A walk through reunited Berlin is like walking through a living history book – or more precisely, an onion, with layers upon layers of complex history built on top of each other. On one hand, there is the basic story of the growth of a northern European town and capital of the Prussian empire. Then came a pair of World Wars along with the Nazis, followed by the city’s division and attention as the focal point of the Cold War. And while the city is essentially new (over 90% was destroyed in WWII and rebuilt), even to this day the city is reinventing itself seemingly overnight with new attractions, hip districts, and a culture that is still banding together after a brutal 20th century.
The following outline is taken from a fascinating guided FREE tour of the city that we took on our first morning in Berlin, led by Adam Greis, a knowledgeable & comical grad student from Atlanta, Georgia. Over the course of 4 hours, he painted an in-depth picture of Berlin, and I believe a lot of what he told us you will find interesting, or at least make you the most en vogueperson at your next cocktail party. Enjoy!
PARISER PLATZ
Just before 11am, our English-speaking tour group fittingly assembled in front of the Starbucks at Brandenburg Gate. With my Grande Non-Fat Hazelnut Mocha in hand, I was ready to see what Berlin was all about. I didn’t have to wait long – for we found ourselves in Paris Square, the center of Old Berlin. To the naked eye, it looked pretty much like any other modern square in a European capital. However, on this spot there is much more than we could have ever assumed – such as our very position would have been a part of the “death strip” of the Berlin Wall just twenty years ago!
Towering over the square to the west stood the Brandenburg Gate, the icon of the city. Its shiny white columns were completely restored in 2002, but its history dates back much further. The gate was built in 1791 as one of 14 gates in Berlin’s old city wall. A statue of a four-horse chariot that was originally called the Goddess of Peace crowns the top of it. When Napoleon conquered the city in 1806, he liked the statue so much that he took it with him back to Paris and plopped it in the Louvre. The Prussians – the German empire of the day – won it back in 1813 and to spite their longtime rivals renamed it the Goddess of Victory and placed it back on the Brandenburg Gate. (They also changed the name of the square to Paris Square.) In a touch of even more irony, the statue today looks slightly down and to the left, directly at the French Embassy. It was under this gate that Hitler passed in a torchlight parade as newly crowned leader of Germany on January 30, 1933; and where thousands of Berliners would gather on November 9, 1989 to celebrate the tumbling of the Berlin Wall.
Not to be outdone, the rest of the square consists of the American, French, British, and Russian Embassies and a number of other notable sites. One such site is the DZ Bank Building, designed by Frank Gehry, the American architect that designed Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Bilbao’s Guggenheim Musuem. Further from the gate is the Hotel Adlon, which Michael Jackson fans will recognize as the site of the now infamous “baby-dangling incident.” Oh yeah, and did I mention there’s a Starbucks?
RIECHSTAG
Looking through the Brandenburg Gate, you see the Tiergarten – Berlin’s answer to Central Park – and further afoot the golden-topped Victory Column and eventually the Olympic Stadium. But just steps away to the north lies the head of the German democracy, the Reichstag.
As far as interesting parliamentary buildings go, I have to believe the Reichstag is near the top. The last Prussian emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, built it in the 1890s. He did it to seem progressive, then became annoyed that those working there were actually talking about issueswhen he was the emperor after all. He pleasantly referred to it as the “house for chatting.” After World War I, the German Republic was born here in 1918. This is where it gets interesting.
After losing the First World War, Germany was in a very bad place. Not only had they lost millions of men, but they were also forced to pay back huge war reparations to the victorious parties a la the Treaty of Versailles. The tried to do it the easy way – by just printing money – but that led to hyperinflation and a horrible economy. The only ones who were really helping were the Americans, but when the Great Depression hit in 1929 it couldn’t get much worse. Then came a little man called Hitler.
One ill-fated night in 1933, the Riechstag nearly burned to the ground. Someone had to be blamed, and good ol’ Adolph pointed out that conveniently it was the communists. Collective groan. Using this as his own little Firegate or whatever the tabloids of the day called it, he convinced the 80+ year-old leader of the country to grant him emergency power to save the country from these evil-doers. The rest, as they say, is history as he quickly arrested all his political opponents and consolidated all the top offices in the land into Nazi central with him as supreme dictator. The Nazis would actually make their final stand against the Allies at the end of World War II in this building.
Today, the Reichstag is topped with a glass cupula (isn’t that fun to say?) that rises 155 feet above the ground. It is made of glass and steel, and stands as a symbol of transparency in government, something that was completely lacking during Hitler’s time. Admission is free and offers spectacular views over the city. In fact, from the top you can see down into the actual parliamentary building that is home of the Bundestag (Germany’s lower house.) I think this is good for checking the politicians’ toupees.
MEMORIAL TO THE MURDERED JEWS OF EUROPE
Just a stone’s throw south of the Brandenburg Gate is the new Holocaust memorial. It was completed in 2005 and consists of 2,711 grave-like pillars. It was designed by a Jewish-American, who hoped the central site and non-descript nature of the pillars would make everyone who visits the city contemplate what happened during the Holocaust and come up with their own conclusion. We found the site a moving tribute… and I personally thought it fitting that it was the only place in all of Berlin I did not see any graffiti. It is also fitting that just 200 meters from this huge memorial lies a barren parking lot that was Hitler’s bunker, sitting forgotten without a single sign. (We were told that parking lot is a place many Berliners like to walk their dogs… without doggy-bags if you know what I mean.)
Under the memorial is a good – and free – information center. There are 6 Holocaust victims in particular that are featured at the end of one passageway. It blew my mind to try to imagine that standing behind each of these six individuals would have been one million more victims. How could that happen?
