mia and I first went to the Reichstag (parlament building) to see this really awesome “glass dome” inside. It’s one of the most famous sights in Berlin and I really wanted to see this is in person. It’s not very old, but it’s a really cool piece of modern architecture and looks like it’s made of mirrors. But when we got up to the queue to get in, we found out that SO many people wanted to come see it, that it was a security hazard (it’s still the parlament building), so now you have to make a reservation online 3 weeks in advance! Bummer! So I won’t be able to see it this time. This building is super important for German history. Hitler (may have) started the fire here that let him “legally” take power by “state of emergency” here in this building.

From there we walked to the most famous monument of Berlin, the Brandeburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor). This has a unique history too (I learned a few new facts in the tour that we too after too). It was originally one of 18 gates that allowed access into the city of Berlin. Also, the Germans designed every building around this gate as dull and boring as possible, so as to pull more attention towards the star attraction, the gate. The woman on top riding the chariot was originally named Irena after the goddess of peace. Napolean Bonaparte liked her so much, that he took her and put her in his private collection in Le Louvre. The Prussians obviously hated that he stole their statue of peace and they ended up eventually getting it back when they defeated him, but they made a change or two. First they renamed her Victoria after the goddess of war. Then they took the wreath of oak leaves she was holding and supplemented it with an iron cross, a military symbol.

We had breakfast near the gate and then went to the meeting point for the tour. The tour was awesome, as I said. It started at the Brandenburg Gate where our guide gave us some info about the gate. From there we went around back to the Reichstag and he gave us a full history of the city of Berlin, the political turmoil after WWI, and the rise of Hitler. Berlin started out as a swamp-fishing village until the Hohenzollern family moved here and made it a tiny kingdom. This grew and eventually made what was Prussia during WWI. The Hohenzollern family actually ruled for over 500 years. From the early 1400’s until the end of WWI in 1918 when the Weimar Republic took over.

FrFrom the Reichstag we took a short walk to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a really strange and controversial memorial for many reasons. It cost a ton to make to make and all it really is, is a bunch of concrete slabs. It’s open to interpretation what all of it means exactly, because there was no explanation by the designer and no plaque explaining anything. It’s a very large area (almost 5 acres) and right in central Berlin. The concrete blocks start out very short and get a little bit taller as you go deeper in, but the ground also dips too, so you’re walking into these rows of tall concrete blocks and the ground sinks down too. They’re not spaced very far apart and there are over 2700 of them. It was pretty interesting. Our guide let us walk around a bit on our own before continuing to a very interesting site. Hitler’s bunker.

Hitler’s bunker is nowadays unreachable. The German government did not try to reconstruct the parts destroyed and instead flooded and sealed it off. Mostly because they didn’t want it to become a neo-nazi shrine. This is the bunker where Hitler married Eva Braun and then shot himself. Afterwards he had two guards come in, take his body, and burn it. He didn’t want his corpse to be dragged around in the streets like Mussolini’s. The bunker is now under a normal dirt/gravel parking lot and the government actually finally put up a sign claiming that this was the spot, because tourists kept knocking on the neighbors doors asking them if this is where Hitler’s bunker was. So we didn’t get to go inside or anything, but it was an interesting site nonetheless.

Next on the tour was a very well built, originally Nazi building. The Nazis built this building with great effort, thinking that the Third Reich would last 1000 years, they wanted to make their buildings stand the test of time. This particular building was for the Luftwaffe (the airforce) during the Nazi period. The buliding wasn’t destroyed in WWII and the Soviets took over the building and used it for their own government use. This is where the 1953 Uprising took place when over 250 protesting East Berliners were killed by the Red Army to stop the protests against the Stalinist government of East Germany. 250 people massacred by the army and even more injured. Needless to say the people of Germany really hated this building. Our guide told us that after the Cold War the German government really didn’t want to destroy this building, because it was so well built. So since they couldn’t use such a hated monument for much, they put the offices of the department of taxes here!

