Bear-lin

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So Greg and me, on our own, for six days/five nights in Berlin (to the American ear it sounds a bit like "bear-lean" and indeed the symbol of the city is an adorable bear which can be seen in decorated fiberglass varieties in various places, though not leaning).

I'm just going to say, if you're ever greeted by a hotel proprietor who says, "I have some good news and some bad news about your room," don't bother finding out what it is. Just go somewhere else. In this case, the "good news" ("... but it's off the street, so it's quiet") wasn't true, either, so we ended up with a room that was sweltering and unbelievably noisy at all hours and we didn't get much sleep. I am still bummed, because the hoteliers were so charming and we so wished we could have fully enjoyed our stay with them.

However! Bear-lin!

Almost too much twentieth century history here, and almost nothing of world interest before that. (Sorry, Preußen. Just not.) That's the thing about Germany. It literally didn't exist until 1871 when a zillion little principalities unified into it. I guess no wonder it burst onto the scene in the early 1900s with such a chip on its shoulder and turned into such a bully. It seriously had things to prove to the rest of Europe, all those powerhouse countries with real histories. Well, Germany made up for lost time.

If you're American with German immigrant ancestors, like I am and have a lot of, you can likely see the fingerprints of Germany's identity crisis in your family's US Federal Census records. Greg's Heitman grandparents reported their birthplace as "Holstein" in 1870, "Denmark" in 1880, and "Germany" in 1900. That isn't because they changed their minds about where they were born: it's because the place they were born was ruled by a different nation every time the census-taker asked! (Our Walters, who live in Schleswig-Holstein today, agreed that Holstein-Denmark-Germany is plausible.) My Rehbein great-great-grandparents, from Danzig/Gdańsk, answered "Poland Germany" in 1900, the census equivalent of "your guess is as good as ours". My great-great-grandfather Henry Fry answered "Germany" in 1850, "Preußen" in 1860, "Prussia" in 1870, "Württemburg" in 1880, and finally "Germany" again in 1900; he turned out to be from a village in what is now Nordrhein-Westfalen in far northwest Germany near Netherlands, which is really nowhere near Prussia or Württemburg but was controlled by each at various times. (I didn't discover that myself; I found another researcher who'd already done the heavy lifting.)

Anyway! Bear-lin!

It's a huge city. It gets stupid-hot in the summer (see: 84°F/27°C at 23:00), humid, and miserable (nothing is air-conditioned, not even museums). It's exhausting. But, public transit is like the best ever. Our delightful hotelier clued us in to the best local bus routes, which took us on several already-paid-for (because we'd bought transit passes) tours past the main sights in the company of locals, instead of on a pricey Stadtrundfahrt with tourists. I'm just now starting to learn how nice an option the aboveground bus or tram can be compared to underground subway trains or commuter trains to see a city. You get there almost as fast and you can see stuff along the way!

This is my third trip to Berlin, and our official plan was for me to show Greg my favorite things, which we decided would include:

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (WWII memorial)

Best thing to do here is find a stele to sit on and cry, or at least reflect. It's interesting to see the visitors interact with all those stones, and I have mixed feelings about the Dunkin' Donuts and Biergarten (beer garden) which have grown up next door, but in general a "living" memorial seems like a good way to honor so many dead.

Topographie des Terrors (WWII museum)

Massively expanded and improved since I last visited in 2005. The new interpretive center is a fantastic place to get a general overview of National Socialism and its horrors. We spent a lot of time and talked about a lot of things. Like, when the Nazis invented forms of torture that wouldn't leave marks and would therefore be harder to prove, they called those "verschaerfte Vernehmung", which translates as "enhanced interrogation". Hey! That's our euphemism! #americafyeah

Museumhaus am Checkpoint Charlie (Cold War/Berlin Wall museum)

Massive, and more zany and disorganized than I remember. As before, I think it tells even more about its activist founder, Rainer Hildebrandt, than it does about the Cold War and the Wall. This time through, Greg pointed out some of the weird inconsistencies: large parts of the museum are dedicated to non-DDR-related peace themes, like tributes to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and protests against nuclear weapons, but then there's the entire room set aside as a shrine to Ronald Reagan, who's about as non-peace-themed and pro-nuke as it gets. Hildebrandt seems to have appreciated Reagan for taking a strong stand against Communism and the Wall, which elsewhere he sharply criticizes the West for failing to do.

The neighborhood around Checkpoint Charlie has sprouted a lot of tourist traps, including the rage-inducing costumed theater students who stand in front of the Checkpoint Charlie replica guard shack and charge €10 to pose with you if you want to take any photo of it, and the stalled-for-funding municipal Cold War Museum which I understand is going to try to introduce a professional curated view of the Cold War, since the Checkpoint Charlie Museum definitely doesn't fill that void. The whole area, including the kitsch, is an absolute must-see.

Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (WWII museum)

Also completely re-done since my last visit in 2005, with more resources in English than before. (Last time I brought my English Andreaguide.) What I remember so strongly from last time, I didn't find at all on this trip: the point that these few German resisters matter because they prove resistance was possible and thereby they condemn all those Germans who chose not to resist. Because no matter how extensive the museum, no matter how many different types of resisters they honor, it seems to me that they were, at best, too few, too little, too late.

It's uncomfortable wondering if I'd have the strength to be a resister myself. The "left-wing intellectuals" who saw trouble coming and exiled themselves to foreign lands before the war seem, these days, more my speed, and I'm not sure I feel good about that. But looking at German resistance heroes whose contribution was a few basement meetings with their equally powerless neighbors, no real plans, no real possibilities, doing nothing but commiserate until they were infiltrated by Gestapo and shipped off to camps for the crime of commiserating, doesn't feel better.

Reichstag (outside only), Brandenburger Tor, Unter den Linden, Potsdamer Platz, Berliner Dom, general city views

They've redesigned and rerouted the queue to enter the Reichstag, which is a bummer because ugly fences on the front steps now (instead of an ugly queue of ugly tourists), and hideous security building in front, which wraps around and almost totally obscures the important memorial to KPD and SPD parliamentarians who were murdered by the Nazis shortly after the Reichstag fire of 1933.

Other than that, though, the sights of Berlin never disappoint. It's still wonderfully unsettling to turn around almost anywhere in the west and find the Fernsehturm breathing down your neck, which must have been the intention of the East Germans when they built it there.

The only thing we missed seeing was the Tiergarten and the view down the Straße des 17. Juni to the Siegessäule, due to the temporary construction of a huge Fanpark right in front of the Brandenburger Tor with a giant TV screen for viewing the 2014 FIFA Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft, which is what the Germans call the World Cup football tournament. Because our feet were done for the day by 22:00, and also it was intermittently thunderstorming, we skipped the Fanpark and watched the Germany-Brazil semi-final match on TV in our hotel. The many restaurants surrounding our courtyard were all showing the game on big-screen TVs which ran 5-10 seconds ahead of our broadcast for some reason, so we'd hear wild screaming and look up in time to see Germany score another goal against home team Brazil: 7 in all, 5 within the span of just a few minutes well before halftime, culminating in a 7-1 victory for Deutschland - an insanely high score in world football at this level. (Brazil were missing two star players, so I guess now we know how good those two guys are.) In American baseball (and somewhat American football) there is etiquette against "running up the score": after taking a very large lead, it's considered disrespectful to try too hard to score even more. We were assured by our football-loving Facebook friends that there's no such protocol in world football and perhaps it's considered disrespectful to ease up on a team after taking the lead on them. I'm not sure all those sobbing Brazilian children (and adults) in the stands would agree. That was the one evening we really did enjoy the noise at our hotel, even the honking horns on the Kantstraße (Kant Street) for a few hours after the game ended around 01:00.

One of our best days was when we took the tram a ways outside the city center (still very urban, just not Mitte) to Maria Bonita, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant Greg found online. The food and drinks were amazing, and we loved just wandering around a regular neighborhood with regular people. Rolling the dice doesn't always work out, but it's such a win when it does.

Alexanderplatz (open-air Cold War museum - I'm only partly kidding)

Holy cow, this place has sprouted malls. It's still got a fair amount of Soviet ambience, but there are shiny new buildings, filled with modern consumer goods, obscuring the miles of Soviet block housing once visible from this square.

Bad news, my favorite Eiscafé on the Karl-Marx-Allee has closed (it has other locations around Berlin, all too far away). Good news, we found a delicious new favorite Eiscafé at the Alexanderplatz S-Bahn station.

Schloß Charlottenburg

Shhh... don't tell... I found something interesting pre-twentieth-century in Berlin.

Prussian Queen Sophie Charlotte, patron of this palace, and her teacher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, feature very prominently in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, which I'm still the only person I know to have read all of. Palace tours are always long, slow, and feature lots of standing, so it's nice to collapse in the palace gardens afterward, which we did.

And so! Bear-lin!

That's six days' and five nights' worth. We skipped a bunch of things that would be great to see next time, like the interactive DDR Museum and the Berlin Wall Memorial outside of the city center. We've even got a lead on a better place to stay. Berlin is challenging but always a must.

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Photos

Memorial church
Unbelievably ugly on the outside, with this glorious blue on the inside.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Ambivalent about those cafés in the background.

Resistance
I know that feel, sister.

Explorating
We wandered around a regular neighborhood.

This seems so wrong
An electronics store now sits in front of my favorite socialist realist mural.

Charlottenburg mirror hall
Bringing the outside inside.

Preußischen Kronjuwelen
Crown jewels of Prussia.

View on Karl-Marx-Allee
There's still a bit of the East here if you walk behind the malls.

World Clock and TV Tower
OK, more than just a bit of the East. :)

Comments

[J&J]

Bear-lin
So much to see and read about! Interesting explaination of the German family birth locations that were renamed.