Friday in Berlin

At 9pm on Thursday, when I arrive in Berlin Hauptbaunhof, an enormous six storey glass and steel structure with McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts; mostly everything is open as if it were 9am. Outside, it’s dark and cold and I slide into the first taxi at the rank. Stocky and grey palloured, the driver speaks only in hmpf hmpfs and grizzles.  I don’t comment on the plush koala that is swinging off his rearview mirror although it might have made for a nice conversation starter from an Australian woman to a less moody taxi driver. I look out the window as we drive past big buildings and lights and giant billboards. Hmpf Hmpf can’t find my hotel and his grizzles intensify.  We do three U-turns before I point to it on a corner in the old east Berlin, Mitte, now the centre of the city.  Hmpf Hmpf mutters something like “but is new hotel” as an excuse, pulls up and carries my bag across to the hotel.

Friday morning and I have breakfast in the hotel dining room ignoring the fishballs and herring salad and settling on museli. The weather forecast is for a low of -9°C and I have leggings on underneath my jeans, three top layers, coat, scarf, gloves and boots. After half an hour wandering outside I’m painfully cold with a perpetually dripping nose, stinging cheeks and hands. I can’t do it on my own. I can’t stop and handle a map because I can’t feel it. I pick up some bright coloured pamphlets for several of the ubiquitous Berlin walking tours. 

Various guided tour companies pronounce that they are the best or the original. All are apparently highly recommended by Lonely Planet or one of various travel guidebooks. All have the most knowledeable guides with testimonials from phD historians. All are offering the same menu of themed tours. I randomly pick one that covers the main sites, catch the U-bahn to Alexanderplatz, the S-bahn to Hackescher Markt to the meeting spot. It’s a café which can accomodate no more than three customers with already six inside. I’m half an hour early so I have to wander around in the subfreezing weather until it’s time. 

Kenny is a grey mopped and spectacled Glaswegian tour guide who’s lived in Berlin twelve years and he leads us, a group of about ten Britons and North Americans plus me, around the main sites of Berlin. With his Scottish accent telling the stories behind Berlin’s sites I could be in a BBC documentary.

His method is to stand still for no longer than a few minutes while he tells a story before moving us again, enough to keep warmish blood pumping to our extremities. We cross one of the many bridges over the River Spree that has angular plates of ice floating on it’s surface. We stand still on Bebelplatz opposite the former Humboldt University, more like a palace, where twenty-nine Nobel prize winners were produced. Karl Marx studied there and Einstein taught. Kenny tells that it was on Bebelplatz, next to the University library now the law faculty, that Hitler’s Propagada Minister Joseph Goebbels infamously orchestrated the burning of 20,000 books by Jewish and left wing authors in 1933. The Nazi’s then began their programme of systematic extermination of Jews throughout Nazi-occupied territory.

Bebelplatz

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi’s murdered six million Jews. Berlin’s austere Holocaust memorial was only completed in 2005. Over a large field, the memorial designer has placed dark grey concrete boxes of various heights in neat rows and colums. Kenny says that it’s a Jewish custom to place a small stone of the grave of the dead. However these stones are huge and become taller than the eyeline as I walk between the rows.

Holocaust Memorial

In 1945, Berlin was taken by the Soviets and Goebbels and Hitler both commit suicide in the Nazi bunker. Hitler shot himself, Braun took a cyanide pill. Goebbels and his wife Magda killed their six children then committed suicide as well in the bunker. Our tour group stand on a nondescript carpark over the top of the old bunker. Hitler’s corpse along with Braun were burnt on the ground we were standing after his death.

At the end of World War Two, Stalin, Truman and Churchill signed the Potsdam Agreemant splitting Germany and Berlin into East and West. Communist and Capitalist-democratic. In 1953 adjacent to the present day government Treasury, formerly the Communist Party Headquarters, a Workers’ uprising resulted in the deaths of dozens possibly hundreds of protestors shot by Soviet troops. On the side of the building is a socialist propaganda mural, on the ground is a memorial for the dead.

Socialist Propaganda mural on former Socialist Headquarters

In 1961 the wall went up to prevent people fleeing East Germany through West Berlin. The Berlin wall was effectively two parallel wallls with a death strip of barbed wire, dogs and sniper watchtowers in betweeen. There are still sections of wall here and there. We stand on what would have been the death strip and see what is left of one of the concrete walls in situ.

Section of the Berlin Wall

At Checkpoint Charlie, once the only passage for foreigners between East and West Berlin; actors in army fatigues pose for photos with tourists. It’s become a tourist mecca where stall holders flog Russian bear hats, Gorbachev babushka dolls, and gas masks.

Checkpoint Charlie

We are still in the death strip when we walk beneath the Brandenburg gate a symbol of Berlin. The gate was built in the late 18th century and modelled on the entrance to the Acropolis. Nobody could walk beneath it’s arches between 1961 and 1989 and I imagine the gate would have looked out of place between two concrete walls and barbed wire.

Brandenburg Gate

The Brandenburg Gate was part of the roughly seventy percent of Berlin’s buildings that were damaged during World War Two. It’s surprising that so many baroque and neoclassical masterpieces of architecture that occupied East Berlin, including churches, have lived through the communist regime and have now been repaired.I had assumed that  such decadent architecture would not have faired well behind the wall. We see the magnificent buidings such as the 19th century Berliner Dom Cathedral, the Reichstag, the five 19th century museum buildings of museum island, the 18th century Zeughaus (a former arsenal) and French and German baroque domed cathedrals on the Gedarmenmarkt. 

The HuguenotFranzösischer Dom in Berlin

The Reichstag

These are grand and ornate structures in contrast with the spanking Potsdammer Platz. Formerly inside the deathstrip, Potsdammer Platz is now all glass and angles, office skyscrapers, IMAX theatres, restaurants. Famously, Potsdammer Platz in the old East Berlin was the transport station through which Western trains had to pass through. Guards patrolled the station as the trains were not allowed to stop.

Potsdammer Platz

After the tour is over I am in want of some quiet time and cannot stand being out in the cold a moment longer. I head off to the Gemäldegalerie to look at some paintings. The Gemäldegalerie is a German collection of all the various painting schools from the 13th to the 18th centuries. My favourites are still the 17th century Dutch artists. There are a number of Rembrandts including portraits of his wife Saskia and his mistress Hendrickje;  a few Jan Vermeers including The Wine Glass. The German painter Albrecht Durer could also paint portraits with personality. 

Albrecht Dürer portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher

My favourites of the southern European artists are Botticelli’s ‘Venus’ and Titian’s ‘Venus and the Organ Player.’ A work by the 15th century Italian painter Carlo Crivella features. He is said to always include a cucumber in his painting. Nobody knows why.

There are no cucumbers in my dinner at a Berlin brauhaus. The only vegetable is pickled sauerkraut hidden in a frypan full of glistening meats and sausages. It is however, preferable to fish balls and herring salad for breakfast.