Berlin - its buildings

Photos: far left - Bauhaus museum.

Middle: Mexico embassy in Berlin.

Right: Soviet TV tower,showing the Pope's revenge of the cross made by sunlight hitting the tower.

Berlin has many beautiful buildings, some restored to their original, and some completely new. I would like to describe some of these buildings and their significance to the city.

The first "building" I should show is the TV tower that the Soviets built in the eastern sector of the city. This tower is so huge that really, no matter where you are in the city, you can catch a glimpse of it. It is located on square known as Alexander Platz, a huge area with stores, eating areas and parks, and of course, the Ubahn station named for the Platz. I am not sure how lively it was during the Soviet era, but now it is full of people and places to shop and eat.

The TV Tower is really huge when you get close to it. It is a very tall tower, with a silver ball near the top. I think they actually had a restaurant in that silver ball once upon a time. The weird thing is that when the sun hits the ball, a silver cross appears on the ball. Everyone thinks that is pretty funny, since the communist's did not believe there was a God. Having the symbol of Christianity show up on their magnificent TV tower was very ironic. It is called the Pope's revenge.

I have already talked about the Reichstag, but this building is really a standout, and the glass dome makes it a must see for tourists. Museum Island is also a wonderful place to visit just for the buildings. There is also a Gendarme Marked square, located in Stadt Mitte. During Napoleon's time, the square housed the French army. Now it is a beautiful square, with the Concerthouse of Berlin, with the French Hugenot Church on one side, and the Lutheran Church on the other.

Berlin is full of shops and department stores, but the most famous one in KaDeVe, a huge department store in the Western part of Berlin. This department store has been in existence since the mid 1800's. We visited it and it is almost as good as Harrod's Department Store in London. Its nine floors are full of wonderful merchandize and boutique departments. On the top floor is the food market. Everything is up here: wine, sushi, desserts, meats, vegetables, pastries, exotic food from everywhere. Every area has a little bar where you can savor the food that is on sale there. It is beautifully done, and it was teeming with people the afternoon we were there. We poked around and looked at all of the displays, perfectly situated and lavishly decorated. Of course, Jack preferred to eat at the brotwirst stand outside, but we had a great time looking at everything in the store.

There is an area behind Potsdammer Platz where the national picture gallery is located. This building is a wonderful place to exhibit their rich collection of fine art. The building itself, on the outside, is a disappointment. Too much concrete and not enough greenery in front of the building. It is very near the Concert House of Berlin. This building is nondescript on the outside, and we were not sure if we liked the inside either. The orchestra is almost in the round, with seats running up and around the orchestra. Not so sure about the acoustics either.

Another building that is very interesting is the Bauhaus museum. The original Bauhaus school is now in Deshau, a small town west of Berlin. This school of design was very popular in the 1920's, with famous architects in charge, like Mies Van der Rohe, Gropius, and Corbusier. But the Nazi's considered their creations as degenerate and closed the school. Now Berlin has the museum of many of the works from that era. We had studied the architecture in our art history class, but the school also designed furniture, china, weavings and various other things for the home. The museum building itself is typical of a Bauhaus creation, very sleek and modern.

While we were in that part of the city, south of the Tier Garten, we walked around to see the many embassies. The "big guys" of America, Britain, Russia and France, had their embassies near the Brandenburg gate, but the rest of the world had its embassies down the road, in this more beautiful are. We saw about 20 different embassies, and the countries went all out to design the building as part of their culture. The Egyptian embassy was very beautiful, as well as the Spanish one and the Italian. The Mexican embassy was especially lovely. I have a photo of that one.

There is a famous street connecting the Brandenburg Gate area to the Stadt Mitte. It is called Unter den Linden. The King of Prussia planted numerous Linden trees down the street. They were removed decades later when the street became one of the most traveled, so that tram lines could be laid. It still is a very wide, beautiful street, with huge, baroque buildings on either side. One of the most famous was the Prussian guard house,designed by Schinkel. It is now a museum of peace.

There are hundreds of other buildings that are significant in some way, but I picked out a few to describe and give a flavor of Berlin.

Berlin - Photos of the Topography of Terror

Far left: Grey coffins row at Jewish memorial.

Left: Jole at the top of the Reichstag dome, overlooking Berlin.

Below: outside musuem of the Topography of Terror. Behind the posters is a portion of the Berlin Wall.

This area housed the German building that the Nazi's used to plan and carry out the expulsion of the Jews, in Berlin and coming from all over Europe.

There is also a museum, to the left of the photo, that further explains the actions of the Nazi's and how they systematically rounded up and sent the Jews away to concentration camps.

