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Published: April 4th 2007
Brandenburg Gate
I'd give anything to have been here in 1989! I’ve spent much time east of the Iron Curtain and made several visits to Germany, but this weekend I finally made it to the one place where the Cold Warriors stared one another down, literally, face to face: Berlin. I took the 4.5 hour train journey from Prague and arrived early evening on a Friday. After a packed week of class projects, my 6 Taiwanese friends and I were tired, but Berlin was abuzz. Our train arrived at the main station, recently renovated and ultra-modern, and we made our way to our hostel, right in the heart of East Berlin, feet from what used to be the Berlin wall. We crossed the old border without thought or hesitation, something incomprehensible only 2 decades ago.
My expectations were that the East side of the city would be relatively run-down, and the West just like the cities of Frankfurt, Munich, etc. There are certainly some Communist bloc apartment buildings scattered about, but in fact, East Berlin is a lively, busting, modern place that in many places out-does its Western counterpart! It makes sense—Germany has invested more than US$1 trillion to bring the East up to Western standards since 1989. It isn’t
Berlin Canal
Self Explanatory there yet, and I have never been here before, but I can tell this place has undergone dramatic transformation. All the cranes and scaffolding made me think of China.
Despite the changes there are, of course, monuments to the past—despite the place being bombed to oblivion on several occasions. Here only for a brief weekend, I decided to spend all of my first day with a map and a sense of adventure, and did a city tour of East Berlin. We started out at Brandenburg Gate (pictured), which was painstakingly renovated but still obviously the place where so many of us watched the East and West Berliners reunited in November 1989. The place literally reeks of history—Berlin is built on a swamp and the sewers on the E. half, well, could use some upgrades! Yet there is a beautiful new French Embassy situated right on the plaza, with the American Embassy on its way. It will be among the few new US Embassies that doesn’t meet standard security perimeter requirement…but apparently the Americans were keen to upgrade and re-open the place where its embassy to Germany once sat before the division and the Brandenburg Gate can’t be moved!
As I walked through the gate, I noticed a cobble stone pathway that divided the road—it turns out to be the footprint of the Berlin Wall (pictured). You wouldn’t know it by looking around—the city seems integrated and although I expected the East to be lined with industrial chimneys, clunky cars, and dodgy people, it was nothing like it. It’s a little rough around the edges, but, the Germans have done a phenomenal job re-integrating the city. Just past the Brandenburg gate is an unusual monument of cubes rising from the pavement. At street-side they are flush with the ground, growing slowly until they reach dramatically to the sky—about 15 feet into the air. The subtle rise is meant to mirror the latent anti-Semitism that emerged in Hitler’s Germany, rising slowly until it made an unmistakable detour in Germany’s path in history. The walkways that travel between these structures are not flush and rise and fall dramatically, to mirror the instability of the Third Reich. The maze is a bit disorienting, and if you go with a group, sometimes you look back to see that your neighbor is missing, and nowhere to be found. You can hear voices nearby, but
can see no-one. The architects planned this with considerable thought.
When you finally make it out of the maze, you end up on a nondescript street corner lined with Communist-looking buildings flanked by an unremarkable car park. There is a dusty clearing next to the parking lot that isn’t exceptional but for a sign which shows an elaborate-looking diagram—strange for such a disinteresting place. But it turns out that the bunker where Hitler committed suicide is below the dusty clearing. It was completely destroyed, though TNT didn’t do the job—they had to drill hundreds of holes into the cement to weaken it first. The Germans placed only a simple sign there out of fear that an elaborate marking would attract neo-Nazis who would establish the area as a shrine for extremism. Interestingly, the fairly ugly apartment buildings (pictured) surrounding the area are actually quite nice relative to the others of the time—these were designated for party elites and had the distinct advantage of height, allowing views into West Berlin.
Roughly 100 meters past Hitler’s bunker stands one of the few Nazi-era buildings that survived the Allied bombings. It looks like many other cold-looking buildings behind the Iron Curtain,
except that there is a brilliantly colorful propaganda painting on the side (pictured) depicting happy, beautiful Germans working together in communist solidarity in factories, on the farms, and on the railways. Reality was a bit different, and upon re-unification the German government decided to keep it but balance the propaganda piece with something else. So, out in front of the building is a glass mural embedded in the walkway, showing German dissenters who once protested in front of the building. On day two of their protest, they were gunned down. Now their memory is etched in history.
