September 24 to 26—Berlin Day Tour, Laundry, and A View of the Past

Dear Family and Friends,

Monday, September 24, we joined the 1:00 PM Free New Berliner Walking Tour with Jessica as our guide. The tour is pretty awesome in that if you have no money. You can still enjoy learning about the city, but if you do have some cash, then you pay the guide whatever you are able to when the tour is over.

Most of the guides have theatrical backgrounds and are particularly talented in storytelling, or at least Jessica certainly was animated and spun a good yarn. After we met up with this former-Swede, who lived in Manhattan for six years as a dancer and speaks excellent English, she told us about her personal history as we made our way by metro from our meeting point outside of a Dunkin Donuts to the central meeting area near the Brandenburg Gate.

At the Brandenburg Gate, all of the tourists split up into several groups according to 1-2-3-4 number and language spoken, and we luckily were "stuck with" Jessica. She began with a long story about the larger history of Germany, how Berlin got its name from the local water source, the dawning of Prussia, and the eventual collection of provinces into the Germany of today. Of course, main characters in the tale were Otto von Bismark the ‘Iron Chancellor,’ Kaiser Wilhelm I, Napoleon, and Adolph Hitler with his Nazi cronies. The gate itself was stunning, with the Quadriga statue at the top, which had been stolen by Napoleon because he thought she was so wonderful. After the statue's return from Napoleon's clutches, she faced East, but after the reunification of Germany, she was turned to the West, where her head now faces the French Embassy below in a little ‘nah nee nah nee poo poo’ to Napoleon’s people! (Or so the story goes …)

From the other side of the gate, Jessica told us of the burning of the Reichstaggebaude (the re-creation of the original government building could be seen from where we stood) that led to Hitler’s dictatorial power over the country. We did not go in with the tour group, but Martha and Dani decided to return in the next few days to get a view of the city from the tower at the top of this building.

A few paces away, we approached the very-recently completed memorial to the Jews who died during World War II, better known as the Holocaust Memorial. The 2,711 pillars create a powerful and moving sculpture to walk through. We all walked through and met on the other side, sharing our interpretations of the work and how it made us feel. We’ll let you decide for yourself how it impacts you when you get a chance to visit.

Next, we headed to the side of East Germany where Hitler had his bunker and stood on the ground above where he and his wife (he married Eva the night before) committed suicide. Nothing left to mark the spot except a little sign that shows the layout of the bunker that was created below the city streets. Jessica informed us that Hitler and Eva had told their cronies to burn their bodies immediately after they were dead so that they would not end up like the body of Mussolini in Italy, which was paraded through the streets, spit upon and otherwise used as a celebratory body at the hands of the people.

Surrounding the scene were tall apartment buildings with red roofs, known in Eastern Germany as luxury apartments, homes for the Nazi elite, and tools for the Stasi police force. To get information from people, they might use an apartment in the complex as bait, saying, “Well, if you rat on your friends, then maybe we can find you a spot in the apartments!” among many lies told. Jessica told us that about one in every six people in Berlin were informing the Stasi, creating an intense atmosphere of mistrust among neighbors and families. Scary times, indeed.

Very little still stands of the Berlin Wall that separated East and West Berlin, but we went to the longest stretch of the remains to see its crumbling testament to a torn country. We had never visualized how the wall actually separated the city, and were surprised to learn that the Berlin Wall actually surrounded/encircled the central ‘West’ side of the city, the one that belonged to the capitalist Allies, because over the course of many years (up until 1961 when the wall was built), people were leaving East Berlin in troves to live in the West and to obtain a passport and/or flight to the rest of the West. So many intellectuals and professionals left that eventually the communists running East Berlin had to put a stop to the emigration and put up the wall overnight, separating families for thirty years, including parents who left their young son with a babysitter while they went out for a drink. There were actually two sections of walling, and the dangerous part was the zone between them that was heavily guarded by dogs and people with instructions to shoot on sight anyone who tried to cross without proper papers. Some people attempted to cross over and were killed. Some people made it, including two men who dressed up like a cow and mooed their way across to West Berlin!

The path that shows where the wall once stood is marked throughout the city by bricks in the streetways and sidewalks. A plaque marks that it stood from 1961 to 1989. We never did go too close to Checkpoint Charlie, but we could see it from where we stopped across the street. Many of the streets were lined with wallboard testimonials to attempts at escape and to the history of the region. Jessica stopped to show us how the Berlin Wall actually looked surrounding the center of the city.

A couple of hours into the tour, we had our lunch stop, where we split a ham and cheese sandwich since we had dined on coffee and bagels at the Dunkin Donuts before we joined the tour. We sat with Jessica and another guide who was from Sweden, listening to them talk about their jobs and Jessica’s impending trip to South Africa where she will be working with a South African choreographer to put together a show with dance students that mixes European with African dance styles. Sounds like an amazing task and opportunity!

