Berlin - today

Today was an exceptional day of travel.

I marvelled yesterday at how much this city has been through. Today I saw where events that shaped the last century took place.

I'm not a big fan of tours. They usually make me feel like the tour guide must think I'm an idiot because he or she sure talks to me like I am. Today was much different and it was a welcome relief that my FREE tour was much better than any I would have paid for. (Tips are a great motivation for making a living.)

I'll go over the biggies.

Checkpoint Charlie - There is currently a replica of the actual checkpoint in place where two men dressed in fake military guard allow people to take pictures for 1€. (Our guide informed us that this is their day job and at night, the two men are strippers. No surprise in Germany where prostitution is %100 legal.) The street I easily crossed was once the dead zone where people found there were shot first and no questions were asked later.

The wall - I saw a western portion of the wall, where I learned that the East had built the wall a foot or so within their territory so as not to instigate war by infringing on the West. Therefore, in West Berlin one could graffiti the wall with a police officer nearby and there were no consequences. The East didn't care what was painted on the side facing the West and the West had no jurisdiction on that one foot between the wall and West Berlin.

Stories of escape - The guide shared several of his favorite stories of escapes from East Berlin. I particularly liked the following: A man in West Berlin had a girlfriend in East Berlin. To get her out he searched for three years for someone in the West who looked like his girlfriend. He wooed the look alike and brought her to East Berlin for a fancy dinner. (It was possible to get into East Berlin for the Westerners, just not vice-versa.) When the look alike went to the restroom, the man steals her passport and picks up his girlfriend and they cruise over the border leaving Look Alike to convince the authorities of what had happened. It took her six weeks to get back.

Dirt parking lot - We stopped in a dirt parking lot surrounded by apartment buildings just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie. Our guide explained how the wall came down due to a mistake made by the press secretary for the East, who notified the public that travelers visas were going to be made available and when asked about when this would happen he said immediately. He had no idea when they were going to be made available and slipped up. The border was soon flooded with people trying to get across and the few soldiers to the thousands of desperate East Berliners were unable to stop them. As we soaked in this story, I should have been wondering why the guide was telling us this information in a dirt lot. It didn't occur to me at the time that this was odd. It turns out we were standing on the sight of Hitler's bunker. I have to say it was a chilling bit of information. On this trip I have stood on several famous spots where Hitler had given a speech or built a concentration camp, but the dirt lot immediately gave me the creeps. Until recently there was no reason to suspect that this spot was Hitler's bunker, but the government decided to put a sign up explaining the spot. This was likely done because the tours brought tourists through anyway.

Prohibitions - I also learned that there are several laws in Germany concerning Nazi articles and imitations. It is illigal to possess a copy of Mien Kampf unless you are authorized because your profession regitimizes the need for the book. A history teacher could have a copy, but a plumber could not. Swastikas are forbidden and until recently so was anti-nazi paraphernalia. The Nazi salute is also illegal. Despite all this and the work the German government has done to memorialize the dead and proceed towards a brighter future there are many Germans who feel a weight of guilt. You wouldn't want to ask someone what their grandfather was doing between the years 1939 and 1945.

Book Burning Square - I was very impressed with the memorial at the square where the Nazi's burned 20,000 books in one night. Under the square are empty white bookshelves, enough for 20,000 books. You can see the shelves through glass over the memorial. Across the street at the University where Einstein, Marx and Hegel all studied, there is a booksale 365 days a year. They sell copies of books that were burned.

Reichstag - The German parliament building is interesting because over where parliament meets is a glass ceiling and people are allowed on the roof. The idea is that never again will the government be able to work in secrecy.

Memorial to the Jews killed in WWII - This memorial impressed me most. The architect left the interpretation quite ambiguous, but did say he wanted it to resemble the Jewish cemetary in Prague. I just saw that cemetary and can say there is a resemblence. Large grey blocks some upright, some leaning, cover an area the size of three football fields. The ground is not level, but rolls up and down like hills. The blocks get taller and taller as you enter the memorial. I like the way our guide interpreted it. He said that anti-semitism starts as a small remark or feeling like the short blocks around the outer edge, but over time it gets deeper until a society is lost in the midst of it. The memorial is controversial for two important reasons. The first, it is a memorial to the Jews. Many other groups were systematically exterminated during the holocaust. The German government has promised memorials to them as well. The second, the paint on the blocks is anti-graffiti. This is a good thing in a city that is covered in spray paint as high as a tall person can reach. However, the paint was bought from the same company that once sold the Nazis the gas that was used in the concentration camps. First they profitted from killing the Jews, then they profitted from memorializing them. Controversial indeed.


There was much more but this has been a long blog entry. I hope if you made it this far that some of the impressions I had today came through clearly, spelling mistakes and all. :)