Our Berlin Adventure: Day Four

When we woke up this morning, the room seemed a bit dark, and I wondered if maybe last night's downpour meant that today was going to be a dark, rainy last day in Berlin. But then I remembered about an oddly fancy feature of our hotel room: the automatic sunshades that quietly come down each morning to protect us from the glare of the sun.

Actually, my photo of the gauzy, pink sunrise makes the view seem much more romantic than it was, considering the number of GDR-era highrises that comprised our usual view! Since our flight didn't leave until 9:00 P.M. this evening, our last day would be a full one, and although our museum passes were still valid, we decided to resist the lure of the many museums on the pass that we'd not yet visited, in favour of some wandering that didn't involve frames and audioguides. This isn't to say that we were bored of Berlin's art--we just realized that there was no way we'd be able to see everything we wanted in this fascinating city over a four-day visit, and there were still a lot of non-art attractions we wanted to peruse before we returned to London. If you've been following our Berlin adventures, you can probably think of a rather obvious Berlin attraction that hasn't yet made an appearance on these pages--the Wall--so that was the first thing we set out to get some perspective on today. We headed toward the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometre portion of the Wall that still survives along the River Spree. As we walked toward the East Side Gallery, I was struck by the beauty of the turreted bridge ahead of us and the creepiness of the pink face (made of a mass of faceless pink bodies) beyond the bridge:

Sometimes I felt like every view we had in Berlin came with a counter-view, creating a palimpsest like the one that Anselm Kiefer spoke about in the quote we saw yesterday at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Berlin is literally and figuratively in various states of rubble, and when we arrived at the beginning of the East Side Gallery, this crazy photograph had me looking back at the three-dimensional bridge behind me to reassure myself that it was the same one as the heavily bombed ruin in this 1964 photo:

The East Side Gallery is known for its art--this portion of the Wall was covered with murals just after the Wall fell, and although much of the original art was later covered with graffiti, many artists have been asked back to redo their work. We didn't walk the whole length of the East Side Gallery, but it was still rather surreal to walk alongside this bleak stretch of what once defined Berlin.

Brandenburg Gate is held aloft by the Statue of Liberty on this part of the Wall:

You can peer through various points in the Wall to what used to be West Berlin, just across the river.

One part of the wall advertises a tourist kiosk with a very odd feature: they'll stamp your passport as if you were crossing over between east and west.

This is the view across the Spree to what used to be West Berlin,

and here's a better view of that fantastic bridge:

I liked this simple piece of graffiti just under the U-Bahn line,

but I liked the graffiti in the station even more--it's done so subtly that you can barely tell that it isn't meant to be there.

We wanted to have a peek at some of the iconic Socialist boulevards in the former East Berlin, and this is one of the best places to see the grand concrete housing blocks of that day, in case you couldn't tell by the street name alone:

A wide street built for GDR military parades, Karl-Marx-Allee used to be known as Stalinallee.

We stopped in at Café Sybille, which used to be one of the most popular cafés in East Berlin before reunification, to see their displays on the changing nature of the neighbourhood. While we were there, we had some coffee and Bob couldn't resist their apple pie, which I initially said I didn't want any of, but, well, okay, just one taste . . .

. . . maybe two. It was delicious--I've never had apple pie topped with a mixture of fresh and dried apples, and the combination really worked. "You're glad I got the pie, aren't you?" Bob asked. I couldn't answer because my mouth was full of pie. The buildings that line Karl-Marx-Allee are grand concrete structures full of intersecting lines and nowhere to hide.

Surprisingly, we both quite liked the end result.

This smaller-scale building was located just off the main street:

We passed this shop on the tram, and I liked their clever slogan:

Our next stop was at the Wall Documentation Centre, filled with fascinating stories, images, and video/audio testimony relating to the Wall. There's also an outdoor viewing platform from which visitors can take in the Berlin Wall Memorial across the street.

As with our experience of seeing the photo of the ruined bridge near the East Side Gallery moments after passing the reconstructed bridge, many of the photographs in the Wall Documentation Centre seemed like they were from another world (I suppose because they were), especially now that we could picture the present-day settings of many of the images:

Of all the images, sometimes it was the simple ones that were the most striking--people going about the everyday in spite of the strange concrete newcomer in their midst.