CHECKPOINT CHARLIE AND BERLIN WALL
After World War II, the Allies realized that they couldn’t do the same thing to Germany as happened after the last war. Instead, they split the city into 4 sectors – Soviet, French, British, and U.S. The first section would eventually become East Germany (DDR), and the last three would be in West Germany. When the “Iron Curtain” fell in 1952, taking Eastern Europe into communism behind Soviet control, the city of Berlin remained an “open city” where people could still move freely. However, Stalin and Co. weren’t too happy as 2.6 million people decided to get out of there via the Western sectors between 1949 and 1961, so eventually they decided to do something.
Literally overnight, the East Germans decided to build a wall. The citizens awoke on the morning of Austust 13, 1961 to find the Western section circled in barbed wire. This made me realize something else I should have known but for some reason was never exactly clear on:
THE BORDER BETWEEN EAST AND WEST GERMANY LIED 100-MILES TO THE WEST OF BERLIN. THE CITY ITSELF DID NOT STRADDLE THE ACTUAL BORDER, IN FACT, BERLIN AS A WHOLE WAS DEEP IN EAST GERMANY. IT IS THE CITY ITSELF THAT WAS DIVIDED IN TWO, WITH THE WEST BERLIN TIED TO THE WEST VIA AIRPORTS AND SECURED RAIL/AUTOBAHN.
The new wall – built by the East and kindly referred to by the Soviets as the “Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart” – was really geared at stopping this free escape of Easterners to greener pastures in the West. (You know a government is for the people when it has to build a wall to keep people from leaving.) The wall would go through 4 stages, each increasingly complex and deadly, with the final version containing a 16-foot wide tank ditch, an approximately 100 foot wide no-mans-land or “death strip” where snipers could pick off defectors, and 300 sentry towers.
Some stats: There were 5,043 documented successful escapes – 565 of which were by East German guards. Border guards made over 3,000 arrests during the 28 years of the wall, and I’m not sure that many of those ended pleasantly.
Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous crossing point in the Wall, named after the army-slang for “C” not an actual person. During the Cold War, this is the closest the US and Russia came to blows – as each had tanks on opposite sides pointed at each other. Today it is more of a Niagara Falls type freak show of cheap souvenirs and corny stores, but there are some interesting photo exhibitions telling the history of the wall, and a good museum that gives insight into fascinating escapes.
UNTER DE LINDEN
Back north of the wall is the major avenue of Central Berlin, Unter de Linden (literally Under the Linden Trees.) The sites come fast on this street, as if you are suddenly reading the history book faster to get to the end. Humboldt University is found here, where Marx and Lenin both studied making it the de facto birthplace of communism. A guy named Einstein also taught here before moving to Princeton in 1932. Across the street is Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the famous book-burning exhibition took place when Nazi “Propoganda Minister” Joseph Goebbels ordered staff and students to burn 20,000 books. Who seriously goes by the title of Propoganda Minister and is taken seriously? The square also is home to the Opera House – destroyed not once but twice during WWII. Just down from here is the moving memorial to the victims of war of tyranny – the statue Mother with Her Dead Son. By this point you feel like the town needs to stop making memorials and actually do something to stop this from happening over and over.
MUSEUM ISLAND
The Cathedral of Berlin
At the end of Unter de Linden is Musuem Island, home to a handful of museums and the city’s cathedral, or Dom. By this point my brain is fried, so I can tell you we didn’t go in the museums or set foot in the Cathedral. (It was built only in 1905 and was criticized for showing no restraint. Isnt’t that what buildings of that time were all about?) I do however remember this story – the way the Wall actually came down, and quite unexpectedly I might add:
In the mid 1980s Gorbecev came to power in the Soviet Union and hoped to bring about a little reform and more openness. Before long Hungary had opened their border to Austria, allowing a crack in the Iron Curtain for people to get to the West. Those in Germany saw this, and thought they too would like to have this option. Those on the East side began demonstrating – first 70,000 people, then 120,000 people, then finally almost 500,000 people in Alexanderplatz in East Berlin. The Eastern government didn’t know exactly what to do, so they held a secret meeting to discuss the possible ways to placate the people. A few days later a press conference was set to tell the media what they would do.
The only problem was this secret meeting wasn’t attended by their press secretary – the man giving the press conference. It was a standard affair, with the usual pre-approved questions by the media. Until an Italian went off the list to ask what the government was going to do about all these protests. For this question the press secretary didn’t know what to say, so he began looking at his secretary’s notes from the secret meeting. Not always the best thing to do while the world is watching. He said – without reading ahead first to be safe – that the government was going to lift the travel restrictions from the East to go the West. A buzz went off in the room – really? An American reporter (I think Brokaw is his name) then followed up on this by asking if this included Berlin. Why, yes it does. Brokaw then asked the zinger – when this would happen? At this point the press secretary should have maybe called a twenty second time-out. Perhaps conferred with the serious looking dudes to his left and right. Instead, he said two words that would change the course of history forever: EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
So completely unexpectedly, the Wall had fallen. The people had never anticipated that it would happen on that day – November 9, 1989. Immediately thousands flocked to the Wall, and the astonished Germans began singing songs, drinking (lots of) beer, and chiseling away their own souvenirs. Within the month negotiations began between the two countries and elections were held. (Shockingly, the communists did not win in the East.) Just 11 months later, on October 3, 1990, German Unification Day was held and the country was back together again. In 1991, Berlin re-assumed its role as capital. Maybe that’s why my parents didn’t find it the most relaxing and developed place in 1992 when they visited?
And so ends our tour… danke!
~ J. Twice
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