European Escapade 8: Checkpoint Charlie & the Fall of the Wall

---

Berlin, Germany: August 13th - August 16th

The trip to Berlin was really interesting. The train track followed a river most of the way which was good, as it was a bit different than the open fields we had seen on our other journeys. Along the way we noticed so many power plants (about 6), including one nuclear one - it seemed that the Czech countryside was full of them! The river here also had a lot of weirs in it, & some very big locks so that some quite large ships were able to move along there (I guess to provide things to the power plants or to Prague itself). At one point we saw an impressive wee town, built alongside the river, but set back into the cliffs behind it. All the houses (totalling about 40 in all, plus a couple of t-shirt stores for the tourists) were in a single row half in the rocks, & half out. The train tracks were on the other side of the river & it made quite a nice view across the water & over to the wee houses & huge towering cliffs behind them.

Once we dealt with all the border guards & police again at the border to Germany, then we left the river & huge power plant facilities behind, & again began to see more wind turbines - in fact, there were hundreds of them spread out over quite a huge distance. We began to see the German-style houses again, with their wee beer gardens out the back, & we headed through Dresden, which was apparently almost completely flattened during WWII - it looked as if a lot of effort had gone into getting it back to it’s former glory, & I found the buildings to be quite impressive. I was interested in stopping off there, so maybe that can be something to look at another time. We were only meant to be in the station for a couple of minutes but in the end we were there for an hour - we found out later that a passenger had had some kind of medical emergency onboard the train. Soon enough we were on our way & made it in to Berlin after dark. The main station is Berlin was absolutely massive (& so brand new & clean) - it had about 3 levels of mall, as well as having the train station at the bottom, & two levels of metro/subway train up the top. We found the right metro to jump onto (changing lines once) & got to our hotel safely - we were quite impressed when we got there. I had scored an internet deal at a business-type hotel - empty rooms don’t make any money so we got a ridiculously nice room for hardly anything - excellent! We hadn’t had much to eat during the day so we went looking around the area for some place to sit & relax, finally settling on a late-night Chinese restaurant, which was top-rate - it was funny eating Chinese in Germany, but what a great place. Really yummy & a great end to a long day!


Day 20 - This morning we woke up to pouring rain, & weren’t quite sure what to do with our time, as many things to see in Berlin are outdoors. We started off by going to an area called Alexanderplatz, a huge square with lots of restaurants. Unfortunately the whole thing was under reconstruction (of course), so it wasn’t that interesting to stick around for very long, but we did get something to eat. From there we decided to visit the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, which was based in town, near some of the last remains of the Berlin Wall. Checkpoint Charlie was the main checkpoint (guarded gate) through the Berlin Wall, separating East & West Germany - the museum was absolutely excellent (please check out the website if you're interested, as the internet shot shown here is all I have!)! We learned so much about the Berlin Wall itself, humorous tales of escape over it & ways of hiding in cars to get through it - some stories were quite a laugh, although of course, there were many serious tales & those with unhappy endings as well. I found myself to be incredibly interested in the history of the wall, & what it meant for the German people (& communism as well) - perhaps because I can only just remember it happening at the time, I’m not sure, but it was fascinating! We took some photos of the old checkpoint building, which still remains outside (again, more lost photos). From there were visited the old piece of the Berlin Wall just down the road, which had a display set up alongside it, on the old grounds of the SS Guard compound. The Wall itself was protected by fencing, so you couldn’t really get up close & personal with it, & it was hard to take a decent photo there.