The centre contains a memorial for all the lives "lost" at the Berlin Wall from 1961-89:

Here's the view from the top of the viewing tower--in contrast to the East Side Gallery, this stretch of wall gives a better sense of how the Berlin Wall actually looked, with two walls spaced 100 yards apart. This "death strip" was filled with tripwires and the smoothly raked gravel surface meant that no footprint went unnoticed. It didn't seem like it could have ever been real.

Down at ground level, the memorial wall is lined with wreaths, and an inscription that dedicates the memorial to "the memory of the division of the city from August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989." This was initially going to be the extent of the dedication, but after much protest by various groups, an additional inscription was added: "in memory of the victims of the communist tyranny."

Across the street from the memorial, we noticed people heading toward a small, round building whose significance was unknown to us, so we went to investigate.

The walkway to the building tells of the history of the area, and the black-and-white photographs were eerily effective at creating an atmosphere of division and surveillance.

I stood in front of this photo for a long time, trying to rationalize what I was seeing. The red dot ("you are here") made the image all the more impossible to comprehend.

When the Wall first went up near the Church of Reconciliation, the absurd outcome was that the church was now located in the east, while most of its congregation now lived in the west. This next photo shows a group of West Berlin women in 1961, at the bricked-up entrance to their now inaccessible church:

When the second wall was created, the church found itself in an even more grotesque situation (the one depicted in the photo that caused me to stare for so long)--it was now within the death strip, completely isolated from everyone and everything, and stayed that way until 1985, when the building was blown up by GDR authorities, on the grounds that the church obstructed security sight-lines and resulted in border patrols having to detour unnecessarily around the structure. After the Wall came down, the church foundation was found to be intact, and some of the church relics were either found or returned. The decision was made to rebuild the church as a small chapel that would "serve as a sign of remembrance and as an expression of gratitude for the overcoming of the partition of Berlin and the division of Germany and Europe. It was also meant to symbolize the hope that a place of silence, worship and reconciliation would arise on this site." Although the architects' original design was for a concrete building, the congregation refused to see their church rebuilt using the material that once comprised the wall, and so the design remained, but the chapel took the form of clay and wood instead of concrete.

Near the church entrance, the statue Reconciliation commemorates November 9, 1999: the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall.

The chapel is a lovely, minimalist space,

with one extremely jarring artifact within its walls, located under this grating:

an unexploded American bomb from 1945, discovered and defused in 1999, and left where it was found.I was surprised when we left the chapel and I noticed a series of billboards with Korean writing on them. All of a sudden, I realized the last time I had felt so strange, so disbelieving of what I was seeing right before my eyes: when I visited Panmunjom in the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) that separates North and South Korea. The 4km-wide Korean DMZ is the most heavily armed border in the world, and Panmunjom is the only place within the DMZ where North and South Koreans regularly come face-to-face. In fact, most of the landmine-filled DMZ is akin to a wildlife sanctuary; people have not set foot there for more than fifty years. Billboards shine and loudspeakers blast from the North Korean side, welcoming defectors and promising the good life in the north. Members of our tour group (comprised of people holding many different citizenships except Korean because Koreans cannot visit the DMZ except by "prior"--virtually imposssible--arrangement) were warned of proper standards of behaviour and dress, as it is believed that North Koreans film tourist groups for use in propaganda campaigns about how uncivilized the capitalist west is. And just in case anyone has any hope that the two Koreas are anywhere close to reconciliation, the fact that the official negotiation room and table used for meetings between North and South contains a line, not to be crossed with feet or hands, down the centre (of the room and the table) makes the thought seem virtually impossible. But then, I guess after a certain point, no one thought the Berlin Wall would ever come down, either. Anyway, I'm sorry for the long digression, but somehow the billboards made me think of all of this, and I felt extremely silly for not realizing how much today's wandering around Berlin echoed my up-close experience of divided Korea. On our way to the DMZ, we passed the rail line that used to connect Seoul and Pyongyang--when I was there, the South Korean end of the line was signalled by tracks that suddenly ended, in the middle of nowhere. This first billboard commemorates the mainly symbolic reopening of that line on May 17, 2007, when delegates from both Koreas travelled from south to north:

This nearby pair of billboards shows the 2000 and 2007 summit meetings between the leaders of both Koreas. In 2000 (on the left), Kim Dae-jung was president of South Korea, while in 2007, Roh Moo-hyun was president. Of course, Kim Jong-il was the North Korean leader at both summits.

