Berlin

Last weekend I met Cassie in Berlin. Oh Berlin... how to describe.

I got there using this carpooling website to meet people already going to these cities and then you just split gas with them essentially and it works out great usually. The guy that drove on my way to Berlin FLEW on the Autobahn. I was actually pretty sure that if the car was any more aerodynamic or god forbid had wings we would have been having lift problems. I was remarkably calm though considering I had trouble trying to imagine friends of mine that I would even agree to be in a car with going nearly that fast.

Let me start by explaining that it was the hottest day I've had to experience in Germany so far... it was on the hot side even by Florida standards (90s Fahrenheit... I think... either that or I've become a wimp this Summer) and since Europe has virtually no air conditioning the only escape you can get from the heat is finding some shade with a breeze. So after Cassie and I met we tried to walk around and see some sights but it was about 1:00 in the afternoon so it was at its hottest so we decided to find a park and some shade and hang out for a bit hoping it would cool down soon. Neither of us having slept much the previous night, we ended up passing out for a few hours in the Tiergarten under a tree. When we woke up it was indeed a little bit cooler... but still pretty awfully hot as far as I was concerned.

We walked around the city trying to find sights to see and just sort of wander... we didn't realize it at the time but we walked through a good 80% of a tour we took later. The most noticeable thing about walking around the city, this is on a Saturday evening mind you, is how just terribly quiet it was. It didn't feel like the capital of a fairly big country with a supposedly famous reputation for getting crazy... it was just... quiet. We scavenged together a dinner from a grocery store (where after speaking to the cashier there in German her first real sentence in response to me was "you speak English?"), did a bit more walking, a bit of beer drinking, and called it a night.

We took a 'free' tour of the city the next day which ended up passing exactly through most of what we had seen the day before for the first part, just with a lot more information, and sort of placing the historical events I had known to occur in the city to specific spots. The actual chronology of our day at this point is partially a blur and mostly unimportant so I'm going to drop that construct.

Compared to Munich, Berlin certainly wins in just how neat their memorials and monuments are. They have a Holocaust Monument which is just absolutely amazing. They stuck it right smack in the middle of the city, I think with the intention to make it absolutely impossible to ignore. I have pictures of it so I'll refer you to those to see what it is exactly, but the beauty of it isn't in the actual structures erected so much as the experience of being there and walking through it. I don't think I can describe it correctly like this so maybe you'll have to ask me personally about it sometime, but I strongly recommend this to you if you're ever in the area. I was actually reluctant to mention it or post pictures of it because the difference between seeing the pictures or hearing about it is so vast compared to being there and walking through it that I felt I would be doing it a disservice.

And on the spot of where the first Nazi book burnings took place they have another really neat monument. It looks almost like a window sitting on the ground. If you look at it at an angle you see shelves... shelves that are said to contain an empty space for all of the irreplaceable books that were burnt that day. And then looking straight down at it all you see is your own reflection. This translation is repeated in the captions of my pictures but the marker for this monument has the extremely fitting quote by Heinrich Heine (written over a hundred years prior to this burning, and whose works were burnt) which translates as "That was only a prelude, for where one burns books, in the end one also burns people."

In the end I think if I had to pick one way to describe Berlin it would be as a "recovering Schizophrenic." Berlin was originally many small villages that were sort of mashed together to form one city, and then after WWII it was split up for some 50 years. It's only been one city again for 17 years, and only been the capital of unified Germany since 1996. In some ways I feel like it's somewhat skittish and still sort of in the middle of integrating the lifestyle of West Berlin and East Berlin to make a single identity, not to mention the huge presence that the Soviet Union and the Allies have left there... maybe not as far as military presence, but historical... and you can just kind of feel it there. After our two days there I felt as though I had seen nothing of the spirit of the city... I really felt as though I hadn't been in Berlin at all actually. By contrast I really felt like I had started to feel comfortable in London after a few hours, Edinburgh overnight, and after spending one day in Munich I felt closer to the city. Obviously a weekend isn't enough time to really see any city worth seeing... but Berlin especially so compared to everywhere I've been up to now. But it's changing so quickly these days that I would imagine someone that grew up there would have the same problem if they came back for a weekend.

This is already way more than I thought I was able to write about Berlin. Ian and Dave are coming to visit at the end of the week(!) and the entire time they're here I'm taking off from work so I think my next adventures will be all about that time.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen,
Shane