When we were finished with that area of town we walked up towards Potsdamerplatz, a completely redeveloped area of town, with many large high rises all designed by different architects, giving it a an interesting but mismatched kind of look, especially considering the buildings weren’t even the same shape. In fact, the area kind of illustrated Berlin as a whole - Dad calls it the City of Cranes, which I had not imagined to be so true until I arrived. With much rebuilding after WWII & also after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the entire city seemed to be undergoing a transformation into a brand new metropolis. I think I only saw about 4 old buildings the whole time I was there - once all the construction is finished it will be incredibly had to believe that the city is actually quite old. It’s quite odd to see a place of that size which is all so new! It was kind of like a fake city. Potsdamerplatz was near a large central city garden called Tiergarten, which we walked past on one side on our way to see one of Hitler’s Bunkers, which was just some concrete concealed in muddy clay, surrounded by contractors fencing, which was a bit bizarre - I’m not sure if it had just been discovered, but nothing had been done with it. In fact, you weren’t even allowed in there but I busted in to take a photo of course. After just another few minutes walk we made it to the Holocaust Memorial site, a strange area filled with hundreds of rows of black marble-type rectangular blocks of varying heights. Am not sure what it was meant to symbolise specifically but it was interesting & we were both glad we went. Although we were very close to some of the other main hot spots to see in Berlin, we decided to jump on the metro to a local bus that could take us all around the main spots of the city, & save some of the other places for the next day. The bus ride was really good & we got a good view from the top deck of the double-decker - it gave us a good idea of a few other places to check out while in Berlin too. The bus journey finished in Alexanderplatz which was fairly close to where we were staying. We got some really nice dinner (local food, which wasn’t too badly priced) - no, this time it wasn’t sausages, but special fried meatballs in sauce. Very nice! We went back to the hotel for a relax after that, as we had been quite busy & the weather still wasn’t too impressive. Good stuff!


Day 21 - Today we went to the Chinese restaurant from our first night for breakfast - it really was good food & we couldn’t pass up the chance to eat there again! We had planned to visit Brandenburg Tor (Brandenburg Gate) & the Reichstag Building (Parliament) nearby. Brandenburg Gate is famous in combination with the history of the Berlin Wall - the Wall used to pass right in front of the gate (in fact, a coloured brick line still marks where the Wall used to be, right throughout the city) & the square in front of the gate was the site of mass protests in the late 1980’s when the people decided they had had enough of the Wall separating the people of Berlin, & of Germany. We had a look around that area (also under reconstruction - of course) & then headed over to the Reichstag. From there we walked down to Museumsinsel (Museum Island) where there were all kinds of museums & art galleries. The weather had become quite nice by that time (in fact, it was quite hot & sunny) so we just sat on the soft grass outside the main buildings, near the fountain.

While we were there a walking tour came along & had a rest near us, & we got to catch the end of their tour. The guide pointed out that a building across the road had been one of the older buildings left undamaged after WWII but it was still being pulled down to make way for redevelopment. It seems as if there will not be much at all left of the real Berlin soon. The guide also told the story of the Berlin Wall, which was awesome - the Russian Communists realised they could not keep pushing across Europe, as they did not have enough resources to take over every single country. The people in Germany kept moving further & further West, to get away from the communist takeover, so eventually a wall was built to keep people from moving away. This meant that those on the East were now living in communist Germany & the wall happened to run right through Berlin - very messy. Whole communities & groups of families & friends were split up, & many people had to quite their jobs as they couldn’t get to work. The people in West Germany still had the same opportunities that they had before, but the people in the East now had hardly anything, including food. People would try to get through the border crossing daily, & would devise all kinds of plans (like hiding in specially made compartments in cars) to get across into the West. I think the Wall was there for about 28 years before the public decided they couldn’t take any more of it - they began to hear stories of Gorbachev offering ‘perestroika’ (essentially meaning ‘freedom of country’) to some parts of the USSR, who were choosing to form their own new countries. The Germans wanted this ‘perestroika’ for themselves & began to hold protests every Sunday in front of Brandenburg Gate. At first there were just a few hundred people, but every week the number grew & grew, until one Sunday in November 1989, 70,000 people gathered in the square. By this time even the communist guards (many of who were German themselves) began to revolt against the idea of the Wall. A press conference was held, & the press secretary (who was drunk) accidentally told the people that the Wall would come down immediately (it was thought that the Wall would eventually fall, but not for a year or two) - Vaughan enjoyed learning about the drunken press secretary, Gunther Shabowski, because the story was kind of amusing. Of course, the people were so ecstatic that the Wall would be coming down, that they took to it with machines, axes, & even their hands. Some of the border crossings were opened that night, & people were reunited with their friends & families for the first time in years.