These billboards are part of a series of works by artists from Korea, Russia, Germany, and China that have been placed outside the Berlin Wall Memorial in order to draw attention to various political issues in the artists' home countries--overall, it was a nice use of space that might otherwise have been blatently commercial. By now it was almost noon, and with our day passing more quickly than we had hoped, we decided to head to our next destination, but not before Bob noticed that we were being swarmed by masses of rather startling-looking insects. We didn't know what these red-tuxedoed beetles were, but their outfits definitely acted as a deterrent against any closer inspection!

Speaking of deterrents, this mural on our U-Bahn platform seemed to give us a pretty good reason not to get too close to the edge of the platform!

(I'd like to think that the various elements in the mural spell out B-A-H-N, but I can't quite see the "N.") Pieces of the wall, like this one near Potsdamer Platz, are on display throughout the city:

In some tourist areas of the city, the former course of the wall is also marked by rows of cobblestones that cut across grass, sidewalks, and roads. You can see such a line of cobblestones in the above photo, but here's a more detailed view:

One disappointment about our trip was that I was looking forward to seeing the Neue Nationalgalerie's spectacular collection of 20th-century art, but it's the type of museum that drives me crazy, because when there's a temporary exhibit, the permanent collection closes. Oh well, I suppose we don't really need another excuse for a return visit, since we didn't even want to leave in the first place, but if we do return to Berlin, I'll keep my fingers crossed that there's no temporary exhibit at the Neue Nationalgalerie! I was still curious to see the building, one of the last major buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe:

The museum is surrounded by a series of sculptures, including Henry Moore's The Archer (1964/65)

and Alexander Calder's Heads and Tail (1965),

seen here in more detail:

The museum also contains a rather spectacular sculpture garden--although it seemed a real shame that no one was in it on this perfect summer day. With all the thought we'd given to the Wall today, I must admit that even the beauty of the garden couldn't make me shake the thought that the large expanse of space sandwiched between two high walls seemed like an alternate Berlin Wall--one of beauty and serenity instead of blight and fear.

On the bus to our next destination, we passed this ruined building--sights like these had somehow come to feel normal in Berlin, but we were still intrigued to know something about the building's history. Thanks to the fact that I got the name of the nearby S-Bahn station in the photo, I was able to find out that the ruined facade is that of Anhalter Bahnhof, a major train station that was heavily damaged during WWII and demolished after much protest in 1961, leaving only the facade that you see here:

When I first came across the name of our next destination in a travel guidebook, my only thought was that I was a bit afraid to learn what would make a place called Topography of Terror a recommended tourist attraction. The phrase turns out to be the name of the exhibition on display at the former site of the Reich security offices (which included the SS and Gestapo headquarters). The outdoor exhibit is housed in the foundation ruins of the building, seen on the lower right of this next photo, which was the part of the building where the most important prisoners were held and tortured.

This gorgeous building near the starting point of the exhibition caught my attention; Martin-Gropius-Bau is now a site for rotating art exhibits.
By now I wasn't surprised when we started walking through the Topography of Terror, only to come across a photo of the same building. As I looked back and forth at the real thing and the photo, I marvelled at the ways in which Berlin has turned rubble into wholeness again and again. Formerly the Museum of Industrial Arts and Crafts, the building was heavily bombed toward the end of WWII, and the entire area in which we were now standing was carpeted with rubble.

The exhibit presented detailed analyses of how the Nazi organization worked, coupled with descriptions of the seemingly endless breadth of their crimes.

Another photo showed how the Topography of Terror site looked in 1991:

A fragment of the Wall still stands behind the exhibition area,

and here's another nearby example of a decorated portion of the Wall standing on display.

As we walked to our next destination, we passed this interesting sight. I'm not sure what it's meant to be, but I find it quite mesmerizing.

Although the original Checkpoint Charlie military post is now housed in a museum, a replica of this well-known crossing between East and West Berlin stands on the site, complete with images of border guards

and replicas of the signs that once stood here.

With massive crowds milling about, the largest group of people waited in two queues: one to get their photo taken with people dressed as border guards, and another to get their passports stamped by a similarly costumed "border guard." Very strange.

