Remarkable Berlin

One of the murals painted on the Berlin Wall. Pictures by Jackie Davis.

You’d think that five years of learning German at high school would prepare you for a four day stay in Berlin. And you’d be right. But knowing pluperfects and past participles will only get you so far.

So it was good to know that a friendly smile, and the appreciation that English is understood and spoken by the majority of Europeans, meant that I didn’t need to rely on my vague rememberings of the language in order to have an enjoyable and memorable visit to der Vaterland.

We travelled to Berlin by train, taking the overnight service from Venice. It was fascinating to watch the wide, flat vineyards give way to green rolling hills, then snow-capped mountainous terrain. Farmhouses in northern Italy were clay-coloured plaster villas; as we ventured into Germany, pushing north, they became white two-storeyed houses, steeply roofed to allow for heavy winter snowfall.

We had a private compartment during the leg from Venice to Munich and in Munich, we disembarked, and boarded the overnight express. This time we had a sleeper compartment, with bunk beds and a tiny bathroom, and a breakfast the next morning of juice, pastries and strong black coffee delivered to our door by a friendly German porter. Hooray for the underground, or the U-bahn, which is easy to navigate and has so many stops, there’s never very far to walk once you hit street level.

Our hotel, the art’otel mitte, was less than 200m from the Märkisches Museum Underground Station and was clean and modern, had original art on all the walls and breakfasts that made me fall in love with German bread.

Berlin is a very walkable city and although you can get wherever you want to on the underground, we invariably chose to walk. How else would we have stumbled upon the Spree river, with wooden boats and barges berthed on her shores, or the eclectic and bizarre East Side, with its art galleries and vegetarian cafes, outdoor sculptures, and of course, the remaining section of The Wall, muralled and graffitied, defiant and glorious.

Our strolls through the city took us along the tree-lined sidewalks complete with bicycle lanes. It was a delight and a real joy, while walking, to hear the tinkle of a bicycle bell, as a cyclist approached from behind and was letting us know his intention to pass. Such manners!

Heading the must-dos was a guided walking tour, and we chose The Original Free Berlin Walking Tour. The hardest part of this tour was finding the meeting spot, One80 hostel in Alexanderplatz, but once we met up with the other guests and the amazing host, Artemis, we were not disappointed. In the space of two-and-a-half hours, we walked all through central Berlin and learned much about its history.

Our host, Artemis from Greece, didn’t flinch from telling us about the difficult and painful aspects of Berlin’s recent past, including taking us to the site of the Nazi book burnings and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. We saw small gold plaques laid into the footpaths, indicating where Holocaust victims had lived during World War 2. They list the victim’s name, the date he or she was taken away, and date and place he or she was murdered. The German name for the plaques is Stolpersteine; in English, stumbling blocks.

The standout on the walking tour, for me, was seeing Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture, Mother with her Dead Son in the Neue Wache, or The Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Dictatorship. A glass prism structure with an eternal flame was originally placed in the centre of the hall and the remains of an Unknown Soldier and of a nameless Nazi concentration camp victim were enshrined there. This was removed at the personal suggestion of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and was replaced with an enlarged version of Mother with her Dead Son. She sits alone under an oculus, and so is exposed to the elements. In winter, she wears a shawl of snow around her shoulders, or a sheen of rain on her face. This symbolises the suffering of civilians during World War 2.

The tour also visited Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, the Luftwaffe headquarters, Unter Den Linden (Humboldt University), the Gendarmenmarkt and the Brandenburg Gate. While the walking tour was free, we were invited to donate a few euros, which we did gladly.

One of the places we revisited in depth was the Holocaust Memorial, or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a breath-taking but sobering memorial, consisting of 2711 concrete slabs of varying heights, set out in the open, in a grid patten on slightly sloping ground. It is designed that you walk among the slabs, or stelae, and they are laid out in such a way that they produce an uneasy, confusing response. You start at one end, with the stelae at knee height, and by the time you have walked to the other end, they tower overhead.

Peter Eisenman, the designer, said in his project submission that ‘the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason’.

An information centre is underground, and this features a timeline laying out the history of the Final Solution, from when the National Socialists took power in 1933 through to the murder of 500,000 Soviet Jews in 1941. It contains memorabilia such as letters thrown from the trains heading to the concentration camps, photos and trinkets, and in the Room of Names the name of every known Jewish Holocaust victim is read aloud.

It took a while to shake off the emotions that the Holocaust Museum elicited, but it was a valuable experience and one to recommend.

The absolute highlight of our whistle-stop visit to Berlin was to visit The Eastside Gallery, a 1.3km walk along the still-existing stretch of The Wall, on Mühlenstrasse. It is an open air gallery of murals painted on the remaining stretch of The Wall, and it documents, through art, the changing times in Berlin and the euphoria and hopes for the future that the artists felt. It was a real privilege to see the passion, determination and belief in a better future, that those artists believed in.

And then, when we had only just begun our exploration of this amazing city, our trip to Berlin was over. At the airport, while waiting for my flight, I realised I hadn’t tried a pretzel. How could I have been in the bread capital of the world and not had a pretzel? So I paid an outlandish price for one, and was not disappointed. Even this left me wanting more of this remarkable city.