The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe--- a really strong and disorienting memorial. You can walk through the cement blocks, arranged in a perfect grid. If there's no one in front of you, it seems like you're in it all by yourself, lost in a labyrinth of concrete. The memorial lends itself to a wide range of images--- some see the blocks as soldiers marching off, or as gravestones, or as bars marking out statistics on a graph...
TRABIS! Trabants were the standard car of East Berlin. It could take between 3 to 18 years to get one off the wait list. And teenagers complain about how hard it is to get a car *now*...
One of the last remaining stretches of the wall, near Checkpoint Charlie. Nearly got hit by a bus to get this shot!
One of the impossible chocolate confections at Fassbender and Rausch. They build four chocolate models for their windows every few weeks. This is the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial cathedral, and they also had chocolate models of the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag, and the Titanic. TALK ABOUT EPIC. The cool thing is the church actually looks like this...
People examining the memorial to the Nazi book burning. Students burned 20,000 volumes in Bebelplatz, including many works by Jewish authors. The memorial is composed of white bookshelves in a recessed room. Unlike some other memorials that are more symbolic, this one reflects exactly what was lost--- there are enough shelves in the underground room to hold 20,000 volumes. There are also plaques around the square that list a quote by Heinrich Heine in 1820 (more than 100 years before the burning)--- "That was just the beginning. Where you start by burning books, you end by burning people."
Another memorial off of Bebelplatz. The Neue Wache has been a memorial to protest many things, including WWII, Bolshevism, and Fascism. Today it is dedicated to all victims of War and Tyranny. The artist, Käthe Kollwitz, lost her son to WWI and her grandson to WWII. The sculpture is beautiful up close, both elegant and understated in grief. I think that it makes the work, titled Mother with her Dead Son, more powerful. The woman is not lost to the passion of grief--- rather, she is lost in the memories of her lost child, remembering little fingers and little toes, holding and comforting him when he was small. Definitely one of the most powerful sculptures I've ever seen. I really like the fact that Berlin is a city that remembers--- everything holds significance in a different way, from the artistic to the symbolic to the literal.
Me, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. The men who started it all!
Straddling the divide! Much like the Patriot Trail in Boston, you can follow a brick line in the tarmac that follows the old line of the wall. Careful, though, because it strays out into the middle of the street quite often...
View from the Reichstag dome, looking West.
View of the Brandenburger Tor from the Reichstag dome.
Photo from the collection at the Dokumentations Zentrum Museum. It must be particularly awful to build your own prison...
One of the stories highlighted at the Checkpoint Charlie museum. This man had his West Berlin girlfriend make an American military uniform and smuggle it through the wall. He imitated an American soldier so well, with salute and all, that he walked right through the checkpoint. I thought that the Checkpoint Charlie museum was going to be super-touristy and fake, much like the Spy Museum in D.C. It was actually created in 1948 to raise awareness about the division between East and West Berlin. The museum documents what happened post-1945, the division of the city, building the wall, and the means people used to escape.
This was my favorite thing to see in Berlin. It's a stretch of the original wall (several hundred meters, in fact) that was originally decorated in 1990. Over the last 20 years a lot of the murals suffered from decay or additional grafitti, so a lot of the original artists came back to recreate their works. I loved the color and the message of peace and hope. Our tour guide said that Berliners like to express themselves through a wide range of mediums (graffiti/street art, tattoos/piercings/clothes, murals, music) because they were denied the right for so long. These murals also show how Berlin served as a beacon of hope for other peoples suffering tyranny--- if Berlin could gain freedom from the Soviet Union, other peoples, communities, and nations could shake off repression as well.
A famous mural, titled "Kiss of Brotherhood: Lord! Help me to survive this fatal love!", that depicts an interesting greeting between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker.
This was my favorite mural, just for it's simple message. It honors the victims, the dead, while showing the pointless nature of the wall. Creation and destruction were caused by the same thing--- what was the point?
