This is my last night in Berlin; being here has been so much more than an incredible experience. This video pretty much sums up how I feel about getting on that plane tomorrow.
Berlin, World Capital of Memorials
Berlin has been in the center of several major events; as a result, the city is overflowing with monuments built to commemorate the events and, usually, the staggering number of people who died as a result of those events. For this reason, Berlin is often seen as the world capital of memorials. The Soviets built several monuments to their war dead after they took the city, each with very very large statues of Soviet soldiers doing heroic Soviet-y things. Another mark of the Soviet presence here in WWII is the thousands of bullet holes left, pockmarking buildings all over the city to serve as a reminder of the price of war. There’s also the monument to German dead, and to the German soldiers who served on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. But the most impressive memorial by far is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was one of the most incredible monuments I’ve ever seen.
30 minutes in Alexanderplatz
I didn’t have much going on today, so I set my sights on
Alexanderplatz to see what I could find and photograph there within a 30 minute timeframe. And even though it was cold, rainy and windy there was still plenty of activity in the former East German socialist dreamland (slightly reminiscent of Tomorrowland, if Walt Disney had been a dystopian despot).
It’s almost as if a huge war was fought here or something
Even though World War II ended almost 70 years ago, signs that the city was annihilated and then rebuilt from the ground up are so commonplace that they go almost totally unnoticed.
The Führerbunker, where Adolf Hitler lived up to and including his suicide, was converted into a parking lot several years ago. Apart from an information placard, nothing commemorates the site of the dictator’s death.
One of the most impressive examples can be found in Volkspark Friedrichshain, the city park near our hotel. I went running there one afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to find what I thought was a natural forested hill. It wasn’t until a few days later that I was told the hill I had gone up was actually an enormous pile of rubble, collected from a Nazi flak tower that stood in the park as well as debris from around the area. A huge slab, which probably should have tipped me off to the bunkerberg’s origins, is still visible at the top.
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- The site of Hitler’s death.
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- Anchors left from the turret that once topped the flak tower in Volkspark Friedrichshain
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- What would eventually become the hill in Volkspark Friedrichshain. Credit: Otto Donath
First few days in the city…
After 30 fiasco-ridden hours of travel, I finally arrived in Berlin on Friday evening. Immediately flabbergasted by how vibrant, lovely and weird the place was. Which was convenient, because we spent the next few days in a whirlwind of bike tours, courtesy of Fat Tire Bike Tours, as well as general sightseeing. Along with government buildings and the nearly ubiquitous graffiti, we saw the famous Brandenburg Gate, a city-wide bicycle race, the apocalyptic Berghain techno club (still busy and pulsating at 2 p.m.), political posters and pro-Russia demonstrators sporting the inflammatory Ribbon of St. George . So far, an excellent start.
Berolina 