A City Trying to Become...

Monday, August 28 -- Today, we had a 10 am walking tour of Berlin starting at the Brandenburg Gate.  We grabbed coffee and paninis (mine was a vegan beet and kale) at the Costa Coffee and Sandwich shop and then caught our bus to the meeting point.  Berlin looks better on a sunny day and I am finding more to like, but I still believe it is a gritty place.  It feels like fall as we wait in the sun with temperatures in the mid-60s.

U.S. Embassy by the Brandenburg Gates 

next to the Academy of Arts

We met Mark, our tour guide, in Pariser Platz in front of the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) near the Brandenburg Gate.  This history is very interesting and Mark is British, but lives in Berlin.  He taught history in the UK with an interest in German history and decided to move to Berlin and become a tour guide.  He was a fabulous tour guide.  I will save the history lesson to the end with the photos.

Our tour was a walk through the Berlin -- Mitte (city center) and we found out a lot about what makes Berlin a city of diversity.  According to our guide, eighty percent of the city was destroyed during WWII (confirmed online).  Many of the building were rebuilt in 1960s, 70s, and 80s in the style of the day; while others were built as reconstructions of their former style.  Our guide commented that Berlin is a city "trying to become, but never quite becoming".  I think that sums up my feelings that it isn't quite finished.

After the first 1 1/2 of our tour, we stop for a break and Thom has a jelly donut (of "Ich bin ein Berliner" fame from JFK speech in at the wall in 1963).  They are also known as Berliner, Pfannkuchen, Kreppel, Krapfen, and Bismarck.  We completed the tour with a recommendation for two vegan restaurants.  Either of which would take us to new areas of the city.  We head back to the train station by our hostel (Meininger Hostel was very nice with very clean private rooms and a short walk to the train station) to reserve seats for our train tomorrow.  We stop by the hostel to regroup before visiting the East Side Gallery of the wall.  We decide to eat at the Vietnamese vegan restaurant called 1990 Vegan Living.

The East Side Gallery heads us in the direction of the restaurant.   The East Side Gallery is the 1.3 kilometer long remains of the Berlin wall with murals painted by various artists after reunification.  It is the largest open-air gallery in the world making it a colorful memorial to the period of separation.  The western side of the wall had paintings prior to reunification, the new paintings conveyed a mood of freedom and reconciliation. The paintings are varied with surreal images alternating with political statements.  Over time the paintings, the paintings were damaged through weather, graffiti, and pollution.  In 2009, artists were invited to repaint their murals and majority of the murals have been repainted and now a foundation is responsible for the care of the murals.  

Photos from Eastside Gallery

The only mural as it was originally

At the end of the murals, there is a sitting area along the Spree River

After our East Side Gallery walk, we head to the 1990.  The restaurant is in the Treptow-Köpenick borough which is full of artist studios and galleries giving it an artsy, Bohemian vibe.  It had various ethnic (restaurants.  This a great area of Berlin.  The restaurant only takes cash and we are low on Euros, so we decide to make it a light meal and then we will head back towards our hostel and an area called Holzmarkt 25.

Slaw, potstickers, and a Buddha bowl

Street in the Treptow-Köpenick borough

The Holzmarkt 25 (Wood Market) is cooperative city district directly on the banks of the Spree in Berlin.  Three years ago, this was a timber market.  In 2012, it all started with just a few tents and balloons on the dusty sandy river bank. The project shows how user-driven urban development can work.  Plants were brough to the area which is freely accessible to this day and is tended by two gardeners from the cooperative. Here you can enjoy a cool drink and the beautiful view over the Spree with plenty of seating has been created for visitors to the Holzmarkt and sustainability is very important.  Food carts, small shops and two bars offered food and refreshments.  We enjoyed beers and Caribbean pakoras (pakoras are an Indian battered vegetable fritter) by the banks of the Spree as the sunset.  It was a wonderful day in Berlin.  The following are photos taken of the area over time.

Photos of Holzmarkt 25

Pictures and descriptions from our historic tour of Berlin.  I will provide a brief description ad a link if you wish to read more about the site.  I will mostly provide links to the Berlin website which provides great detail about each site.

