The most recent news of note is my trip to Berlin last weekend. That's right, finally gotten around to seeing the capital and a tiny taste of what used to be the GDR. It's actually pretty amazing as you walk around the city to think that there was a major world division here for 20 some years. The city feels quite whole now in my opinion; most of the tourist attractions are actually on the east side of the wall.
Berlin is truly a wealth of modern history though. Nearly every major event from the French revolution to the fall of the wall has left its mark on the city. Berlin was the home of the notable "enlightened-despot" Fredrick the Great, Napoleon claimed the statue on top of the Brandenburg gate when he conquered the city, but when the Prussians(leaders of the newly formed German state) trounced France in the Franco-Prussian War, they brought back the statue and renamed the square Pariesier platz so that hundreds of Germans would be walking all over Paris every day. The city was obviously key in the events of both world wars and served as living testament to the hostilities of the cold war; with the fall of the wall really signifying the end of the cold war in most people's minds.
Being the capital city and a seat of culture, Berlin also has some pretty impressive museums. I only visited the Pergamon museum, since we only had a few days in the city, but boy was it incredable! It's chalk-full of statues and columns from the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well reconstruction of the walls of Babylon and an extensive collection of early Islamic art. It's a great place to expand your appreciation for the foundations of western civilization.
Besides the amazing depth of history, the trip also proved to be a learning experience in some interpersonal areas. I think I've indicated before that most of these sojourns to other German cities have been undertaken with a subset of the other students who are also in Darmstadt on the same exchange program. Generally, this has added to the fun of the travel, but this trip there were some challenges that caused some conflict and ended up costing me some money.
In short, our group of travelers has never been the most organized bunch. Thus, we had much confusion about who was going when and where on this weekend and I ended up booking a hostel for some of the people in the week before the trip. Then, one of the folks I had booked for decided he really wanted to book somewhere else; there was a flurry of emails to get htings arranged, but it worked out fine in the end.
On the day we left (friday morning), there were 4 of us, to be joined by another when he arrived after work. Three of us were in the hostel I booked, the other two were in the other hostel. On arriving to Berlin, we decided to get tickets for the bus/u-bahn/s-bahn for the weekend to get around the city. Our initial idea was to each buy an individual pass for the weekend that included some deals at some museums, but when we got to the counter, the clerk pointed out that buying 2 1-day group passes would cost us about half as much. This is where I made the first mistake: we'd all traveled around together most of the time in the other cities, so I thought that sounded like a great deal, there were some concerns expressed (by the guy who had insisted on booking a different hostel), but they weren't super forcefully made and it seemed simple enough to just hand off the ticket at the end of the day so the other guys could get to their hostel (both hostels were in the same direction, one just further away than the other). It terns out however, that Victor(the guy expressing some concerns about the change of plan) had felt forced into buying the different ticket. There were some minor hard feelings, but they passed. Lesson number one, when working as a group, especially buying stuff, it's important to be extra sensitive to make sure concerns are resolved and that everybody knows exactly what's going on.
We had a fine rest of the day, but when we split up for our hostels, there came more trouble. The guys in the further hostel needed the bus passes to get to their hostel and to get back in the morning. No problems there, we set a time to meet and parted ways. But, the guys who left with the ticket are fa from the most organized of the group. When it came time to meet at 9:45am, they didn't show; turns out they didn't get into their hostel until super late and decided to change plans without informing us. They wanted to bike around the city and take a biking tour. This would have been fine except that we'd planned the day before to go on a walking tour of the city which left at 10:30 and there was no way they'd be there to hand off the tickets(they wouldn't use them since they'd be biking and we would since the tour stared in the city center, 5km away) So I learned another costly lesson, it's better to let the group split up earlier, before spending money and effort on group plans, rather than let it fall apart later due to poor communication and people really wanting to do their own thing anyway.
Despite the mix-ups, I still enjoyed Berlin; I just chalked up the monetary loss and the feelings of frustration to a lesson in group dynamics and leadership and tried to have a good time. All in all though, I'm glad my next trip will be a solo one where I can just enjoy the city and not worry about the details so much.
And now without further ado: Pictures!
First a couple of pictures from inside the glass dome on the Reichstags. This is the primary visiting area, which looks down into the main hall in which the parliament meets. The glass is supposed to represent transparency of the govn't process and the mirrors allow the parlement to look up and see the people to whom they are responsible.
It was horribly rainy, but as a result it wasn't crowded as I'm told it usually is. This one's from out front:
Siegestuele (Victory tower) in the middle of what used to be the royal hunting grounds. Now a ~15km square park in the geographical center of the city:
The sony center, massive shopping center in west Berlin:
The Berliner Dom:
and The Berliner Dom + the second highest building in Europe...the East German TV tower! (The tallest is the TV tower in Moscow. The Communists had an interesting way of showing their might. :-P )
Statue of Fredrick the Great on Berlins royal street, Unter den Linden:
Ironically, this is the Catholic cathedral. it's under renovation, and while the side is all boarded up they've got some massive advertisement space:
The Humboldt University library. In the square out front there is a glass pane where you can see a room of empty shelves; this is a reminder of the event that took place in this square, where Nazi students and professors burned all the books in the library on Hitler's black list. The university now encourages an open air book market across the street:
Statue of Schiller out side the opera house. We unfortunately picked the one week this summer when there were no operas or concerts in the city.
The fair-minded Fredrick built two identical churches on opposite sides of this square, one for the French Calvanists invited over because of persecution in France and the other for the traditional German Lutherans.
This cafe overlooked "checkpoint charlie" the famous checkpoint in the Berlin wall. While none of the original checkpoint still exists. This was the station of the CIA in Berlin, and of course the KGB had an office above the cafe, just on the other side of the wall.
Some of the few pieces of the wall that remain:
Mural from the side of the former GDR "Ministry of Ministries":
The memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust:
and the famous Brandenburg gate:
There's one other picture I wanted to point out:
Sachsenhausen was the Nazi's prototype concentration camp and later served as Soviet "special camp" (where it was used to treat the German people the way the Nazis had treated their prisoners. I wanted to just walk through the place, rather than taking pictures everywhere, so I just took the one out front of the entrance. I would encourage you to take the opportunity to just walk through one of these camps for yourself. There's no substitute for seeing it in person, as brick an mortar, wood and stone.
The think that struck me most about the place is how familiar and real it is. When we hear the numbers and the shear brutality of the Holocaust; I think it becomes some foreign, unimaginable event, but the fact is that the place on the surface seems just like any other prison, I could envision the prisoners coping with their lot, living and dieing there. I could see the SS men just across the street singing and enjoying the latest popular movies. The place is utterly real, and startlingly similar to what I expect even approve of in a prison - except you could point: here, a man who couldn't take it anymore flung himself against the electric fence and killed himself, there, SS troops occasionally would drown someone in the wash basin, here, they killed by the hundreds and thousands.
It's a harsh thing to look and to see that it really could happen, really did happen, really could(will?) happen again, to real people, at the hands of real people, who eat and breath and think and dance just as I do. The message I see isn't "look how horrible the holocaust was" but "look how human the holocaust was".
And on that somber note I will leave you.
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