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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
