Willkommen in Deutschland

14 - 18 July

Note - this blogpost talks about some pretty depressing stuff from World War II & the Berlin Wall.


After a long train ride through much of the German countryside, I arrived into Berlin in the late evening. Somehow sitting in a train for 7-8 hours makes you quite tired, even though you're not doing anything, so I just had a quiet night at the hostel with a couple of beers with a guy from my dorm room.

Berlin, despite whatever has happened in it's past, is now well and truly known as a vibrant, active city with very good nightlife. I found this out on my first night, indirectly - the group of 4 Irish girls sharing my dorm went out as I went to bed, around 11.30pm, and arrived home after I'd woken up from a good night's sleep at 8.30am...

Everyone knows there is a lot of history in Berlin, most of it considered pretty bad and there certainly are a lot of very sobering moments in Berlin's more recent history. I started off with a couple of the famous sights though - the Reichstag parliament building and then the Brandenburg Tor - warning, typical tourist shot coming up...

German Reichstag (parliament building)
Parliament sittings were held here until 1933, when it was severely damaged by arson fire not long after Hitler was named Führer. It remained out of use right through WWII and the Cold War, with West Germany's parliament sitting in Bonn. It was refurbished after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has been used again since 1999.
I visited the large dome at the top later in my trip...

And... Typical tourist shot at the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate)

It's pretty sobering, though, reading some of the history behind just that gate. It was on the border between East and West Berlin after the war and is now, of course, a very important symbol of both the division of Europe during the Cold War as well as unification of Europe and Germany after it. And you don't have to go far to find another sobering site - the very directly-named Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Walking around in thoughtful contemplation inside the memorial

The site is meant to be open to anyone's personal interpretation, and I wondered if perhaps every inch of height of each one of the blocks might represent a murdered Jew. Maybe even every centimetre. Or millimetre.

Makes you think pretty hard about what happened.

It was a bit sad though about the behaviour of some people in around the memorial. It's possible to climb on the blocks, and play games running around inside them, and quite a few people were not really giving the site the respect it deserves. Why parents think it's a good place to take 7-year old children, I'm not quite so sure.

From there I made my way to the Topography of Terror displays. There was a lot of really detailed information on the Nazi terror inflicted on the German people. Something I hadn't realised previously was the extent of the terror of the Nazi regime not just against Jews, but also against gypsies, disabled people, anyone who voiced opposition to the regime, and many other groups of people. It was very difficult to take in, standing in 35°C sun, people walking past on the footpaths laughing, talking on mobiles, wondering about their next meal or who would win the football match that night. It seemed impossible that this could even have happened.

Terror in Germany didn't end with the fall of the Nazi regime and the end of World War II, of course. The Communist-run East German regime implemented all sorts of hard-line policies during their reign, most notable of all forbidding anyone from leaving the country without a (very hard to get) pass. This did, of course, lead to the Berlin Wall, and the most famous checkpoint on the wall was into the American sector of West Berlin at the so-called Checkpoint Charlie. This really was a tourist grab-a-photo spot...

Everyone knows this sign...

After spending so long reading information at the Topography of Terror, it was pretty late, so I headed back to the hostel and got some dinner.

Dusk view of Museumsinsel (Museum Island) on the Spree River

I then walked back towards the Bundestag buildings, just across the river from the Reichstag. As it gets dark, each night during summer, they show a free short film projected up onto the side of the Bundestag buildings. If there's one thing you have to say about things in Berlin, is that they're not afraid to discuss what happened in the past. The movie was quite the light show, and also very interesting.

Short film being shown at the Bundestag

Having spent most of my first day at places related to the Nazi regime, I headed the next day for Bernauerstrasse, home to the largest remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall from the Cold War Soviet regime. As I alluded to before, the wall was built by the East German government to keep people in, not out. Over the years it was developed from a wire chain-link fence to two large concrete walls, with a no-man's zone in between patrolled by regular guards. Anyone trying to escape was seen as an enemy to the state, and that was justification enough to try and shoot them down.

Bernauerstrasse had an excellent set of displays, with photos of the places you were standing when the wall was there, and markers showing the location of the wall all the way along. There were also descriptions of attempted escapes, by the border guards themselves, by tunnels, by jumping out of windows of buildings on the wall before the no-man's zone was built.

