Berlin

I have no idea how best to describe Berlin. Unlike the cities that I've recently visited, such as Rome, Athens, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, etc., whose architecture and history date back to medieval times, Berlin has been the crossing point for the major historical events of the last century... events from which it is still trying to recover. There are beautiful buildings that date back much earlier, but many for damaged or destroyed by Allied bombing and left to rot in East Berlin. They only begun restoration in the last fifteen years. This, though, provided me with the unique opportunity to have a very real experience of the events of the last century.

I don't usually join walking tours because I feel like I can do a better and more efficient job of seeing everything myself, but I heard Brewer's Walking Tours was exceptionally good, and my tour guide for which was currently majoring in recent German history. He showed us all the major historical sites, but, for most of them, he had to use the phrase "damaged by bombs in WWII," a phrase which I haven't heard in any other city... including London. Most of the tour and most of the old city of Berlin were in Communist controlled East Berlin (part of East Germany), and the government chose not to repair any of the damage from WWII (except if it was an apartment building). So work has only been started in the last decade.

The most memorable sites were those where events of the last century occurred. For instance, in 1933 the Reichstag here was the site of a fire that was blamed on a crazy communist arsenist who tried to start the fire with a book of matches and his shirt and somehow managed to get flames to shoot out of the opposite end of the building. The next day the majority Nazi party convinced the Kaiser or whoever to suspend the constitution and to give emergency powers to the chancellor of parliament to counter the Communist threat. (Does anyone else hear the plot to Star Wars here?). And we can all guess who that guy was.

That guy spent the last six weeks of his life in a bunker marked by this unassuming parking lot. The white post in the back is roughly the spot of the crater where his body was burned by a couple of barrels of petro. Personally, I'm glad there's nothing marking this spot. It's further fitting that the marble from his huge palace lines the subway station through which we walked and is used in the Soviet War Memorial.

By far the greatest effect on Berlin, though, was The Berlin Wall. I was amazed to find out that the wall went up in all of four hours, not to protect the East from the West, but to keep the working class in the East. It completely divided family and friends. All to try to show that Communism was better. The Cold War here seemed so much like a fashion show... just bullshit postering on either side.