And now what I had been waiting for, the Berlin Wall. We saw a big section (we’re seeing the biggest, called the East Side Gallery, tomorrow.) that’s been somewhat preserved. It had a lot of holes in it from where it’s eroded, but it’s still intact enough. This was a fourth “generation” part of the wall and so a little different in design from the rest. The part of the wall we saw didn’t have the trenches, barbed wire, spotlights and watch towers with snipers like it would have if we were here in the 60’s, but it’s still a deep reminder nevertheless of how this city and it’s inhabitants were literally divided and separated from eachother for so long.

A short walk from there is a very famous Berlin spot, Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie is a reconstruction (not actually very accurate) of the checkpoint between the American and the Soviet sectors of Berlin during the Cold War. There are plaques there detailing different escape attempts and skirmishes and also a booth where you can get your passport stamped for passing from through the checkpoint. There’s also a huge sign with two sides. One has the face of an American soldier who was stationed at Checkpoint Charlie, and on the other side is a Soviet guard. I thought it was kind of funny that they put this high in the middle of the road. People having to go to and from work down this road would always feel like they’re crossing a border.

There’s also a truly amazing chocolate shop near this street that makes chocolate replicas of huge monuments and other symbols. They’re completely edible too! They had the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Titanic, and a giant bear!

We took a coffee break at a nearby café and then continued on to Gendarmenmarkt. A really cool square with two almost symmetrical churches, one protestant and the other catholic. We also went to Bebelplatz, which would’ve been even better if we could stand on the square to see the buildings, but there’s a German fashion week thing going on here and the entire square is filled up with temporary buildings for the fashion show. This was really disappointing, because the university I’m thinking of attending here in Berlin is right on this square. It’s called Humboldt, it’s over 200 years old, and it’s one of the most famous universities in Berlin. It’s a really great looking building and our tour guide is actually doing his masters degree here. Hopefully this weekend I can find time to go inside and talk to them about admissions too. There’s also a very interesting opera house on this square that’s been rebuilt four times! It burned down once a while back, then it was bombed by the British during WWII to piss off Hitler (he loved the opera). Hitler had it rebuilt, even though he was fighting a war on 7 fronts. He made this a priority and the entire thing was rebuilt in 2 years. Three months after it was reopened, the Americans bombed it again. To finish up the square we saw a monument across “Unter den Linden” (Under the linden trees in English), which is the most famous and well known street in Berlin. The monument was to ALL the victims of tyranny and dictatorship and below the the building are the remains of an unknown nazi soldier and a concentration camp victim. The statue inside is called “mother with her dead son” in English.

We finished the tour on the Museum Island and at the Berliner Dom, a stunning dome and another very well known symbol of Berlin. This dome is so beautiful and quite hard to describe so I’ll leave that to the pictures (just ignore the dreary weather). I’m not trying to endorse the tours or anything, but it was really a great experience and really good for anyone wanting to know a little more history behind the monument and go beyond tourism. We finished the day having dinner and walking through the GDR (East German) museum near the Berlin Dome. It was small, but pretty interesting. It was all about life for the East German during the Cold War and Soviet rule. "The wall in the mind" is a saying about Berlin as a city nowadays. Even though the city is reunited, there's a very obvious difference from one side to the other. Some West Berliners are upset that they have to pay higher taxes to help the East develop, and East Berliners feel that West Berliners all have better jobs. There's still a "wall in the mind" so to say.

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Photos

Reichstag
We wanted to see the famous glass dome/upside down cone inside, but you need reservations

Hotel Adlon
where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out the window. Some suites in this hotel get up over $15,000 a night

My own interpretation
Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe

Part of the Wall
graffiti

Hitler's Bunker
under this parking lot

This is what Checkpoint Charlie really was
basically a road block

"Mother and her murdered son"
in the memorial building to all victims of tyranny and dictatorship