Around the corner from this building is one of several sections of the Berlin Wall (pictured) that has been preserved. It isn’t as imposing as I imagined it to be, but then again it is only part of the picture. During Soviet times there were actually two walls, with a no-man’s land in between in which many who attempted flight were gunned down under the watchful eye of the E German border patrol. But it is reinforced concrete and at least 10 feet high, and its purpose is quite clear. It is now protected by an outer fence, but I managed to
grasp a piece of this history and it was surprisingly satisfying.
From here I was only about ¼ of a mile from Checkpoint Charlie, the (in)famous crossing between the divided city. Most of the infrastructure is now gone, and what is there is largely replicated for public viewing. Yet the pedestrians and BMW’s that race across the non-existent line without batting an eye are still impressive to me. Watching over this activity is a large post with a picture of an American solider symbolically staring down the East (pictured). Opposite his image is his Soviet counterpart. (pictured). There remains a small house with actors posing as American soldiers in the center of the street, and the stately building housing the Café Adler (pictured), allegedly the center of much of the Allied intelligence activity in the area, still stands over all of this, but now filled only with locals and tourists alike. I came to this place at night after most of the crowds had disappeared and feasted on a baguette and a coffee while thinking about my first day in Berlin. I remember reading about this place in 1988 in my sixth grade social studies class, and I can’t
Rush Hour
Or, whatever it is... believe I am now sitting here watching what used to be the cause of so much fear. Some of the stories of desperation I heard were amazing, and the pictures of East Germans gunned down as they fled terribly sad. One of the more extreme techniques of escape that I read about consisted of ripping out the passenger seat of a diplomatic vehicle and literally reconstructing it around the defector. The defector would sit “inside” the seat, with the passenger seated on the seat, for the duration of the journey. This actually worked!
The rest of the attached pictures show the renovated historical buildings and neighborhoods I wandered through all day, as well as some of the newest and brightest buildings around. It is the youngest and most lively, vibrant place I’ve been in Europe, as well as clean and bright. It’s a tremendous effort that is clearly still in progress—there are cranes and construction projects everywhere. The food and service were great, and I am looking forward to spending a day at one of the first concentration camps Hitler built, tomorrow.
We boarded a train to a quiet town on the outskirts of Berlin. It took about
an hour to reach our destination, Ossenburg a little German town like any other—except this one had the dubious distinction of hosting a Nazi concentration camp. This hasn’t exactly helped its growth—many of the homes are the same ones that were there in the post-war era. The town is quite normal—we walked down a tree lined-street where people were tending their gardens and walking their dogs. But at the end of the street we were greeted by a foreboding grey slate wall. It looked miserable. And beyond it was a no-man’s land—just fields and trees. It was very barren, unforgiving, and inhumane. We approached a large gated building with a clock tower, the time stopped at 11:07—apparently the time that the Soviets entered the village and put an end to the Nazi activities there.
But, the town was also known for something else. There is a signpost marking the beginning of a “death march”, which occurred when Nazi leadership realized their fight was up, but that they should at least finish up their job of killing off their “undesirable” prisoners. They decided the best thing to do was march north, to the sea, to escape the approaching Allied
and Soviet troupes from either side. The plan was to put them all—several thousand—onto waiting barges, set them to sea, and then torpedo them. But they never made it as far. Most of the prisoners were too weak to make the journey, and many died. Their Nazi escorts became weary of the effort needed to keep the prisoners going, and abandoned them in order to escape themselves.