We didn't join either queue, and I got more of a kick out of this sausage stand, located just beyond the checkpoint:

We ended up having sausages for lunch, but not from Snackpoint Charlie--instead, we headed southwest, to Witty's, where everything on the menu is organic:

This time we both went for the Bratwurst (mine with mustard, Bob's with ketchup), and it was heavenly: delicious sausage, nuanced heat in the mustard, perfect sourdough bun, and scalding hot, wonderfully crisp fries. Mmm!

Witty's is on Wittenbergplatz, a large square teeming with imbiss stands of all sorts, but we were very happy with our choice. There's a U-Bahn station in the square, and the building looked rather pretty from the outside, so we went in for a peek:

The most well-known tenant of Wittenbergplatz is KaDeWe ("Kaufhaus des Westens" or "Department Store of the West"), said to be the largest department store in continental Europe. But just in case you think that this must mean that Wittenbergplatz is only about eating and shopping, notice the large sign directly in front of KaDeWe that reads, "Area of terror. This we must never forget," followed by a list of concentration camps.

Was it an artpiece? Was it a memorial? It seemed to be a straightforward call to remember the past, located on a site of present-day carefree consumerism, which makes it all the more effective and jarring. Again and again, this was our experience of Berlin--a sense that it was impossible to spend any amount of time solely in a consideration of the past, present, or future, because at least two time frames seemed to co-exist, collide, or inform each other in any given Berlin moment. We went into KaDeWe to have a look at their 6th-floor food hall--which rivals anything we've seen in Paris. In fact, as we started roaming around the gorgeous food floor, I got that tingly food-hall feeling which I've only previously had in Paris. Since our Witty's lunch hadn't included dessert, we treated ourselves to some amazing gelato (lemon for me and chocolate for Bob) that was surprisingly inexpensive, considering the lavish surroundings.

While I could have easily spent all day on the sixth floor of KaDeWe, it was already 3:00 P.M., and we only had a few Berlin hours left, so I tried to ignore most of the foodie delights and limited myself to exploring the chocolates and baked goods before Bob sensibly dragged me out of the store so we could continue our wandering. We saw the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church from the bus on our first day here, and decided that the surreal sight was worth some close-up exploration later in our visit. My first reaction on seeing the church was, "What in the world in that?" Known locally as "the broken tooth,"

much of the church was destroyed by British bombing in 1943, but the entrance hall and part of the spire remain as a memorial to the futility of war.

The hall ceiling is covered with an intricate mosaic

and the hall space contains artifacts from the original church, including a door-knocker and half-melted fragment from one of the doors.

The floor is just as beautiful as the ceiling.

This bear sits at the hall entrance,

from where you can see the new church, built right next to the ruin of the original church.

Apparently, the architect's original plans called for the ruin to be demolished, but Berliners protested the proposed loss of the beloved building, and the architect reworked the plans so that the remains of the entrance hall and spire would be incorporated into the site. The contrast between the old and new churches is quite dramatic, and unlike anything we've seen before. The new tower (visible in my first two photos of the church site) acts as a belfry, and both the tower and the new church (visible above) are made of concrete with a glass mosaic. From the outside, the design doesn't look like much,

but it's absolutely spectacular from the inside.

The floor of the church is beautifully tiled and nicely counterbalances the square honeycomb design of the church walls.

I almost missed this next sight, but as we walked under a bridge, Bob pointed out that we weren't quite alone:

We headed into the middle of Tiergarten to have a peek at a sight that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire or Barack Obama's speech in Berlin last month: the Berlin Victory Column.

The landmark commemorates Prussia's military successes, and originally stood outside the Reichstag, but was ordered moved to this location by Hitler in 1938 as part of his plans to make Berlin the capital of the Third Reich. Although you can pay to enter the base of the column with its mosaics and you can also climb the 585 steps to the top, we just took in the column from the ground before moving on. We may have managed to stay out of art museums today, but we still spent most of the day going from destination to destination without leaving much time for one of our favourite city activities--wandering through neighbourhoods, turning down side-streets that look especially inviting, and usually discovering gems along the way. We decided to head down to a neighbourhood that we'd not yet explored, Schöneberg, and end our time in Berlin doing just that. Schöneberg is a lovely residential area whose past residents have included Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, David Bowie, Iggy Pop,

and Christopher Isherwood, whose former residence in the centre of gay Berlin

is marked by this plaque.

