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Lichtenberg
Undies for one Euro! INTRO
One of the more curious political alliances I witnessed on the Hill was that between Henry Hyde and Jesse Jackson, Jr...both Illinois representatives but the similarities end there. They teamed up to almost succeed in, as I recall, redirecting FAA money away from O'Hare towards building a new airport to the south of Chicago. When JJJr spoke on the House floor about it, he held up a tourist's map of Chicago, and shouted, "my district isn't even on the map!" Well, think about it. The 660,000 Chicagoans he represents live in a part of town where no tourists go and, one might say, would never want to go. Would a new airport help? Ask someone who knows...
I offer this to introduce my favorite travelblog posting (to date). Over the past few days I went out to the furthest reaches of East Berlin. Off the tourist map. Almost off the transit map. And, from 1945-1990, in some cases, off the map on purpose.
LICHTENBERG
This district is just east of Ostkreuz, which is the easternmost point any normal tourist would hit. On 14 May the railyards for the streetcars had a party, celebrating their 125th year of electrification.
Lichtenberg
old East Berlin bus Berlin had the world's first electric mass transit...how's that for you Civ3 fans?! The scene was way more crowded than I thought. You could ride the old trams, and a long line allowed some patient Berliners to drive modern buses. U-bahn tighty-whiteys were on sale for only one euro...not quite as good as the London Underground "mind the gap" boxers. I almost dropped 25 euros on an old sign saying some seat was reserved for pregnant mothers...most cool signs were more expensive than that. I did get a postcard of the S-bahn map from 1961, the year the BWall went up. There were a lot of folks in wheelchairs at the fair...at first I thought there must be some hospital nearby, but they weren't in a group or anything. So I decided that the handicapped really appreciate mass transit, because it's the only way they can get around.
Lichtenberg is also home to the headquarters of the Stasi: East Germany's secret police, real police, and spy network all rolled into one. The complex is vast...one can take tours of the Stasi records (apparently more than a few marriages ended after this stuff saw sunlight). I just toured the HQ,
Lichtenberg
it's a party tram. it sez "drink & drive" where Erich Mielke managed that apparatus of state control for one the world's most thorough totalitarian dictatorships. It's kinda weird to see his office and whatnot...you can even get coffee in the Stasi generals' canteen. There are 007 spy kits as well--mostly for surveillance, not execution. The strangest were mason jars containing bits of cloth (to preserve someone's scent in case they needed to sick the dogs on him). Mielke, by the way, was a weirdo...even his breakfast was outlined and diagrammed. His guards had the dials of their radios taped, marking the forbidden bandwidth pumped out of West Berlin. He also thought himself the heir apparent to Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the red Russian NKVD and full-blown psychopath.
MARZAHN
This public housing project was a "prestige project" of the commies, and perhaps their last. The complex is, typically, ginormous. Built from 1975-1985, it housed 190,000 persons in 1989. Most buildings are 9 to 11 stories high. To the West, Marzahn is the symbol of state-planned housing run amok, but to the residents of East Berlin Marzahn was actually desirable. These flats were new, fairly large, had central heating and indoor plumbing. Quite a step up from the bombed-out
Lichtenberg
the tram hospital 1880s apartment in the center of town. Problem is, it was only housing. 190,000 persons need places to shop, to work, to play, to tear down a wall. Marzahn has changed a lot since 1990...perhaps more than any other part of Berlin, save Potsdamer Platz. Now "only" 140,000 souls call it home. Many buildings are being reduced to 3 or 5 stories, as the pre-fab, lego-like construction technique makes disassembly quite easy. Chop off some stories, add balconies and a new can of paint, and BOOM you've got a pleasant-looking apartment complex! It was eerily quiet, very clean, and very green. But I wouldn't want to live there.
HOHENSCHOENHAUSEN
This district is pretty close to mine. It's home to FC Dynamo Berlin, whose managing director in DDR times was none other than Erich Mielke. Their last game of the season was called off with 15 minutes to go because violent fans stormed the pitch. It's also home to the Berlin Eisbaeren (Polar Bears), this year's ice hockey national champs. (I didn't make it to a game. Sorry.) It's also home to one of the Stasi's secret prisons.
Gedenkstaette Hohenschoenhausen began life in WW2 as a food storage facility
and canteen for the Wehrmacht. After the war, the Russians used its cold-storage facility for torture and whatnot. About 4200 Germans suspected of Nazi ties were rounded up here from 1945-1951, and 3000 of them died of the "living" conditions. The rest were tortured into confessions and sent to Siberian labor camps. After the fall of the USSR, Russia announced that these persons were innocent. The Stasi inherited the prison in 1951, and made it kinder and gentler. Most deaths under the Stasi were from "blood cancer" from radiation poisoning from unnecessary X-ray-ing. The Stasi kept political prisoners here...not criminals. Today the Russian torture rooms have been refurbished with their instruments, based on survivors' testimony. The Stasi cells are as-is, vintage 1990, when human rights activists stormed the compound. Some survivors give tours today, and many are incapable of holding down jobs, while their Stasi overlords tend to do quite well for themselves in today's Germany. Erich Mielke, now dead, was actually compensated for his few years in jail in the 1990s (for two murders he commented in the thirties) and never was held accoutable for decades of methodical cruelty.
KARLSHORST
From 8-9 May, the German army, air force
Lichtenberg
<-- this way to the Stasi archive! and navy surrendered unconditionally to the Russians, British, Americans, and the French(!) at a pleasant house in the suburb of Karlshorst. The building was an officers' club in WW2, and became Bersarin's HQ during the final battle of Berlin. From 1945-1994, Karlshorst remained the command of the Russian military present in East Germany, but few Russian signs still adorn the neighborhood. In the early sixties, the building was made into "The Museum of the Capitulation of the Fascists." While this isn't untrue, it also is a bit unnecessary. In the nineties, Germany renamed it "Karlshorst Museum of German-Russian Relations." Whatever. The place is free and everything's in German and Russian. It traces German-Russian mistrust dating from the end of WW1, and has some great propaganda posters. The WW2 portion is the juiciest, with original Barbarossa maps and uniforms and weaponry, as well as footage of SS slaughters of towns in European Russia. The Nazis truly wanted to wipe the land clear of humans and human settlement. The surrender room is restored to its 1945 vintage, with some brief explanations of, say, why Britain was in WW2.
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