Ich liebe Berlin

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Well, one major flight stuff up, 4 hours and 400 pound later I made it to Berlin and wow!! I love this place! So I’m back on my own again, and it actually feels really good.

So I get to my hostel, check in and after a bit of Facebooking I find out that Olly’s in town, so we decided to catch up for an ‘alternative’ pub crawl. We saw some really cool places, a club that Rammstein used to own, a pub where there’s a constant game of circular ping pong, and of course, and absinthe bar. I ended up having way too many absinthes with the other guys on the crawl. Mary, Rose and I can’t remember the name of Mary’s brother, but such great people, and luckily this other guys from Seattle was staying at the same hostel or I would never have found my way home. So yeah, thanks for that Seattle.

The next morning I met this girl Amanda at breakfast and I joined those guys on a walking tour of Berlin. This city is so amazing, given that the city was practically destroyed in WWII, then with the amazingly recent history of communism and the Berlin Wall, it just seem so weird to think that all that happened only 20 years ago. The city is so rich with history, tales of oppression, heroism, and survival, the city is ever growing, ever changing, still finding it’s personality. The best way I can describe Berlin is like an adolescent teenager that just moved out of home. The whole city has this real alternative and expressive vibe to it. The tour guide Sadie was really amazing too, she really knew her shit, and could tell a good story that would have you on the edge of your seat. The tour went for like 4 hours and was truly great. Berlin has the sights to see like your Paris’ or Romes but the difference is that firstly the history is so much more recent, and more importantly there are so many human stories or everyday people behind everything, it’s really amazing, but hard to explain. There are dozens of tourist hotspots in Berlin, but also some hidden gems, so I’ll only briefly touch on a few that I found the most interesting, and note that you probably won’t find some of these on anyone’s top 10.



Brandenburg Gate

If you’re in Berlin the Brandenburg Gate, being one of the most recognised monuments in Europe, is definitely worth a look, it’s an amazing monument, in fact one of the few monuments that survived WWII relatively unscathed. It’s got a lot of history behind it and the statue on top has been changed a few times, but you can read up on that later. For celebrity buffs, across the road is the hotel in which Michael Jackson infamously dangled his new baby over the railings in front of thousands of onlookers.



Holocaust Memorial

This is a massive and incredible piece of architecture. Contrary to popular opinion, the architect has never mentioned how it is supposed to be interpreted, he wanted each person that walked through it to interpret in their own individual way. You wander through these columns that rise and fall, although you’re not really sure whether the ground is getting lower or the columns are getting higher. It’s a really interesting and disorientating experience. Definitely give it a look and see what you personally take from it.



The Book Burning Memorial

For avid readers like myself, you will appreciate the sheer tragedy that was the Nazi book burning. <span> On 10 May 1933, upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books were torched in a symbolic act of “purifying” German literature.<span> Among the authors whose books were burned that night were Karl Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, August Bebel, Jack London, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, Heinrich Heine and many others. This fire included swag of first and only editions. One can only imagine what incredible literature the world lost forever on this fateful day. So in the square where this burning took place is a glass tile, looking through this tile shows an underground room filled with ……… empty bookshelves. The symbolism is obvious, but it’s really good to see such a humble memorial. There’s no massive statue, no glaringly obvious sign (in fact you actually have to look for it), not massive story or plaque to read, just empty shelves in an empty room. Really powerful.



Hitler’s Bunker

When Hitler’s Bunker was found, Germany decided that it was never to be memorialised. They didn’t want people worshipping it, or lighting candles there, or tourists talking about it; they wanted Adolf Hitler and anything relating to him wiped from the minds of people. They did not want Berlin to be synonymous with this man. So when his bunker was found it was collapsed, filled with concrete, and now lies somewhere in an unimportant car park at the back of an unimportant apartment building, if you weren’t shown you would not know it was there. I think this is a tribute to Berlin, and although me writing this kinda defeats the purpose, I just think it’s great to see. <span> An interesting fact is that after Hitler was cremated, his ashes were then soaked in petroleum jelly and then re-cremated (yes they burned him twice), then the remaining ashes were scattered so that he may not rest.



Checkpoint Charlie

There’s a lot of history behind this place that you can read up on but there’s just something I wanted to point out. When you get to Berlin and find Checkpoint Charlie, please keep in mind that the little hut you see labelled “Checkpoint Charlie” with the two guards on either side is NOT THE ORIGINAL CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, in fact it’s nothing like what it looked like and it’s not even in the same spot. But if you go across the road there’s some great big boards showing photos and details of the original checkpoint, including photos of the tanks staring each other down from each side, another great story :-).



The Berlin Wall

Ok, so I’ve saved the best for last, my favourite, the Berlin Wall.

Imagine that you and your wife want a Saturday night to yourselves, so you drop your kids at your parents place and enjoy a lovely quiet evening at home. The next morning you are heading off to pick the kids up and there’s a 6 foot high wall of barbed wire separating you and your kids. This one of many tales that tells the human story of the wall.

At midnight on Saturday, 12 August 1961, German troops laid 200kms of barbed wire separating East and West Berlin. By Sunday morning, no ones life would ever be the same. A week later construction began on the concrete wall that was to separate Berlin for 30 years.

There are hundreds of stories of daring escape from East Berlin, and families reunited through incredible odds, it’s really worth sitting down with someone to hear some stories.