The camp was an atrocity in itself. The small prison barracks built to hold 150 housed 400 or more. The courtyard where the forced labor occurred faced, on one side, three utility-poles with a protruding nozzle used to tie prisoners’ hands (tied behind their back) and leave them hanging 8 feet in the air, such that their shoulders became dislocated. After that they could do nothing but hang there and wait to be dropped—and then back to work, dislocated shoulders and all. On the other side was a gallows, where those who fled were hanged in front of the others. The near side of the grounds contained a trench which was used for gathering groups of prisoners together and shooting them. Conveniently next door was a room filled with ovens to dispose
of the bulky corpses. This was done after a truck load of corpses crashed and spilled bodies in a small town, raising the suspicions of the people there. There was a track of sorts, roughly 400 meters, ringing part of the camp. It had different surfaces, and was useful for testing different materials for the Nazi military boots. The prisoners were given shoes with different materials and forced to wear them, regardless of whether they fit, and run back and forth on the various surfaces carrying heavy packs to emulate the battlefield. Yet the prisoners were weak from forced labor, sleep deprivation, and starvation. Typical daily rations included “soup” of hot water with dried turnips or in lucky weeks a ration of bread and piece of sausage. On all sides of the camp was a “neutral” ground where prisoners could never travel—the area about 10 feet in front of the perimeter wall. If you went there, you’d be shot. Yet sometimes the guards would taunt the prisoners by taking their clothes or tools and throwing them into the neutral zone and ordered them to get them. They then faced the decision of whether to disobey the order, and suffer the
consequences, such as solitary confinement where they had to stand without moving and stare at a blank wall for 19 hours+, or retrieve their belongings and get shot by the soldiers in the watch towers.
It was hard to decide what the worst thing about the camp was—like choosing between death by stoning or flames. But the psychological tactics used might have been the worst. Just beyond the grounds were the officer’s quarters, which were comfortable and held large amounts of good food and alcohol. They would have frequent banquets staffed by the prisoners, who had been doing manual labor all day, sickly and starving. They would then have to put on black and white restaurant attire, and serve the officers sumptuous meals and expensive French wine. They could have none of it, and were shot on the spot if caught taking any.
The camp is now strictly a museum, of course, but a work in progress. There is a giant communist-era monument facing the clock tower, which served as the entrance to the camp. It was build to be the largest thing on the camp, and to stare down the symbol of Nazi power to represent their
defeat by the Soviets. Many of the original buildings are gone, but the electrified barbwire fence which lines the perimeter fence is still there. It is so dusty and, in places sandy, you almost wonder if there is human ash flies beneath your feet when the wind picks up. It is eerily silent and so sterile that it can’t have been a place where thousands of people “lived”. But it was.
After spending the day there, no one was exactly upbeat. Some on the tour cried. The long train trip back into Berlin was nice because it gave time to reflect, but as we moved into the suburbs and got distracted by the houses, the people, buildings, landmarks, and daily life, it was easy to forget what was going on just down the street.
Back in Berlin, at the recommendation of a local waiter from a previous night out, we found a smoky German restaurant on the East side of the city, far from the tourist areas. No one spoke English, and for 5 Euros I had an unbelievable bratwurst with mustard, sauerkraut, and boiled potatoes, washed down with a fine pilsner. Afterwards, we returned to the center
and walked by many of the buildings we’d toured during the day, now illuminated with brilliant lights. At one square, I found a guy playing classical musical on his violin, in the shadow of a large church, surrounded only by the dark and a chandelier. I sat on a bench and listened to the music and let the cold night air beat against my unprotected face. It was the best evening I’ve had in years.
I’m now on a train, racing south toward Dresden. The fields are green and dotted with trees. There are giant windmills along the way, and, outside of Berlin’s center, I can finally see signs of economic discontent—graffiti, litter, tired buildings and weary farmers huddled by their limited material wealth-rusty cars and various household appliances. It isn’t as bad as I might have expected, but you can see the difference. That said, what the Germans have managed to do here is nothing sort of a miracle. When I think about the places I used to live and their abject poverty, I used to get depressed looking around and thinking how utterly hopeless it was. Though very, very different situations, this is at least a glimmer
of hope that one day, maybe those people we determine a more prosperous destiny for themselves too. I hope so anyway.
Dresden was clearly a city of history. I only had the afternoon to wander around but I managed to pop into many of the re-constructed churches and get a feel for how the city was re-constructed after WWII. I’m already long-winded so I’ll end there and attached some pictures….
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