I liked this pair of apartment buzzers--this one adds some greenery to an otherwise barren wall,

while this one uses a simple, but glorious, arrangement of tiles to liven up the entranceway.

As we crossed Winterfeldplatz, we were both amazed by the apartment building in front of us, with its angles, jutting balconies, and light pink walls. I felt like we shouldn't like it, since something about it was almost ugly, but somehow we felt that the building transcended such a dismissal, and we both couldn't help loving it.

As with many photos I take during our adventures, I hoped to be able to find out something about the building when we returned to London, and thanks to a combination of Google and Flickr, I learned that the building was designed by a Berlin architect, Hinrich Baller, who is known for his creative use of angles and Art-Nouveau-inspired motifs. I hadn't heard of him before, but after getting an online look at some of his other buildings, I'm sorry we didn't see more of them while we were in Berlin. In the centre of Schöneberg, a plaque made of pink granite symbolizes the pink triangles that gay and lesbian people were forced to wear in concentration camps as a marker of their "deviance" and commemorates the people murdered by the Nazis for their sexuality.

The plaque is on the side of Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station, another Berlin spot that makes lovely use of tile in its decor.

We got on the U-Bahn and decided to end our visit to Berlin in a neighbourhood that we visited on our first day in the city: Prenzlauer Berg. Apparently, the döner-kebab-making girl I showed you at the beginning of yesterday's post has a name, Little Lucy, and she can be seen all over Berlin.

As our departure time drew closer, I found that I was looking upon the Ampelmännchen with a fond sadness at leaving their cute silhouettes.

Less than ten minutes after I took the previous photo, I spotted a sight that made me smile:

Although we wouldn't have time for a proper dinner, we decided to stop at a nice-looking neighbourhood spot to people-watch from our sidewalk table while sipping coffee and devouring the macarons we bought at KaDeWe (from Lenôtre, creator of our favourite Parisian macarons). The little gems were a bit visually worse for wear after being in my bag, but they were still sigh-inducingly delicious, and I think the lovely pattern on our tabletop makes up for the macarons' crushed state.

After finishing our treats, we had to cut short a nice conversation we were having with a German man who was in town visiting his son, because it was time to start heading back toward the hotel to pick up our bags. We felt very sad to be leaving Berlin, and Prenzlauer Berg said goodbye by revealing a bit more of its substantial character, including this fantastic apartment entranceway (flanked by a horseshoe and a seagull, complete with shadow),

smiling children swinging from an asparagus stalk,

and just the kind of local market that makes a neighbourhood great.

On our way to the airport, we caught a blurry glimpse of this amazing sculpture, and I snapped about six photos is a row, hoping that at least one would show the sculpture between the bridge railings that blocked out the view every second or so. Only one photo ended up being railing-free, but one is all I needed!

I later found out that the sculpture is by Jonathan Borofsky (whose Hammering Man sculpture stands outside the Seattle Art Museum). Molecule Man consists of three 100-foot-tall men (the third man isn't shown very well in my rushed photo); Borofsky has said about the sculpture "that both man and molecules exist in a world of probability and that finding wholeness and unity within this world remains the aim of any creative and spiritual tradition." As we waited for the train to take us to the airport, I took a photo of a billboard we saw quite often while in Berlin (although we didn't see much advertising overall--the city is still refreshingly ad-free, by London and Vancouver standards). A sad rubber duckie peers down the drain, seemingly at precious water going to waste:

I want to return to one of our first Berlin sights for the second-last photo of our trip: the S-Bahn carriage, with its fantastic pink walls filled with city icons that I showed you on our first day here. What I haven't yet shared with you are the fantastic seats that make the carriages appear to be filled with graffiti as trains zoom past. In a city as filled with graffiti as Berlin, I wonder if this is more than coincidence?

We grabbed some sandwiches at the airport that were both tasty and reasonably priced (yes, not only is the city of Berlin a cheap place for a trip, its airport isn't a ripoff--and how many airports can you say that about?) and finished off our meal with another KaDeWe goodie--I don't remember what it was called, but it was an amazing poppy-seed pastry with a crumbly topping, and this piece that's as big as my hand is only about half of it! (Bob already ate his part of the treat before I took this photo.)

Soon afterwards, we were on our plane back to London, already pining for our beloved Berlin, a treasure of a city, and one which we've hopefully only begun to explore.