Parsier Platz -- The square on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate belonged to the border between East and West Berlin until reunification. It was all destroy except for most of the Brandenburg Gate.  After reunification, it was completely rebuilt starting the 70s.  The architecture is varied on the Platz and includes on the north the Eugen Gutmann House and the French Embassy, ​​designed by Christian de Portzamparc in the style of a palace. On th south side is  the Academy of Arts (next to the Adlon Hotel) with it's glass facade (Günther Behnisch), then the austere facade DZ-Bank (Frank O. Gehry), and and finally the US Embassy, ​​which opened in 2008 as the last building on the square (Moore, Ruble, Yudell).  According to our guide the facades are all fairly simple as to give the feeling of equality.  

The fountain in front of the U.S. embassy which is in the corner of the two buildings slightly to the left in the photo.

Brandenburg Gates -- The gates have a long history as a point of entry to Berlin Mitte (the city center).  The large sandstone gate was commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1788 and was intended to provide a dignified terminus for the main boulevard to the royal palace.  Carl Gotthard Langhans was strongly influence by the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis.

The Quadriga, a chariot pulled by four horses, adorned the top of the Brandenburg Gate.  The Quadriga was installed on the Brandenburg Gate by Johann Gottfried Schadow in 1793 and depicts a two-wheeled chariot pulled by four horses running side by side. The reins are held by the goddess of victory, Victoria. The quadriga should symbolize the coming peace in the city. The sculpture has been taken down from the Brandenburg Gate three times over the years. After Prussia's (what is now Germany) defeat in 1806, Napoleon took the Quadriga to Paris. But thanks to the victory of the alliance, it was brought back eight years later and returned to her spot on top of the Brandenburg Gate.  After her returned, the olive branch in her hand was replaced by a spear. The Brandenburg Gate and the Quadriga were badly damaged by bombing, during WWII.

As we walk the tour route our guide points out brick marking the location of the Berlin Wall.

The Reichstag (Parliament) -- Design to allow visitors to experience politics up close the Reichstag  building has a glass dome visitors can walk.  Our tour guide said that the dome was put above the law makers as way of saying that country should be governed by the people at that the lawmakers need only look up to see who they are working for.

The Reichstag was built between 1884 and 1894 according to plans by Paul Wallot. In 1871, Berlin became the capital of the empire and the newly created parliament needed a seat of government. Wallot wanted to create a representative and monumental building, so he combined elements of Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism.  The inscription in the gable "Dem Deutschen Volke" (the German People), which is still preserved today, was only added in 1916. The Reichstag was badly damaged during the war and the original dome had to be blown up for structural reasons. The glass dome was added in 1994.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe -- In June 1999, the Bundestag decided to build the holocaust memorial in the immediate vicinity of the Brandenburg Gate.  The Holocaust memorial consists of a wavy field of 2711 concrete pillars that can be walked through from all sides. When walking between the columns of different heights and the labyrinthine corridors, visitors may feel disoriented for a moment, which is intended to open up space for discussion. In the center as the concrete pillars get taller, it is dark and it makes you feel small.  According to our guide, the artist has said very little about his intentions of the design, but leaves it open for the discussion of the visitors.

Hitler's Bunkers -- Under this non-descript parking lot were Hitler's bunkers.  The link provided gives some history of the area.  By choice they do want to pay tribute to the spot.

The Detlev - Rohwedder - Haus -- The former 3rd Reich Ministry of Aviation is the most striking relic of the former government district on Wilhelmstraße with over 2000 rooms, is one of Europe's largest office buildings. After the war, it was used as the house of the ministries by various GDR authorities. In 1990, the Treuhand-Anstalt moved in for a few years, after whose murdered chairman the house bears its current name. It has been the seat of the Federal Ministry of Finance since 1999.  It decided that although it was a Nazi building, also used under the communist rule that it would be alright to use the building as a significant period of time had gone by when it became the Federal Ministry of Finance.  All other Nazi building were destroy during or at the end of the war.  

The Trabant or Trabi -- The Eastern European car touted as the car of the people.  People ordering a trabi during the cold war period might wait 8 to 10 years for their car.  These cars were built in East Germany between 1957 and 1990,and were about 11 feet long and under five feet wide, this family car.  These environmentally unfriendly cars are seen driving through the city as a part a tour company.

A section of the Berlin Wall that was left standing and the basement foundation to a Nazi government building that was recently excavated are seen in an area close to the Detlev - Rohwedder- Haus. 

