Tuesday 2/14
Today I went on a walking tour of former East Berlin. It started at a post office (not sure if it’s still in use or if it’s just a historic place, but that’s where we met) and ended at Brandenburg Gate. The tour guide had lots of interesting tidbits and took us to a lot of different places. Let me see what I can recall. This is basically a backwards account of how we walked.
The last stop of our tour was the Brandenburg Gate, which I had seen at the beginning of my time Berlin with Patrick. The Brandenburg Gate is an 18th-century neoclassical monument, built on the orders of Prussian king Frederick William II. It is one of the best-known landmarks of Germany. It is located in the western part of the city centre of Berlin within Mitte, The gate is the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, a major boulevard in Berlin. Throughout its existence, the Brandenburg Gate was often a site for major historical events and is today considered not only as a symbol of the tumultuous histories of Germany and Europe, but also of European unity and peace. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Gate) It’s seen in lots of photos of Hitler and the Nazi Army marching into town. Surreal to be there and see it in person.
The second to last stop, we walked through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was sobering. (The whole tour was sobering.) This was an abstract art memorial, and you make your own experience of it. So I walked around and thought about all of the people who had been murdered by the Nazis. How each of them have their own personality, each was a person with a job and friends and a normal life before all the war. And they were all murdered.
This memorial was put up by the German government in honor of the people the German government before killed. The tour guide said this was the only place where something like that has happened. It reminded me of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama that Bryan Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, set up. However, this memorial in the US was not set up by the government that committed the heinous acts. “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.” (https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial)
Almost right next to that is Hitler’s bunker where he lived the last five months of his life. And now there’s a parking lot built on top of it. They filled the entire bunker with concrete and did not put any kind of memorial to it because they were afraid that it would be a shrine or a Mecca of sorts for neo-Nazis. So now it’s just a very uninteresting parking lot to some apartments.
We also got to see Checkpoint Charlie which was the third checkpoint for people to get into East Berlin between West and East Berlin. I think Checkpoint A was coming into West Germany, Checkpoint B was into West Berlin, and Checkpoint C(harlie) was going into East Berlin. All the checkpoints to get into East Berlin. Very interesting. It was today that I learned that West Berlin was not in West Germany. It was a weird island of sorts that was surrounded by communist East Germany. Mind =blown. I just assumed that the split between East and West Berlin was the split between East and West Germany; but that is not the case.
There was a temporary American checkpoint at CC because the US did not recognize the Berlin Wall as a real division to East Berlin/East Germany as a different country. So, though it was there for about 30 years (that may not be the right number), it was always temporary. And the one that’s there now is a replica of the one that was originally there. But the original one was so temporary that they just picked it up and moved it even though it had been there all that time that the Berlin Wall was up. I was surprised to learn that tourists could so easily go into and out of East Germany. But East Germans obviously could not.
We also went to the area where the Book Burning occurred in 1933 at Bebelplatz. People starting to buy in to the Nazi party’s ideology spewed forth by the Ministry of Propaganda (I mean, it was CALLED that and they believed it?! Yet another thing I don’t understand.) burned any books that were by any Jew or by contemporary writers who had progressive ideas.
“On 10 May 1933, members of the Nazi German Student Union and their professors burnt books as part of a nationwide action “against the un-German spirit”. The books to be burnt were chosen according to blacklists made by the librarian Wolfgang Herrmann, which were then used to plunder private bookshelves, public libraries and academic collections.
There is a memorial there that commemorates this atrocious event. It’s called The Sunken Library. “The memorial shows what is missing. Underground, almost out of sight, no books, empty white shelves, directly under the Bebelplatz. What was lost and burnt were the books by those who the Nazis ostracised and persecuted, who had to leave the country and whose stories were no longer allowed to be told. Symbolically, the underground bookshelves have space for around 20,000 books, as a reminder of the 20,000 books that went up in flames here on 10 May 1933 at the behest of the Nazis.
The Israeli artist Micha Ullman designed the library memorial, which was unveiled on 20 March 1995. Two bronze plates also set in the ground contain information and an inscription with the warning:
That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well. Heinrich Heine 1820”
The opera house which is also next to Humboldt University at Bebelplatz was one of the few historic buildings that didn’t get destroyed in that part of Berlin during the war. It still exists and never stopped operating during the war, which is astounding! It’s a beautiful pink building.
On the walking tour, we also walked by Museum Island. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Berlin’s historic Mitte. It encompasses five large Berlin museums built under the Prussian rulers. It is also where the Berlin Cathedral is, also known as the Evangelical Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church. Interesting thing about that church…the church was yet another place that was bombed during WWII. After the war, during the communist reign of East Berlin, they left the church in complete disrepair because East Berlin was completely atheist so they did not have use for a church. It was after the fall of communism that the church was restored and is now an operational church again.
Near to Museum Island is the Mother with her Dead Son, a Pietà sculpture by the artist Käthe Kollwitz. The sculpture was made in 1937 or 1938 and is dedicated to Kollwitz's son Peter, who died in World War I. There’s a hole in the roof above the sculpture where rain and snow fall on the statue during bad weather. It’s there to signify the continued suffering of families who lose family members in a war. Very moving statue.
After the walking tour, I met up with Patrick and we went to the Musical Instrument Museum, which is in the same building as the Berlin Philharmonic. It was pretty interesting to walk around and see all the different kinds of instruments at different iterations through history. For me, the most interesting things within woodwinds and all the different iterations of them and the mechanisms used. I think I taught Patrick a few things!
After that we were going to go to the TV tower and look down and see a view of the city, but it was €30 to go up, which is crazy! And it was a little bit of a cloudy day so we weren’t sure how much we would see. So, we didn’t do that and we just walked around a bit longer. Then we came back to the apartment. We had dinner reservations that night to eat at a nice Italian restaurant that Patrick and Priscilla really like in their neighborhood. It was a lovely time of chatting with them and telling them all about my time in Ghana. I really enjoyed being with them these few days and getting to know them a little better outside of the school setting. They have been so nice to show me around and host me in their home. I’m so grateful for this experience.
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