Berlin

Day 5/6/7:

Note: I am unable to precisely remember what happened which day as Berlin is a whirlwind of memories.

Early in the morning we boarded the bus bound for Berlin. The drive to Berlin was marked with beautiful landscapes of the German country side with golden meadows and dark green hills. Once arriving in Berlin, our bus routed around some major landmarks of the city and we eventually arrived at our hostel. Initially seeing the city was awing, with more or less our noses pressed against the windows, our eyes wide like any child's.

The hostel was much nicer than our dorm. We dropped our stuff off and were off again.

We were given a history lecture masked as a museum tour; but this is okay because I like history lectures. Our tour guide gave us a lot of history and I rather enjoyed it. Hearing of Bismarck and the building up of the German State in preparation for The First War. Dr. Kleine jumped in after our guide had said what he wanted and he went on to explain the class struggle of those times and that democracy was not really democracy under Barons in the countryside and the power-struggle of progressives and conservatives in Germany in preparation from early industrial Germany to the start of the Third Reich.

KaDeWe is a mall in a 7 story building. It had many amenities but I found nothing I was set on purchasing but it was fun to tour with friends. Eventually we split ways and I went down Unter den Linden and bought my Deutschland mug. I found a number of touristy shops and just enjoyed the hustle-bustle because coming from Tampa I'd never been truly surrounded by metropolis. It was kind of amusing seeing the young Berlin bourgeois and how Americanized they all were in their fashion.

I don't recall which day but we had a guided bus tour from a native Berliner who was great and showed us Humboldt university and a monument to remember the book burning during the Third Reich held by university students at Humboldt. The monument appears to be nothing but a square meter or so of a piece of glass built into the enormous courtyard and when you look beneath there is an empty bookshelf. A sobering reminder of the civic responsibility we each possess to the knowledge base we carry for our future generations and society at large.

Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe was very moving and nearly overcame me. 2,711 cold, hard, grey, stone blocks covered an open space in Berlin. As Schwartz's post describes it, "a sea". At the edge, much as a beach, the blocks are barely there--only a few centimeters and the more you walk, soon at knee level, waist level, shoulder, and eventually you're well in over your head. You're drowned in a sea of grey stone. The grid of it is disorienting because your vision is quite limited and you lose your group readily as the stones now tower overhead and even block out the sun, casting shadows between them. The ground slopes downward gently and the blocks rise gently. It starts slowly and chips away little by little until you're overwhelmed. The blocks are symbols for whatever you imagine them to be--laws against the Jewish people, the SS, the Nazi regime itself, German society. It doesn't really matter and that's why the architect said nothing. The best art makes you leave thinking. I didn't stop thinking for days. The artifact museums were moderately interesting. I felt the first memorial had numbed emotionally me for the rest of that day. Most of the artifacts were very very old and a lot was broken and shattered. I have lost the pictures I took, but the blue gate from Syria (I assume Damascus) had such a quality of craftsmanship and would have been stunning in it's heyday.

At the museum for the German resistance to Hitler, as seen in Valkyrie, we had the most amazing tour guide who dissected German society and the Nazi rise to power. We were all blown away and even though she admitted her English wasn't great, I was mentally racing to keep up with her flow of words and voice to match with the brew of ideas in my mind. Whenever she took breaks from talking I mentally was gasping for air and felt near my limit to keep at her pace. It was a wonderful experience and as the tour continued, she described the extensive spy network that had formed across the Continent in response for the desire to end the Hitler government. After this museum, Kleine took us to the memorial to a few of the nobles who had been captured. As they hung from hooks, the SS beat them and eventually killed them in a bare concrete room at a prison. There were flowers and wreaths to commemorate their passing. "If they had succeeded, millions would have been saved." The emptiness and silence of the room spoke volumes. And yet outside, the birds chirped and live goes on.

We went to the Radical Jewish Culture Museum on Sunday and inside of a traditional lecture/tour we we presented three pieces of architectural art. The first was similar to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe except the blocks were only 49 and were much taller and the floor was slanted on both dimensions and thus walking was more difficult. Several of my classmates mentioned losing their balance and having to use the 49 columns for support. I felt it a much shallower version of the other memorial.

The second piece was astounding, the Tower of Silence. You walked inside the asymmetric pentagonal tower which was something like 6 meters tall and when you looked up there was only blackness. The only light came from a sharp corner at the very height of the tower and lit the tower in a shade. It was obviously supposed to represent hope. The walls were cold to the touch and hard stone. Everyone clung to the walls and the sense of hopelessness was a very obvious feeling. Standing in the middle of the pentagon was disorientating and I actually felt nauseous and quickly returned to the wall. I preferred the sharpest corner of the room where my back and sides were surrounded by the stone comfortingly and I could view everyone. I felt safest there even though it was the narrowest and darkest place and I suppose that's where you should feel trapped.

Finally, the third piece was called Memory Void. As others have alluded to, the place was a fairly large room with circular metal plates that appeared to be faces. The artist of the piece asked that everyone walk over the faces. To me, I walked and the clanging began. The cold, harsh, mechanical sound echoed off the walls. You wanted to stop walking. You avoided stepping on the little faces. You avoided making much noise and choose the biggest faces instead. I turned back after I felt I had gathered the experience and then realized I had to walk back over it all a second time and the sight was just shocking where you saw how much you still had to go. You looked down to see where you were stepping and were forced to confront the faces, the people upon which you tread. After finishing, the group spoke with the tour guide and he told us that young children refused to walk on this place. You get the feeling of walking over the dead, a sin in most every culture.

The Brandenburg gate was very touristy but nevertheless impressive. What I found the best was the Berlin Victory column was at it's apex held a gleaming gold statue of a woman with wings. A quick wiki search yields the figure as a Roman goddess named Victoria.

The remnants of the Berlin wall were impressive (you could buy pieces of the wall at the tourist shops near KaDeWe) and our guide showed us an art gallery with freshly-painted murals along at least a mile-long section. Some of the art was quite beautiful while other parts were rubbish.

And of course, we went out clubbing both nights. For most of the trip until now I'd been moderately sleep-deprived. 4 hours a night doesn't actually affect you that much.

"I'll sleep when I get home. We're in Germany." Don't let life and adventure pass you right by.