Ich liebe Berlin!

So from Paris my friend and I took a whopping 14 hour bus ride through Brussels to the capital of Germany.  The most memorable experience throughout this claustrophobic cabin ride, among watching "Up" and reading Harry Potter in Spanish, was being nudged awake by a man carrying an automatic weapon at 4 in the morning.  Apparently at Germany's border you have to show your passport, and as I did not know this, I was quite surprised to see the Polizei officer standing next to me in the middle of the night.  


Once in Berlin we took the U-bahn public transportation to our hostel on the east side.  We went straight to the center where we went down the main street Unter den Linden until we hit Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate.

This area is also close to all the international embassies and although you can't see them the American Embassy is on the left and the French is directly on the right.  Near the French Embassy we noticed a group of people anxiously standing around and asked what was going on.  Come to find out, they were about to be guided on a Red Berlin tour throughout the city.  We decided to join and boy do I not regret it.  This tour explained in awesome detail the years directly after WWII until 1989-91 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was no more.  Our tour guide took us through East Berlin and showed us a lot of historical monuments and sites.  This city is so incredible, for so many reasons, but my favorite was that it was embedded with history everywhere you looked.  Every step I took I felt like hundreds of years of important and consequential history occurred on this exact spot.  We started at the now Russian Embassy that, 65 years previous, had taken the liberty to violate the city's building codes and construct the tallest and broadest embassy in Berlin.  As I'll show you in the pictures coming up, there are still some traces of Soviet Union influence on the building itself.  We then went through what is known as a "ghost station" in one of the underground subway stops.  During the era of the Berlin Wall and Berlin's East/West intersection, sections of the underground subway started in West Berlin, went through East Berlin, and ended up back in West Berlin.    Commuters from West Berlin at first were not allowed to ride through the East stations and had to disembark and take a different line.  Finally the Soviet Union allowed West Berlin to utilize the tracks and stations of the underground S-bahn (for a characteristic exorbitant price), but with a catch.  These stations in the East were completely sealed on the outside with bricks and cement.  When the train approached the station underground it would slow down and eerily crawl through the station without stopping while Soviet guards paced back and forth along the platform, ensuring that no passengers exited.  The train would then continue on until it reached its destination in the West.  The abandoned and frightening stations earned the name "ghost stations" and to this day retain the same font on their stops from Old Germany (which was also a favorite of the Nazis, making it even more unnerving).  These stations are just one example of the severe measures taken to ensure East Berliners never crossed to the West.

Russian Embassy

I spy, with my little eye, an old Soviet relic...

Old German font at Ghost Station

From there we took the underground to a Berlin Wall / Death Strip Memorial.  I don't know if I can do justice to the convoluted historical background that preceded the Berlin Wall so for details on that we always have wikipedia.  What I learned was that the Berlin Wall actually wasn't constructed until 1961.  Before they had tried to create a barrier with fences and barbed wire but the cement wall was not actually put up until the early 60's.  Also the Berlin Wall essentially encompasses the entire West Berlin city.  It does not intersect the city but instead circles the West side.  There was a loophole for East Germans to become West German citizens wherein they would go to East Berlin, cross over to West Berlin, become West Germans by West German law, and then could move freely anywhere in West Germany.  The Soviets attacked this loophole by creating the massive structure that culminated into the Berlin Wall in 1961.  This wall was actually two tall walls with rounded tops to prevent people getting a good hold.  The Death Strip refers to the middle ground between the two walls where there were watch towers, floodlights and sensors to watch for intruders.  Although it is still controversial, documents have come up in the past 10-15 years that corroborate the Soviet Union's orders to "kill on sight" whenever they found intruders trying to cross to the West side.  The Memorial had pictures of those killed from 1961 until 1989 when the wall was torn down.

Remnants of the Wall 

Tribute to those murdered

Old Watchtower

View through the cracks of cement into the Death Strip

View from above of the Death Strip

When I told my fellow teachers at school that I would be visiting Paris and Berlin for Christmas they told me, "Wow!  Que stupendo!  You will love both.  Berlin is beautiful and great.  But also really sad..."  I thought I understood what they meant and what I would be getting myself into, but you really have to visit a city like Berlin before you can understand.  Something I didn't know (and wouldn't until the following day on our next Berlin tour) was that 90% of the city center was completely destroyed during WWII.  90%.  As an American that is something I just can't quite wrap my mind around.  This city was very sad, but also showed that it can persevere and come through it.  The monuments and memorials are everywhere which serve to remind, but also to prove its enriching and complicated history.  I still have tons more to say about Berlin but seeing as how this already took an hour to write and I have to go to Spanish class soon, I'll have to save it for a future date.  To give you some pictures to ponder upon while I go here was one of my favorite parts of the city, the East Side Gallery.  This is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still erected and it serves as a kind of outdoor art exhibit with artists painting murals on sections of the Wall.  I find them all to be simultaneously provocative, depressing, inspiring, whimsical, disturbing, enlightening and overall encapsulating but I will leave you to find your own interpretations.

Checkpoint Charlie