Paving like this marks the location of the wall throughout Berlin's centre

More markings

Markings of the line of a tunnel under the wall

The line of the wall with an "event" plaque - there are lots of little round plaques like this noting where "events" occurred, such as a successful escape or a gunning down by wall border guards.

A mock-up of the no-mans land between the two sides of the wall with a guard tower

Can you imagine looking at this for over 30 years, on the route you used to walk to go to the market or to school?

On my way out I also went through the Nordbahnhof metro station, which had a display of attempts to escape through the subway stations - since one of the metro lines (built pre-war) passed from West Berlin into East Berlin and back to West Berlin. The stations under East Berlin were boarded up and patrolled by guards and the trains passed through these "ghost stations" without stopping.

From there I took the S-bahn metro to the East Side Gallery, a long stretch of preserved wall that has been painted by various artists with symbols of peace, hope, prosperity etc. Some of the paintings were quite impressive. The reverse side is covered in free-lance graffiti, and many visitors add their own little message here.

East Side Gallery

East Side Gallery

The reverse side of East Side Gallery

After that I walked to & around Alexanderplatz, roughly the city centre and where some older buildings can be found - there weren't many left after the war.

Berliner Dom

Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall) with Fernsehturm (TV Tower) behind

Neptunbrunnen fountain & Marienkirche (St Mary's Church)

World Clock in Alexanderplatz - it was 1:20 am in Wellington!

I got dinner with a roommate from the hostel - mmm, falafel - and later that night headed out with a few Singapore-based British students for a small taste of the Berlin nightlife.

I had a couple more things to look at on my last day. First was a trip to the dome at the Reichstag building - free, but you had to book in advance. There was a good audio-guide on the sights to see and a good view at the top. Inside the dome, a complex set of mirrors reflects light down into the debating chamber directly underneath - and also allows for some creative photo-taking...

View out over a park from within the dome

The mirrors that reflect natural light down into the debating chamber

And the creative photo-taking (that's me!)

From there I visited the information centre at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe I'd visited several days previously too. This was really quite direct and hard-hitting... I don't think I've ever been anywhere where so little was said. Everyone was just reading in silence, trying to take in the scale of the Nazi atrocities against Jewish people and others. Once again, after looking around at the view from the Reichstag Dome in the sun, this was such a contrast in feelings and emotions, not just of myself but everyone around me.

It seems Berlin really is a city of contrasts like this - a very vibrant, accepting, open, forward-going city with a very chequered past that they're not afraid to talk about.

I said a few weeks ago that museums aren't generally my thing unless they've got a specific purpose or interest. All of Berlin's museums fall into this category, and there were two more I wanted to visit. The small Stasi museum described the hard-handed East German police forces and some of the crimes they committed during the existence of East Berlin and East Germany. While the extent of murders might not have been on the scale of the Nazi regime, they certainly weren't afraid to suppress any form of resistance against the communist rule.

The last one I visited was the Jewish Museum. This described the whole history of Jewish people and the religion. Since being there I've visited many other European cities, many of which had their own Jewish ghettos or districts, and the scale of discrimination against Jewish people extends back for many hundreds of years into history. It really is sad, and while I'd like to think that today's world isn't like that, I know that it still goes on in many places, both out in the open and hidden away in the more minor extents such as school playground bullying.

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I know this has been a long blogpost, but I think that reflecting and sharing some of my thoughts from visiting Berlin is important. I think the city does very well to try and live in the present, while also displaying its chequered history for all to see and understand. Some true atrocities really did happen here, and it's such recent history that makes it so hard to fathom. The Berlin Wall was still standing in my lifetime. My parents travelled with me (as an infant) in Western Europe while the wall still stood.

How did the world let this happen? How did leaders such as Hitler or Stalin think it OK to make these things to happen? And this is only one of the most public, well-known occurrences in recent history. What about Syria? What about Palestine? What about Pol Pot in Cambodia? What about apartheid in South Africa? This is only a tiny selection of the atrocities that have occurred in this world, and many more will continue to occur, despite anyone's best attempts, in my lifetime, your lifetime, and our children's generation and our children's children's generation.

I could apologise for the pulling of heart strings, but visiting Berlin really made me think about these things, and I think we should all think about these things from time to time.

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With that, I made it to a open jazz jam gig on my last night in Berlin. Then, it was up early the next morning for a train to Praha - or Prague, one of the jewels of Central Europe.