This is Per, our delightful British guide. Behind him there is the Reichstag, which I'll probably get a closer look at in a couple days. After an hilarious and educational survey of German history from Frederick the Great to Gorbachev, all through the lens of the Brandenburg gate, we walked down to the Holocaust memorial.
Now, Ian and I (a couple of goyim if ever I knew goyim) had decided that we weren't going to spend a lot of time commemorating (commiserating?) the big H this trip. We get it, it was awful, we will never forget, but we're on vacation, not pilgrimage, so no concentration camps or tolerance museums. But the Holocaust memorial in Berlin is so centrally located you can't help but see it (part of the plan) and it's so cool I have to talk about it for a second. There's no words, or faces, or symbology or anything like that, it's just hundreds of concrete slabs, all the same length and width, but of varying heights. And the ground kind of rolls and rises beneath it. So as you walk around, eventually you go deeper and deeper until all you can see or touch is cold, gray concrete. You turn a corner expecting to see someone and it's just more cold, gray concrete.
I'm not the kind to be emotionally affected by art, much less art with an agenda, but I found myself overwhelmed. Maybe it was the gathering storm clouds overhead, or having just heard the story of how Hitler was able to trample the constitution and civil liberties in the name of defending us from an insidious and ubiquitous enemy (ring any bells, America?), but I felt it. The loneliness, the darkness, the hopelessness and seeming endlessness all had me near tears. Needless to say, I exited as quickly as I could and rejoined the cheerful tour group.
Next stop was Hitler's bunker, where he spent his last days, finally eating poison, shooting himself, and leaving orders to burn his body. The bunker was bombed and bombed, excavated, then bombed again, filled with rubble, and so on until today it is just a small patch of green where Germans bring their dogs to crap. Fitting?
A bit of the wall that still stands.
There was plenty of beautiful architecture to photograph on this tour, and I did, but who wants to look at building after building? I did want to show you guys this. Do you recognize it?
It's the bank where Lola's father works in Run Lola Run! YAAAAY! It's across the street from Bebelplatz, which is where, in May of 1933, 20,000 books (off a list by Goering) were burned in the square. The monument today is a glass window on the ground, which looks down into empty bookshelves. Just as we can't go back and unburn those books, we can't put books on those shelves. And at night, a ghostly light shines up from the middle of the square. A quote from Heinrich Heine (from 1820) is on four brass plaques in different languages around it. It reads:
That was just the beginning. They that start by burning books will end by burning men.
This is a Kathé-Kollwitz sculpture inside the Memorial for Victims of War and Tyranny. It is a woman holding her dead son. Kollwitz's own son died in WWI, and her grandson in WWII, so this is actually a deeply personal work. Which I think makes it an even more powerful memorial.
I also include this memorial because it is a cool illustration of how Berlin has changed hands so often. Originally it was an anti-war monument, then under the Nazis it was a memorial for victims of war and Bolshevism. But then under the Communists, it was the memorial for victims of war and Fascism.
At the end of the tour Per sat us down on the steps of the Berliner Dom, where he wove the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall. His descriptions of the growing tide of popular movements in Europe in the late-80s, and the reactions of East Berliners learning they were now free moved me so much that even though I had planned to just give a nominal euro or two at the end, I found myself dropping 10! What you would normally pay for a professional tour I was shelling out on the tour I only took because it was free! Well, it was worth it.
When I got back to the hostel, Ian was ready to take our expedition to the new hostel. An S-bahn and two buses later, I was wondering if we were even still in Germany.
This was the abandoned bucolic highway leading up to our new hostel, from whose window I can see foxes and other woodland creatures scurry, and in whose common room I am currently enjoying a Mac while ignoring the Aussies watching Sky High (don't ask). I'm not sure we'll stay here two nights, as we are not only very far removed from, um, anything, but when we do venture out we will find ourselves in the poshest section of West Berlin. Evidently the likes of John Kerry and Helmut Kohl live around here. Neil the desk clerk does assure us we can find a 3 euro currywurst, though, so I'll keep you posted.
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