I didn't meant to sound so ominous with that title, but my good friend Marissa's arrival in Europe in June 2015 truly did mean the final leg of my CBYX program year in Germany was about to come to an end.
Just before her arrival, I had my last day of my internship at Kompaktmedien, so I whipped out my best German in my final goodbye email to the office. My coworkers responded and wished me well, and one of them said I was the first American they had met who could speak such good German! Now that's a compliment I'm sure to remember.
After work, I rushed off to a subway station to greet Marissa. She had quite the journey behind her - she had flown from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, from Salt Lake City to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam to Hamburg. Then she took a train into Berlin, and finally she had to ride one last subway train to Friedenau, my host family's neighborhood in Berlin. All in all, it was 28 hours of traveling. Thanks for going through all that, Marissa! It's almost like you're one of my very best friends or something.
Marissa had endured the trek so we could take advantage of a 14-day break in my program schedule and travel together to a whole variety of new and exciting European destinations - but first, we had to cover Berlin. In a whirlwind 1.25-day blitz, I took her around the city and showed her all the highlights Berlin had to offer, giving her a crash course on German history in the process. I began by telling her that when you're touring Berlin, there's no better historical landmark with which to start than the Berlin Wall.
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| Posing at a segment of the Berlin Wall at the Berlin Wall Memorial. At this point, I've regurgitated pretty much every fact I've ever known about the wall and Berlin history on this blog, so I'll refer you to my older posts on the wall here and here if you're hungry for wall facts |
Actually, I lied - I do have some more facts about the wall. The wall ran straight down the middle of Bernauer Straße, the site of the Berlin Wall Memorial today. But when you suddenly split a city in two, complications arise. Namely, the upper windows of tall apartment buildings that directly bordered the wall provided enticing escape opportunities for East German citizens.
Consequently, East German authorities ordered that all such windows be bricked up or barred. The very first East German to be killed in an attempt to cross the Berlin Wall, Ida Siekmann, tried to jump out of her fourth floor window onto the West German side before her window was blocked off, but firefighters could not open a jumping sheet for her in time. She died just 9 days after the wall went up on August 13, 1961. About 135 more victims would also lose their lives in crossing attempts before the wall came down.
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| From the 1960s to 1980s, East German troops used cruel spiked gratings like this along the Berlin Wall's route to injure and hinder would-be escapees |
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| Faint traces mark the path of the smaller inner Berlin Wall |
That's enough talk of death and despair for now - back to some pretty pictures of the tour Marissa and I took around Berlin.
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| We visited the small and quaint Nikolaiviertel, a collection of restored medieval buildings in central Berlin. Marissa stands in front of a statue of St. George and the dragon, with the Nikolaikirche, the oldest church in Berlin (1243) in the background |
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| Berlin's TV Tower |
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| More of the Nikolaiviertel |
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| The Neptunebrunnen (Neptune Fountain), a Berlin landmark built in the late 1800s. You can see Neptune posing with his signature trident on top of a giant mussel |
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| The Weltzeituhr (World Clock) at Alexanderplatz, which was the center of life in East Berlin back in the day |
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| Berlin Cathedral, or Berliner Dom (1905) |
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| Berlin's most famous landmark, the Brandenburg Gate, which was once part of the Berlin Customs Wall in the 1800s |
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The Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus, today home to the offices of the German Financial Ministry, is one of the very few remaining Nazi buildings in Berlin, as it survived the Allied bombings of WWII. During the Third Reich, the building hosted Hermann Göring and the Reich Aviation Ministry he headed. Despite the overtly Nazi-style architecture, the building was not razed, but instead preserved so that future generations never forget German history's darkest chapter
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| Another view |
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| Marissa on Museum Island |
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| Checkpoint Charlie |
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| Inside the Neue Wache, which once served as a royal guard house but now is a memorial dedicated to all victims of war and dictatorship. The haunting sculpture, lit by an oculus in the ceiling, is named "Mother with her Dead Son." The remains of an unknown soldier and a nameless Nazi concentration camp victim are enshrined in the building |
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| In front of the Berlin Cathedral, on Friedrichs Bridge (Friedrichsbrücke) |
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| Altes Museum |
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| Another relic from East Germany's past - the Russian Embassy. It's the largest embassy complex in the world, and since it was built during Soviet times, you can still see the hammer and sickle engraved in the building |
We were right in the middle of Berlin's most bustling, interesting, and historical tourist district. But we had to take a moment for some somber reflection at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a Holocaust memorial consisting of 2,711 slabs of concrete of varying heights. Its architect, Peter Eisenman, has never given an official explanation as to why he chose this design. Is it meant to evoke a cemetery? Or is it simply an abstract representation of the rigid discipline and bureaucratic order that accompanied the implementation of the Final Solution? Or both? You decide! By the way, the German government intentionally included the word "murdered" in the official name of the monument, thereby making it clear that it has no intention of burying or whitewashing its past, and that it recognizes a coordinated genocide occurred under its watch. Some nations could do well by adopting a similarly honest view of their history (looking at you, Turkey).