I found all of this so incredibly interesting - it is, to the best of my knowledge, fairly accurate, although I have not really had time research it any further - yet! This walking tour made us both really interested in the history of Germany, but I still found it quite strange about all the new buildings around us - in fact, Berlin in general did not even seem German! Because it was such a large metropolis, there were many business people there who were not German either. There were very few German-style buildings or anything very historical at all (apart from Brandenburg Gate & the remains of the Berlin Wall), all the roads & transport systems were new & there was no sense of culture at all - no one wearing traditional dress, no stores selling cuckoo clocks & the like. It seemed as if we were in a new city in any Western country, but certainly not in Germany. It was not half as fun or as quaint (or as interesting in general) as Munich, & some of the other smaller German towns we had passed through. Berlin seemed a bit odd in that respect, but it was OK. Although it did smell more than anywhere else we went - not something to go back for!

In the evening we went looking for some cocktails (again - the ones in Prague weren’t really that great). We ended up walking some distance from the hotel & found a nice wee sushi café that also sold cocktails, so we sat outside under some big umbrellas for a while. Then we decided to go & get something to eat as it was almost dark, & as we walked back towards some nice places we had seen near the river, we could hear a concert going on nearby. We could even see it from the street we were walking on - in fact, it was across the river from us, in a small outdoor area with no surroundings, so you could see right in. We sat with some other people in a park next to the river & had a perfect view across the water. We realised after a few minutes that it was Simply Red - not the kind of music either of us are really into at all, but it was still really nice to hear the jazz solos drifting across the water in time to the lighting reflecting off everything. It started to rain so we only stayed for about 20 minutes, & then ran off to find somewhere to have some dinner close to the hotel. Although Berlin had no really won us over, we had enjoyed our day & all the things we had learned about Germany in general.


Day 22 - It was our last day in Berlin before heading off to Amsterdam in the evening, & we had planned to do the whole walking tour in the morning. However, we were both very tired & felt that we might not be finished with the tour before we would need to get on the train, so we gave it a miss. Just for something different (haha!) we headed back to the Chinese restaurant for brunch, & then just kind of milled around, deciding to take the metro over to a different part of town, where a 1.3km-long stretch of the Berlin Wall still remained. Much of the Wall was left open to local artists to create their own graffiti designs on it, but this remaining part (known as the East Side Gallery), mostly centred around the idea of freedom. It was really interesting to see some of the newer paintings that must have been done more recently, as they depicted some of the more amusing & famous stories of escape over the Wall. Unfortunately some of the older stuff was coming off quite badly (the top layer of concrete was actually crumbling) & also, many tourists had covered up some of these older paintings with their names & other destructive graffiti, which was a shame. Some of the older sections were more encouraging though, with artists revisiting their work over time to keep it in good condition - I particularly liked one section with hand prints painted on to it (the ‘hands of peace’), where other people had traced their hands as well, creating this massive wall of hands, over time - it looked quite cool despite not being the original image. It was bizarre that they had also imported truckloads of sand for a fake beach, all along one side of the wall - you could sit in deck chairs & drink alcohol, although there wasn't any water to be see at all. I really, really enjoyed seeing all the art & reading some of the messages - many of the paintings really were quite brilliant. I certainly would recommend a visit to this part of the Wall for anyone in Berlin!

From there we jumped back onto the metro & took a ride around the outer ring line, to see the city from a different perspective. There was a lot of (illegal) graffiti around the city that you could see from the metro, & it was definitely the most colourful & well-constructed graffiti I have ever seen. It was almost as if the artists made a point of using colour (the graffiti in London is black & white, & quite dull & uninteresting). Even though I know it’s not meant to be there, I thought it actually made the place a lot brighter. We saw lots of apartments & many more new buildings going up, all with the mandatory crane - it just cemented our thoughts about Berlin not having too much German culture, as such (it depends where you look, of course). We made it back to pick up our stuff & have a quick shop at the local store so that we had some supplies for our last train trip (boo hoo!) to Amsterdam.

---