The photo of the Jewish memorial is hard to explain. The city block is full of the concrete coffins, representing the six million Jews that were killed. This walkway is only one of the narrow paths through the rows of coffins. People can walk through this, I guess to feel the magnitude of how large this exhibit is, and there are only 2000 coffins.

Berlin - The Topography of Terror

Far left: ramp for the dome of the Reichstag.

Above: the dome of the Reichstag

Left: German flag over the Reichstag.

Berlin's history is made up of the Nazi era and the Soviet era. I have tried to give a picture of the Soviet occupation and the Wall. Now I want to talk about the Nazi era, when the Nazi's came to power in the late 1930's, when they cleared the city of the Jewish inhapitants, and what the city of Berlin has done to remember and regret.

The Reichstag, a beautiful building in the 1900's, was a great threat to Hitler, so it mysteriously burned to the ground in the 1930's. Hitler never stepped inside of the building, though it was the seat of the German government. It was a heap of ruins for decades. During the time of Soviet occupation of Berlin, the West German government was located in Bon, Germany. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the government was moved back to Berlin from Bon. The government needed a place for government rule, so they restored the original building, the Reichstag.

After lots of arguing and planning, they chose a design and agreed with British architect, Norman Foster, that the building needed a dome. He designed and built a glass dome to sit on top of the Reichstag, and now it is the center of tourism in the city. After we passed through the security, we took an elevator to the top of the building and then started walking up the ramp to the top of the dome. We could see the whole city as we walked round and round, and when we reached the top, we went outside to see the expanse of the city. This ramp is so big and wide that one does not get closed in or nervous about the height of the dome. I think that the dome looks down to the parliament hall below, so one can see the German government at work from above. The dome is really a wonderful addition to the building.

Near the Checkpoint Charlie is a museum and open area named the Topography of Terror. This actual city block, where this open-air museum is located, housed the actual government building in which the Nazi's planned and carried out their eradication of the Jews and other undesirables of the German Reich. There are several plexiglass poster boards which trace the Nazi grab of the government and its bureaucratic establishment of agencies specifically designed to strip the Jewish people of their businesses, their homes, their money, and then to send them to Poland or somewhere east for eventual imprisonment and death. It is very scary that all of this Nazi work was carefully planned and set out in documents.

The Germans are very good bureaucrats, I guess, so when the Nazis were in power, they made sure that they set up appropriate agencies and kept very detailed records of what they were doing. All of these preparations for killing more than six million people were carefully documented. That is the scary part of this whole exhibition. The Nazis were very systematic at what they were doing and how they carried out the orders of Hitler and his henchmen.

It takes a long while to see all of the museum that describes the Nazi era because there is so much to look at and think about. Touring this musem is not like visiting one which exhibits artifacts of a people: bowls and jewelry and sculpture, etc. This is a museum set up to try to explain the stripping of possessions, the expulsion to foreign lands and the eventual killing of millions of people, for the simple reason that they were Jewish. It really takes your breath away to look at the photos of the Nazis in charge, because they look like us. I am not sure if the German people will ever understand how they let such a man as Hitler take over and eventually ruin the lives of so many people.

The museum tries to explain the inability of the German government that was in power before Hitler to overcome the hardships of the first World War, and then the stock market crash of 1929, which forced even more Germans to be out of work and penniless. The people wanted stability and someone to help them feel good about themselves, and Hitler was the man that stepped in and took care of them. Once he started his reign of terror, I guess they just couldn't stop him.

Another site to see is the Jewish memorial near the Brandenburg Gate, called the Memorial to the Holocaust. Berlin wanted to build something as a memorial, but it took several years to come up with an appropriate symbol. What they built is quite impressive: it is a full city block of about 2000 plain, grey concrete coffins above the ground. Each one is different from the next; some very tall, some short. No markings on them at all. There is an underground museum which documents stories of many Jews from Berlin who were imprisioned in the well known concentration camps and then later killed. The memorial speaks for itself; as you look out on the huge expanse of stone coffins you try to take in the amount of destruction of so many people. Then when you go to the museum, you see individual people and descriptions of their lives. The six million have faces, and they looked like ordinary, happy people with their families and friends. These sights are hard to take in and understand.

I will turn to happier sights of Berlin in my next post. Stay tuned!

Berlin - The Wall

Top photo: Atrium at the Sony Center at Potsdammer Platz.

Middle photo: the bricks marking where the Berlin Wall existed throughout the city.

Bottom photo: A view of the Bradenburg Gate.

Berlin's history about the Berlin Wall is still very much a part of the city sights. Our first stop was to visit Potsdammer Platz, where the vibrancy of Guilded Age Berlin had been thriving. We found many photos of the square back in the early 1900's, where tram traffic moved back and forth, where people streamed across the streets, and where large buildings held many stores, cafes and hotels.

