Berlin

I’ve been to so many cities that I have never written about.  This will hopefully be fixed.  Let’s start with Berlin – a recent destination.

As I have shared with my friends, my main impression of Berlin is that it is a city living in the memory of the war.  Whether it is because its citizens don’t want to forget those years, because the world doesn’t want the city to forget those years, or because the city just hasn’t managed to replenish itself in the years passed – reminders are everywhere.

Perhaps as a testimony to how jumbled things can become in one’s mind when seeing too many new places at once, when I set out for Berlin, after already two weeks and several countries in Europe, I could not recall any particular sights and monuments to see in the city.  I booked a hostel several blocks away from the Ostbahnhof, and intended to walk the distance by foot.  When I walked out of the station, I knew the river should be on my left, so I set out east for the hostel.  The walk was longer than I intended, so I kept checking the map and worrying if I am going in the right direction, all the time wondering about the purpose of the long dirty wall on the bank of the river.  It took me almost the whole walk to realize, “Duh, it’s the Berlin Wall.”

The Wall is impressive.  The longest remaining stretch is now called the East Side Gallery, and that is the part that I happened to walk by.  It is covered by murals done by various street artists, with motifs mainly concerning war and human rights, some referring to Berlin more directly than others.  The size of the remaining wall as it stands now is not that impressive, but of course before it was also surrounded by barbed wire, a bed of nails, and armed shooters.  What is impressive is the fact that it stands where it was; not in a glass case in a museum, but right in the place where it caused all the distress and turmoil now expressed in the murals.

I lived in the east part of Berlin, and the east part carries with it more of the harsher reminders of the war and the decades after.  As a matter of fact, some West Berliners still feel that they are being dragged down by their east side, and the same goes for west and east Germany.  Old bombed walls and graffiti are prevalent throughout the east part.  Instead of hiding these dirty, as most contemporary people would think of them, pieces of the city, Berliners live within them.  Parks and bars are set up among these faded remains and old tram tracks.  Even the scarce décor in popular bars is dark and murky, baring only memories of the recent horrors.  Every Sunday night the East Side Gallery turns into a concert hall with music ringing from in between the Wall and the river.  In addition, as a tour guide explained to us, the city is still vastly under populated, and this emptiness causes those destroyed walls to stand out more than the people.

Our tour guide on a free tour, in front of the Berliner Dom.

Aside from this history-ridden empty feeling, which struck me so much, Berlin is a brilliant modern city with lots of lively people.  One of the city’s main endeavors is rebuilding historic buildings that were destroyed in the war.  Old churches, museums, opera houses are often topped with a construction crane.  The Museum Island, formed between two branches of the Spree River, is a tight cluster of five fantastic museums with rich and diverse collections.  Classical style architecture stands out in many main squares of the city.  The night life is also famous, with its center in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, and folks arriving to experience the lively clubs from around the world.

Only image on the wall of a crowded
bar in Kreuzberg.

And yet, in all this, still everywhere little monuments, little reminders...  Much of Germany was destroyed, both physically and emotionally, but Berlin is the only city that holds within its limits the loneliness and desolation that was brought to the world in those years.