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| It's impossible to take too many pictures at the Brandenburg Gate! |
Visitors can ascend Berlin's TV Tower, which is the tallest structure in Germany, but I never had the desire to. It's the highlight of the skyline, so what are you going to photograph once you're up there? Instead, Marissa and I went to a much less well-known viewing platform at the top of a hotel adjacent to the TV Tower, and we were rewarded with an incredible scene.
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| Perfect timing - right before dusk! |
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| The perfect shot at the best time of day! |
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| Passing through the Brandenburg Gate one last time on the way home |
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| One more Brandenburg Gate picture, just to be safe! |
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| In front of the Bundestag |
That was it for the first day. You might be tired just looking at all those photos, but there had been even more to our tour that day - during our solid 12 hours of walking and exploring, we had also stopped by the Gendarmenmarkt, walked the full length of the famous Unter den Linden parkway down the middle of the city, visited a history museum about the Third Reich, toured the Palace of Tears, saw the former site of Hitler's bunker, and ate at the most famous döner kebab establishment in all of Berlin, Mufasa's! (Yes, the 1 hour and 15 minute wait in the rain for one little döner was worth it.)
That was it for day one! The next day, we had just a few hours to hit a last few sights before we boarded a plane for Croatia.
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| A look from the Oberbaum Bridge over the Spree River |
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| The East Side Gallery, a section of the Berlin Wall decorated with 105 murals, is another must-do for Berlin visitors |
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| One of the most famous murals |
Having thoroughly explored the eastern half the city, we rounded off our tour with a few last stops in the west. First up was Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace), which I had first visited and explored in depth earlier.
We followed that up with a stop at our last landmark, the Kaiser Wihelm Memorial Church, or Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche.
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| The church was built in 1890 but largely destroyed during WWII air raids. Its remnants were left standing as a reminder of the destruction the war brought about |
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| A fancy mosaic on the ceiling inside the church. I took some other pictures of the interior here |
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| The night the church was destroyed, the 23rd of November 1943, a total of 383 Allied planes dropped bombs that killed 1,000 Berliners and rendered another 100,000 homeless. About 2,000 residents had died in other raids the night before |
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| One final look at Rüdesheimer Platz, a park in front of my host family's apartment in the Friedenau area of Berlin |
We had done it! We really saw all of Berlin's major landmarks in just 1.25 days! It wasn't easy, but I was very happy with the amount of ground we were able to cover.
The only problem was we now had to rush to the airport to catch our flight to Dubrovnik, Croatia. We corralled our luggage and headed towards the subway that would take us to the airport. As I sped along at full power-walking speed and Marissa struggled to keep up, I cheerfully reminded her, "Traveling is hard work, but someone's got to do it!" Check back soon to see the fruits of our labor in Croatia.