Interesting building along our tour walk

Interesting building next to Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie -- In the middle of Friedrich Street, the main traffic axis from north to south, a large mast with a picture of a soldier reaches into the sky. At the foot of the mast is a small wooden shack with flags and sandbags. During the division of Berlin, the former military checkpoint was, along with the Glienicker Bridge, the best-known border crossing of the three border points controlled by the Americans. Checkpoint Charlie could only be used by foreigners and employees of the Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the GDR and by GDR officials. Other visitors to East Berlin were not processed at this border crossing.  There was hardly any other place where the atmosphere of the Cold War was as chilly as at Checkpoint Charlie. The border crossing gained notoriety in October 1961 after the Wall was built: in the last few days of October, American and Soviet tanks took up positions here after members of the US mission at the GDR border post had been asked to identify themselves when passing through the Allied checkpoint. At that time, Soviet and Allied tanks faced each other with live ammunition. There was almost a third world war. In the years that followed, the checkpoint was the scene of spectacular escapes, which often ended fatally.

The bricks in the sidewalk marking where the wall once stood near Checkpoint Charlie.

 Buddy Bears of Berlin (Peace Berlins) -- These bears of peace were founded in Berlin 20 years ago and their displays have been traveling the world.  We first saw these bears in Riga, Latvia on the square.

Gendarmenmarkt -- The eventful history of the Gendarmenmarkt can be traced back to the 17th century.  Our guide told us that Berlin was trying to build population and invited immigration to the city.  They wanted all newcomers to fill welcome and that they had equality.  The Gendarmenmarkt was created at the end of the 17th century according to plans by Johann Arnold Nering. At this point, French immigrants, mostly French Protestants (Huguenots), settled in this neighborhood.  The city built a beautiful church for them.  The German people like the church and wanted one of their own.  A second church was built for the Germans.  Services in the French continue to be in French and the German Church in German.  Both churches look identity as was again the government wanted to create a feeling among the people in the city.  The churches and the concert hall between them are being clean and reconstructed at this time.

Bebelplatz -- This is the only square in the city center whose facades look the same as they did before 1943. Behind these facades is usually a modern construction. On May 10, 1933, the National Socialists burned more than 20,000 books on Bebelplatz. They were of the opinion that the volumes they selected were "un-German in spirit". These included books by Erich Kästner, the Mann family, Magnus Hirschfeld, Lion Feuchtwanger, Karl Marx, Else Lasker-Schüler and almost 400 other authors. Heinrich Heine's books were also burned and 1820 he is quoted as saying "those who burn books will in the end burn people."  Some believe that the book burning in the square foreshadows the crematoriums used in Nazi death camps.   The sentence is now on information boards in the ground, which lead to the eight meter deep "Library" memorial of empty bookshelves in the middle of the square.  The university building at the end of the square places a display of books in from of the building daily as a statement against closed minded thinking.

The Berlin Cathedral on Museum Island is actually a Protestant parish church.  The history of the Berlin Cathedral goes back to the 15th century. The predecessor buildings were originally part of the Berlin City Palace. In the early nineteenth century, Prussia’s leading architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel transformed the court church into a neo-classical building.

The Altes Museum or Old Museum was built by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and is a masterpiece of classical architecture on the square to the left of the Berlin Cathedral.

The Berlin Palace, also called Stadtschloss ("City Palace") as have many buildings in Berlin been reconstructed.  While three sides of the building's original palace facade were painstakingly reconstructed, the side facing the Spree River features a more modern design. The interior of the palace, home to the Humboldt Forum, is also entirely modern. Here, various cultural and scientific institutions present themselves to visitors.

The Berlin Palace was first built in 1943 by Elector Frederick II, since then the palace has been rebuilt and expanded.  After the end of the Thirty Years Wars, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm had the damage palace rebuilt in the Baroque style.  Prior to 1945, the Berlin Palace housed the Palace Museum.  The palace was almost completely destroyed in 1945.  What was left of it was blown up by the GDR in 1950.  The Palace of the Republic (People) was built on the spot in 1971.  In 2003, the building was closed to asbestos contamination.  After a long public discussion, the decision was made to rebuild the former Berlin Palace as the as the Humboldt Forum. The first stone was laid on June 12, 2013. The Humboldt Forum was officially opened in 2020 and houses various museums and spaces for scientific and cultural events. With its historic facade, the new building also restored the image of Berlin's historic center.

There are above ground pipes in the area we are staying.  These are because the area was marshland.  The pipes pump water out of the area especially at construction sites.