Walking on, we headed in the direction of Museum Island, stopping at a square between two churches that looked exactly alike. The location, with its twin churches and grand theater house, is called the Gengarmanmarkt. The churches are known as the German and French Cathedrals (Deutscher and Französischer Dom, respectively) The statues adorning the cathedrals look older than the actual structures. They are from the original churches, built in the very early 18th century, that were damaged or destroyed during World War II, but were removed during war for safe keeping and put back up on refurbished buildings.

We walked down the once-classy and formidable Unter den Linden avenue, lined with lime (linden) trees and on to the Bebelplatz. Here, we encountered a memorial to the burning of 25,000 books in May 1933 that marked the early destructive days of the Nazi regime, when they entered the library with a list of books that had to be destroyed. Jessica told us of a German named Heinrich Heine who, about 100 years before, had made the statement “They that start by burning books will end by burning men” in a creepy, prophetic way. The memorial to the book burning is below a glass plate in the middle of the square. Along the walls below are bookshelves, empty bookshelves; from some angles you can see the shelves, from others, and especially looking straight down into the plate glass, you can only see yourself.

We stopped at a gorgeous memorial by Kathe Kollwitz called “Mother With Her Dead Son” at the Neue Wache building near the university. The ceiling is open so that, as the seasons change, the sculpture is a continuous reminder that there is no season for war; the mourning mother and child is supposedly particularly stunning as the snow falls.

Onward to Museum Island, where a series of sculptures and people littered Lust Park in front of the mighty Pergamonmuseum. Along the side of the Berlin Dom, near its cross that has still not been replaced atop the church tower since its Nazi removal, Jessica told us the lively story of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In short, the announcement of the opening of the Wall was supposed to be a trick to get the people off the government’s back as they shouted in the streets for the boundary to disappear, a step that would then be craftily overwhelmed in beurocratic nonsense for ages, the leadership in Eastern Berlin not about to lose their tight control over the people. However, the announcement was made by a particularly alcohol-blurred individual who had not read the announcement or been informed of the background of the plan. When he read the notice to the press, they asked when it was effective, and he offered the only date on the paper: November 9, 1989. Thrilled, the people cluttered the edges of the Wall, asking when they would be let through. The confused soldiers said that they could pass with the appropriate paperwork. Well, two women in the crowd happened to have proper paperwork as they had scheduled to go through that day … and as the gates opened for their proper departure, the people flooded through and began the process of knocking that darn wall over for good!! All because some drunken official had not been informed of the rascally plan to keep the people from each other indeterminably!

The tour ended, and we saw Jessica practice a humbling experience similar to what we might imagine from a monk as she stood before the clapping crowd and waited to see if any of us would offer her tips to thank her for the tour. We each took our turns, and Jessica clasped each of our hands in thanks with warmth. What a wonderful person and talented tour guide. We can only imagine the emotion she is able to pump into her dancing and would adore the chance to see her work someday. We headed out from the group to the Berlin Dom for a pit stop and got a peek inside the basement and the dom shop before taking the bus through the park and back to the hotel to freshen up. Refreshed, we stopped at a second hand store, where Martha bought two pairs of pants that fit her better (and were not worn out from too much walking) for 13 Euro total! YAY! Clothes that fit! We dropped stuff off at the hotel once again before heading out for the night, stopping quickly at a doner place for a meal and then joining the Pub Crawl that the New Berlin Tours group offered (taking 1 Euro off of the 12 Euro fee if you had been on a tour with them earlier in the day), seeing four different pubs, joining a half dozen familiar faces from the crowd of our group, and experiencing an awesome night seeing the Berlin nightlife. It was a very very late night, however!

Tuesday, September 25, was by far our least productive day. Martha did laundry, at 5:30 PM, carrying two stuffed garbage bags the several blocks to the laundry mat and taking quite a while to figure out the process of which machines were lighted and usable versus those out of order (which were many). She managed to waste a few Euro on machines that said they worked but did not actually before figuring out the system. Of course, the comedy of errors with finding change for a 20 Euro note among the stores surrounding the laundry mat was a different issue, as none of the restaurants wanted to offer even a couple of 10 Euro notes as change, the Internet shop did not have enough to break a 20 Euro note even with Martha buying a Coca Cola Light. Having already opened the bottle, though, she had to go next door to the pharmacist to buy some toothpaste and then return for her sodie pop. Whew. We had dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican food place around the corner. Dani got a big juicy hamburger, and Martha insanely ordered a veggie burrito, but we ended up switching meals since Martha’s burrito was filled with the fungus variety of veggies. We finally worked on the blog for a bit before heading to bed.

