Berlin

Before I get on to Berlin, one thing I forgot to mention in Dresden. At Homage to Oma we had dessert - Swarzwalderkirschtort!!!!!!


Now we can get to Berlin. We stayed in a shopping district on the west side of the Tiergarten. The first night, Wedensday night, we went to the restaurant at the hotel. It was called 44 and had a michelin star. Well it was fantastic. I had 5 courses, Llew had 7. Each came with an accompanying wine. Got rather sloshed! It was so good. Llew reckons he could make nearly all of it - it would just take a very long time!
On Thursday, we had booked a walking tour that left from the zoo station right near the hotel, so we had to get up about 8:30. Wasn't too bad ~_~
We had a German guide who had grown up in London and parts of Australia. First we took the train to the other side of town. We crossed the canal and saw the Jewish part in the distance.

This museum had the unique feature that the centrepiece for the foyer was built especially but then when moved to the site, was found it could not get through the columns! It was left in the middle of the square and moved back to the front of the museum by the GDR government.


The Berlin cathedral. Note that there are no high crosses - more on that later.

Here was a GDR theatre built to show that East Berlin people could have a good time, and for the government to mix with the people to show that they were all the same. It was decided sometime recently, that a private invester could demolish it to put back the building from the imperial time. Apparently it was a nice building and could have been done up nicely - but oh well.

This front was the last remaining bit from the old palace, but the GDR built around it. The only reason it was kept was because the head of the communist party declared East Germany a communist state.

This is a memorial to all victims of all wars. Called The Neue Wache (New Guard House), it was in a building dating from 1861, and it is a memorial to all German victims of war. Recently the wars on terror were included. This statue was put here in 1993 - Käthe Kollwitz's sculpture Mother with her Dead Son.

One thing left over from the GDR and incorporated into West Berlin ever, are the walk lights. These men are famous!

Humbolt University, most notible for Albert Einstein.

This is the square where the book burning took place.

This closed memorial would hold the more than 20,000 books burnt on may 10, 1933.

A long walk up Unter den Linden - under the Linden trees.

Stopped briefly at a metro station that was on the line from one part of northern West Berlin to southern West Berlin, but it was in East Berlin. It dated from before the separation and was the only real way for West Berliners to move from north to south and back. So a deal was struck, and the train could keep running - just the station was closed and patroled by guards (very loyal to GDR). The trains used to run through these "ghost stations".

To the Brandenburg Gate.

This is the Adlon hotel - Michael Jackson, baby, balcony...

The double cobble stone line marks the western wall of the Berlin wall. It is all gone now.

This is the Holocaust memorial and is designed such that each person is supposed to take their own meaning from it. It was huge and with deceptive scale.

Now back to those crosses. Apparently during the GDR, churches could not display crosses higher than the building. This TV tower, however, the pride and joy of 'technologically advanced' East Germany, at certain times of the day gets a lovely cross from the sun. It is called 'the Pope's revenge'.

Hitler's bunker was here, but is now filled with gravel. It was here that he committed suicide with his new wife Eva Brown. Before he married her in his last days, he was 'married to the state'. Behind are the fancy, upmarket, East Berlin apartments, the best in East Germany - they were made nicer and had fancy roofs and even had running water - that were built such that those in West Germany could see that the East Germans lived well too. But it was a very different story away from the wall.

The Czech Republic embassy - style!

This is what the GDR wanted the people to think life was like under their regime. Of course it was very different.

And here it is - the wall. This bit has been left as it was and is falling apart. Our guide said that some people was to restore the wall, others just wanted to knock it down. Some - and she liked this idea - just want to leave it to degrade naturally as a symbol of the diminishing boundaries between east and west that are still in the minds of people who went through it all. As it goes, it is like more and more people reconciling the differences.

Parts have been taken and painted as more of an artistic memorial.

Checkpoint Charlie - as opposed to alpha and bravo further along the wall. The photo is the last allied guard posted there. This is all a replica now and building have sprung up on each side. Before that it was a huge border control, not unlike many borders today such as between the US and Mexico.

The French Argonauts build a lovely church in town next to the philharmonic orchestra.

It was, incidentally, renovated by the GDR right after West Berlin renovated theirs. Hmmm.

The Germans, however, got jealous of the French church, so build their own - mirror image - on the other side of the orchestra building.

That was the end of our walking tour and because it was freezing cold and gale force winds blowing, we went back to the hotel and had room service pizza for dinner.

It was a lovely tour, and great to see everything. Just the weather was bad.