We bought photos of this area after the Allied bombing completely destroyed it. Then the Wall went up right through this area about twenty years later. Now, twenty years after the Wall came down, Potsdamer Platz is again a hugely vibrant area, with brand new buildings that rise many stories in the air, where there are several luxury hotels surrounding the square, and where shops and restaurants are full of shoppers and visitors.

Sony has built a huge theater there, within the confines of a beautiful atrium, with light shows, cafes, places to explore and much more.

There is a brand new arcade, which is like a mall. The stores are wonderful, everything you could ever want to buy. It has lots of places to eat and sculpture throughout the arcade, and even a huge grocery store to get supplies on the way home. We loved to go in there for a bratwurst and a croissant (Jack the bratwurst and me the croissant). There were several very good restaurants that we frequented for lunch and dinner. There were also the chain restaurants, as in Tony Roma, all around the arcade.

There was a live theater at the end of the block, near the Sony theater. In the front of the Platz, there was always some kind of demo on selling something or giving away goodies.

Across the street from the Platz are huge new buildings where businesses are housed - everything from Price Waterhouse to DHL, and not all businesses are American. There are several European logos to be seen there.

Through all of this was the ever-present rememberance of the Wall - a brick line on the sidewalk that was the demarcation of the British and the Soviet sector. The brick line runs down the street, all the way to the Brandenburg Gate.

Just on the edge of the Platz is a remnant of the Wall, and then we saw how tall this thing was. It is well over six feet tall, so there is no way to see over it except to get a ladder or stand on someone's shoulders. Thick and ugly it was. I was shocked. Of course it was covered in graffiti over its ugly concrete gray facade.

We walked down to the Brandenburg Gate - all restored now to its former glory. We also have photos of the Gate at the time of the Wall, and the area was a wasteland. Right inside the gate stands the newly restored American embassy. The Adalon hotel, a luxury hotel before WWII but destroyed during the Allied bombing and neglected during the Soviet occupation, is now fully restored to its beauty and, I am sure, its high prices for a room.

The new British embassy is right around the corner, and the Russian embassy is down the street. The French embassy is also in the vicinty.

The Brandenburg Gate draws hundreds of visitors almost everyday, taking photos and buying souvenirs from the hawkers.

Not far from the Brandenburg Gate is probably the most famous checkpoint of the Berlin Wall era - Checkpoint Charlie, separating the American from the Soviet occupation areas. All around the area are big poster boards, showing photgraphs of what it was like in 1961, when the Wall went up. Down the street they have saved one whole block of the Wall, with all of the grafitti all over it. They have also saved a block in the neighborhood to what it looked like in the twenty years of the Soviet occupation: completely barren, with weeds and pieces of concrete strewn about - probably a building was there and it was torn down by the Soviets for security purposes. They had to be able to see everywhere to make sure that noone was sneaking over the Wall.

It was hard to take all of this in, especially since all of terror and hardship of a people happened during one's lifetime. We walked around and saw local people who probably lived all through this, and we wondered what kind of stories they could tell.

This area of Checkpoint Charlie is a huge tourist draw - tour buses always driving up and down the streets, and knots of people reading the information on the wall and snapping photos. Jack was at this very checkpoint back in the early 60's. His dad, who was in the military, was sent to this area when the Wall went up, and so the Luehrs family moved to Germany for three years. Jack, his mom and his brother Bruce had visited eastern Berlin one cold afternoon, and he said it was spooky, with all of the security measures and the Soviet soldiers everywhere. He said when they entered, their passports were taken from them until they returned back through the checkpoint.

The whole Soviet sector of the city is now trying to revive or regain its former stature. Rich places, like the Stadt Mitte and the area near the Brandenburg Gate, are already back to normal, with thriving shopping, eating, luxury hotels and apartments. The concert house is now a thing of beauty and the churches on the Gendharme square are magnificent.

Other neigborhoods, especially those east of Alexander Platz, deep in the Soviet sector, are still trying to restore themselves. They were the working class neigborhoods of Berlin before the War and the Wall, so they are trying to maintain that image while being a vibrant and safe area to live. We visited the neighborhood way up north in the city, where they have a Saturday market, and walked around, after enjoying a bratwurst and a beer. The place was full of young families, parents walking the strollers, others playing in the children's playground. Some of the apartment buildings had seen better times, but others, right next to them, were newly painted and regenerated.

I thought that Berlin would try to eradicate the remnants of the Wall, but they celebrate its demise and how they eventually overcame the Soviet control. And they want others to see how it was and how they have bounced back in such a short period of time to become the great city that it used to be.