Wednesday, September 26, Dani was refreshed and up by 7:00 AM. Martha, having worked so very hard on the laundry the day before, slept in until 9:00 AM. We finished packing and were out of the hotel by 11:00 AM, checking out on time and heading to our next night’s lodging. With our packs and bags, we walked far across the neighborhood for about 40-minutes until we arrived at Haus Konstanzer, where we got settled in the spacious, pretty Room 10. The room had tall ceilings, an attached porch with table and chairs, big comfy lounge chairs in the room, and a spacious double bed.

We dropped off our things, but did not stay to enjoy the relaxing atmosphere as we headed out for the day in the city. Walking toward the U-Bahn station, we stopped in a grocery store and decide that’s where we’d find breakfast. Martha took pictures of the entire aisle of chocolate, then subsequent entire aisle of beer. Wine filled another entire wall. Martha picked a Curry Salad, a multigrain roll, and a pretzel ball; Dani picked a banana-flavored milk and some Pfefferneuse cookies, Lindt brand Chocolate with Chili, and a caramel chocolate. Who will eat better this morning?

We looked on the map and saw that there was a park just a little ways away, which turned out to be within a Little Garden Community founded in 1929. These communities comprised small homes surrounded by small garden plots, havens for gardening in the big city at a time when people needed to grow their own produce locally to survive. In a different plaza nearby, we stopped at a park bench and enjoyed our breakfast. Next, we needed a printer to get our train tickets to Stuttgart printed out before the next day’s journey to meet up with Markus and Steffi to the West. We went to Dunkin Donuts to try their Internet services, but no printers. The cheap Internet café aspect of Dunkin is grand in its scale, taking up an entire floor above the donut and coffee shop, and is probably what keeps the franchise alive in this country of amazing pastry shops.

Nearby, we stopped at the Went into the bombed-out Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which houses a museum to the war, and the two sections of active church next door, each made of stain glass walls with red and yellow tones. We spent some time at the museum, learning the amazing history of the church and its destruction during WWII. In the new church, we sat for a moment in prayer, asking that the wars end, that there is an end to the destruction and mayhem.

From the zoo station, we took the train up to Potsdamer Platz, deciding that at 2:45 PM, it was finally time for a pastry, so we split a Streuseltaler, which tasted similar to the “cookie-dough pastry” that we enjoyed for breakfast three months ago, and which has kept us dreaming of finding it again! To less sweet activities, we walked through the Topography of Terror exhibit behind the remains of the Berlin Wall in what would have been the ‘death-strip’ between the walls, and the area that housed the Stasi and Gestapo headquarters. The exhibit explained the landscape of the neighborhood and the changes it had gone through in the previous three-hundred years—from upper class wealthy homes of the elite to the government buildings, and finally to the buildings housed by Hitler and his men. We looked upon the faces of the upper echelon of power during that time of cruelty and inhumane humanity.

The afternoon wore on and we wanted to make sure that we got to visit the Memorial to the Jewish Dead again, and to the Reichstaggebaude (Parliament Building), but the line stretched down the street. We made the tough decision to return the next day because it was close to 5:00 PM and we wanted to head over to the Statsoper Unter den Linden (the old state opera house) to check out tickets to the night’s “free entry” show that Dani had read about online and seen advertised—or so she thought—among the coming events.
The doors were open, which we took as a good sign, but the lady behind the counter said there was no performance tonight. What? We went back outside to look at the sign again. Unfortunately, the word Dani hadn’t found in the dictionary the day before but that mysteriously was there today meant “lecture”! Oooo, we almost went to the most boring Opera ever! There would have been no music, just some guy sitting on the stage speaking German! Hah!

OK, then, we decided it was time for dinner. Up the street and to the right, we picked a random place called Oase (Oasis), which turned out to be a Tex-Mex bar, but Martha ordered pasta with chicken, jalapenos, and an amazing sauce, while Dani ordered spinach tortellini after the jealousy of Martha’s spinach dish the other night. Great, filling, slowly savored in our new slowed life pace. We have been working on eating slowly and enjoying every bite.

We walked back through the artistic part of town, looking in on the not-so-secret society of artists who live in Tacheles, a bombed-out building covered in graffiti with random studios and exhibitions throughout. The backyard is an artists’ playground, with large sculpted letters as benches, an old VW van that could serve as a bar, an actual bar, color and steel in different displays of visual delight. On the top floor, we find a snoozing artist surrounded by surrealist-style canvases, large enough to cover the dense space of the room, and Martha buys one of his prints of an eyeball in peril.

Back towards Museum Island, we get a great view of the full moon over Bode Museum with the TV Tower, no longer carrying its cross in the nightlight. We walk until we’re tired before taking the underground back to our neighborhood and to our nice quiet room outside of the main stretch of town.

In love and light,

Martha and Dani