Berlin II

As we continue the historic tour of Berlin, our next stop on the tour is the historic Checkpoint Charlie. This was the gate post between the American sector of West Berlin and East Berlin. Our hotel was a very short walking distance from Checkpoint Charlie. When the wall came down so did the actual checkpoint office. They have now recreated it in a replica hut and soldier’s post. Signs stating that you were “now leaving the American Sector”, as a hard reminder to what was going on at that time, have been replaced for historical value. Of course under normal circumstances, the people of West Berlin were allowed to cross over to East Berlin and return. It wasn’t so easy for the people of East Berlin.
This part of Berlin is full of indoor museums plus out door displays of the changes that took place over the years. One that I enjoyed was just across from Checkpoint Charlie, which had pictures of that area during different times during the cold war. It started with a picture of just the street being blocked off with a gate, guards and sandbags. Then as the time line moves forward new pictures with the construction of the wall, and how the area developed with the wall. Then of course the pictures of when the wall came down and what the area looked like then, versus what it looks like now. They also had very good descriptions of what each picture was in several languages.
Moving down the main boulevard, Unter Den Linden, which was occupied by the East and very run down during the cold war, now is a nice big boulevard full of hotels, shops restaurants, embassies, etc. If you walked down this street with no knowledge of the dark past, you would never think, based on the way this street looked, that something so horrific could have happen here, and so recently. Passing through the Brandenburg Gate, this was the main street of Berlin, where in centuries past, nobles would have parades, and it was the center of commerce. On this boulevard you can find the Berlin State Library and the Humbolt University where Einstein taught.
At one point there is a large square full of cobble stone and nothing else. There are no chairs, flowers or plants of any kind, no monument in the middle of the square sticking up out of the cobble stone to mark some place in history... or is there? In the middle of the square, or platz (plaza in english) is a small plaque that states, in German; If you burn books today, you burn people tomorrow.” This is the site where on May 10, 1933, 20,000 books, important works from the likes of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and others were destroyed by fire. Under the orders of the Nazi Propaganda Minister, right-wing students and Storm Section officers publicly burned literary works considered Jewish, communist, or degenerate in a bid to “purify” Germany.
Next to this plaque is a window in the ground. When you look down you see a very large room, a library, nothing but shelves and all painted white. The shelves are empty, but it is said there is enough room on the empty shelves to house all the books that where burned by the Nazis.
The next stop on our tour was the Berliner Dome. This neo-Renaissance cathedral was built in 1895, and of course needed to be rebuilt after the fall of the Berlin wall. If was damaged during WWII and not maintained much during the cold war. Its center piece is a brass dome 70 meters high, standing out over most other buildings. Inside are intricate mosaics depicting Biblical scenes inlaid with over 500,000 tiles including some in gold. You can climb to the second level where they have a small museum about the history of the church, which was actually included by the designer during the original construction of the church.
You can then climb another 267 steps to the upper gallery which basically takes you to the base of the dome and outside. From here you can see all of Berlin, similar to the Reichstag’s dome, except you are on the outside. You are able to walk all the way around the dome so you truly can see all of Berlin.
Berlin has a few building codes that date back hundreds of years and are still followed. They have a few areas within the city where they allow tall buildings, usually office, but now some are even condos, but for the most part there is a limit to the height that a building can reach. I’m not sure what the exact height is, but it’s somewhere around 70 feet, or a 6 or 7 story building. The exceptions are government buildings and churches. So when you are up high, or on a roof top; you see the tops of all the buildings, but above all of them are the steeples and towers of the churches. Its quite a beautiful visual.
The last place you visit on this tour is the underground part of the church, and what do you think they placed down there, in the basement of a church? After coming down stairs, and stairs and then a few more stairs we walked into this very large room, supported with while columns and arches. At the entrance to this large room, which is for the most part, the entire foot print of the church above, there is a sign which asks for your consideration in being silent as this is an eternal resting place for many people.
I’m sure the look on my face was priceless once I realized we were actually walking into the crypt of a church several centuries old. This room, like the rest of the church had been rebuilt, and most if not all tombs have been rebuilt as well. It almost looked like a showroom for tombs and caskets! The floor, walls and ceiling were made of white marble and all the tombs and caskets were arrange in a perfect manner with small rod-iron fences surrounding them. The lighting was crisp, but very dim, and you could have eaten off the floor the place was so clean.
We somehow managed to spend as much time in this one room as we did in the rest of the church combined.... not sure why? There were nobles, kings, queens, saints, and even children placed inside the crypt. Yes I stopped and looked at each and every one of the tombs. There were even fresh flowers on some of the tombs, not sure if that is surviving families, or the church doing that, but it did add a nice touch.
So the actual last place you visit when leaving the tour of the church is the gift shop! Very Disney. You think I’m kidding! And it was a large gift shop. Of course you want to buy all things associated with the church because you have just spend several hours there and it feels like home. I was a good boy and only bought a post card - of the crypt (of course), as my camera was not taking good pictures in the dim light! They had a beautiful “coffee table” style book exclusively on the crypt! Talk about tempted. If we were heading back to the states I think I would have bought it, but the thought of carrying that through India stopped me.
The last part of our historic tour took us to the East Side Gallery. This
“gallery” is the largest part of the Berlin Wall still standing. It’s about 4265 feet long (1300 meters). The entire Berlin Wall was 155 km long, about 96 miles. The Berlin Wall was not a very tall or forbidding looking wall. The catch was, which many people do not know, is that if you were lucky enough to get over the wall, heading into West Berlin, without being shot and killed, there was a second wall of the same size you needed to cross about 30 feet away. The area between the two walls was considered no mans land or the “Death Strip”, where East German Guards patrolled.
Using the Berlin Wall as the canvas, 106 politically charged works of art, painted by artists from 21 countries, were created in 1990. The works now serve as a memorial to German freedom. Its very easy to walk up to the wall from the train station, take a picture and say you have been there. We decided, despite the temperature being about 35, to walk the entire gallery. Near the other end there is a section that you can walk behind the main wall and see a very small portion of the other wall still standing. You get a glimpse of “the Death Strip”. It ended at another large train station anyway, so our need to walk back from where we started was not needed and took us to parts of the city we would not have otherwise visited.
In the next, and last entry of Berlin, I will share some of the modern activities we did during our stay, parts of the trip that didn’t include the dark past of the 20th century.