So fastforwarding 30 years to the Velvet Revolution, and 70,000 East Germans gather in the streets to protest the oppression. The next week this number swelled to 120,000 people all gathered in the streets chanting “We are the people! We are the people!”. The next week this number more than double to 320,000 people. These people then pulled the keys from their pockets and began to jingle them in unison, symbolising the unlocking of the doors to West Berlin. The sound of jingling keys could be heard for miles. This pressure, along with a verbal slip-up from a German spokesman named Schabowski, resulted in the inevitable fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th, 1989, when East Germans rushed the gates and ended 30 years of communist oppression. There are some amazing stories of mother’s recognising their children after 30 years through a crowd of 100s of thousands of people, and loved ones re-united. Families were reunited, people celebrated, but no Champagne flowed, instead, Bananas ;-).

It’s a great story and I could go on about it for hours, but do yourself a favour and read up on it or take a tour or something, because it really is an incredible piece of relatively recent history.

Another point to mention is that in a world where freedom of speech and artistic expression were outlawed, illegal street art became a primary means of personal expression, and the Berlin Wall became a canvas for thousands of street artists risking their lives to express themselves. Unfortunately, very little of this original artwork remains today. The most famous section of the wall was re-painted in 2009. Although some of the original artists were asked to return to complete the make over, many others were either not known or not asked and this has created some friction in the street art community who believe that, although the work was illegal in the first place, they should have been consulted about the removal of their work. It does look good now, but at what cost to authenticity. I don’t know, you be the judge.



There really is heaps to see, these were just a few I felt the need to mention.



So anyway, that night I went out to some local clubs with Amanda, Mike and these other 3 girls from Gippsland, Victoria, Ruby, Gretel and Monique. It was a night that started out crap and turned out to be epic, and I really got to know these guys, some of the best personalities I have ever met. Oh and we also met 3 Irish guys, John, Craig & Time, that were really cool lads.

The next day we were doing an alternative walking tour when Amanda & Mike backed which just left me and the Gippsland girls and what a day. The tour guide was this funky, alternative dude named Bart that lives in a trailer on a squatted piece of land but he knew a hell of a lot about the street art movement in Berlin. We saw some mind-blowing street art , including an original Banksy; a guy who lives in a tree, a bridge that hosts and annual food fight to determine it’s owner, an abandoned building that became a hub for artists, and some other quirky parts of the city. But I think the tour itself was trumped by my time with the Gippsland girls. These 3 girls have known each other their entire lives and the three of them and so very different that I cant believe they ever got along. Gretel is the quiet sensible type, Ruby is the load, crazy, speak-your-mind type and Monique is the neurotic, anally retentive, completely cynical, bitchy one, and together, the three of them were so much fun, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my entire life. On the walking tour we stopped at a Jamaican Beach Bar (yes, in land-locked Germany), and the place just had this cool, chilled out, stoned vibe about it. And so of course we got some weed from this Rasta, and the good times began. Ok so there’s not enough pages in the world to tell all the funny stories and personal jokes that came out of that day, plus they probably wouldn’t be funny unless you were there anyway. So for my own personal memory recall in years to come I’m just going to list some key words to jog my memory so I can still have a laugh when i'm old and grey, don’t mind me for the minute:

Splush … Shh, Shh, Shh

I’d do that for 20 bucks

The Swagger

Cookies and Cream

2 spoonfuls of period

Gretel! Suck a dick!

Burgermeister

No mayonnaise, oh wait, maybe just a little

Ordering a McFlurry with crushed wafer

Is it sweet? Really sweet, or just kinda sweet?

The fight over 1 dollar

How much to …..

I think that was shit!



I’m sure there was more but I can’t remember it all, such a fun day!

So that night there was some awesome DJ playing at the Watergate Club, so we all headed down to that. Watergate is the kinda place that you don’t just wander into, underdressed won’t get in, groups won’t get in, you know the place. So We split into couples and after Amanda and I got in, the rest of the crew made it obvious that they were in a group and they weren’t let in. It was unfortunate because it was a really cool club, really chilled out vibe, great beats, but unfortunately we had to go. It worked out alright though because after a brief stop at another club, nad an epic mission we ended up at Tressor, a fucking amazing club in an abandoned power station or something with awesome graffiti art everywhere.

It turned out to be an incredible night, and at the end it was Amanda with some Berliner named Marvin (or Pier ha ha private joke), Mike and me. After the club closed at 8am (you don’t see that back home) we picked up some beers and headed back to the hostel. So here we were drinking beers, smoking a joint and being ridiculously loud at 10am in the hostel courtyard, I’m so glad we didn’t get kicked out. Then we all had to check out and change rooms as we extended out stay. That was a rough day.

In summing up Berlin is officially my number one favourite place in the world. Ich liebe Berlin, I love Berlins became my catch phrase. Between WWII and the Cold War there is so much recent history, which has helped to create a city with so much personality. As I heard someone say, Paris will always be Paris, but Berlin is becoming Berlin”.

Thanks to all the amazing people I met there, for giving me a life changing experience, you will never be forgotten.

Sorry too, that this blog is so long, but Berlin really did have a remarkable impact on me.

Just one more keyword for Berlin: 'Have you ever seen a man eat his own head??' :-)

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