Mr. Gorbachev, tear this mother down...

Well, I’ve been in Berlin for two days now, and have spent about twelve hours yesterday and twelve hours today just walking through the city and taking everything in. I’m not sure if there are many other cities in the world that have been through more ups and downs than Berlin. As my tour guide put it yesterday afternoon: “Berlin has seen the worst horrors that history has ever known… but we have finally emerged on the other side.” And it’s true… after Germany was heavily involved in WWI, Berlin served as the geo-political epicenter of WWII, the capital city where Hitler first rounded up Jews and communists by the thousands. 90% of the city was destroyed during the war. The city was then split in two, with the Soviets occupying the Eastern region, and the Allies occupying the western region. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected to prevent East Berliners from fleeing to the allied western region, and anyone caught trying to cross would be shot on sight. And that’s how it was for 28 years, all the way up until 1989, when the wall came down and the city was one again. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, but the scars still remain all throughout the city. It seems like everywhere you look, there’s a history lesson.

On my first day, I decided to take a free tour offered by a company called “New Europe.” They operate in a bunch of major cities and offer great tours on a tips-only basis, because they feel that no one should be excluded from experiencing the culture and knowledge of such an important place. It met at the Brandenburg Gate, so that was our first stop. If you’ve never heard of it, it was erected in the 1700s as a symbol of peace, but was later changed to a symbol of victory. However, it may have more familiarity as the location where Ronald Reagan gave his famous “Tear down this wall” speech in 1987. Right by the gate is also the Hotel Adlon, which gained instant notoriety when Michael Jackson held his infant son out over the balcony a few years ago. Hence, it was referred to by our tour guide as the “Whacko Jacko Dangle-Baby Hotel.”

Next, it was off to the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, or the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. This solemn site was designed by Jewish-American architect Peter Eisenmann, and was inaugurated in 2005. It consists of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The blocks vary in height, and as you walk through it, you easily lose sight of the city around you. Thus, even if there are other people walking through the memorial, you get the feeling that you are alone. There is a very unfortunate fact about the memorial, however, which didn’t arise until after it was built. The concrete slabs are sprayed with an anti-graffiti chemical, and the same company that supplied that chemical also supplied the Nazis with Zyklon-B poison pellets to use in their gas chambers. It was the center of a heated debate, but ultimately, the company was used. It was an interesting place; there is also no plaque or sign that explains the memorial, or even says what it’s called. This was done so that every visitor interprets the space in their own way, with no basis to go from. It was overcast that day, and I got an amazing picture of the dark sky above the memorial.

Our next stop looked like nothing more than a crappy old apartment complex. However, we were intrigued to learn that the very ground we stood on once contained that most infamous of sites: Hitler’s bunker. It was here that he spent the final weeks of his life, along with Eva Braun and their German shepherd. Germany was losing the war, and Hitler’s grand plans were being reduced to rubble. Thus, it was here in 1945 that he shot himself, after taking cyanide capsules with Eva. When the soviets arrived, they burnt his body about 15 feet from where we were standing, and it is believed that Hitler’s skull may still be in a KGB archive in Moscow. A lot of the bunker is now gone; however, the floor and parts of the walls still remain in the ground. It was constructed 30 feet beneath the surface using concrete more than 10 feet thick, so it was impossible for them to remove all of it.

On the way to our next site, we saw a building that was left unrestored after the second world war. It stood out like a sore thumb – the façade looked like the surface of the moon, marked with overlapping craters from shell fire and flying shrapnel. It was crazy to think what Berlin would have been like during that time. How this building even survived at all is a wonder.

Next, I got my first glimpses of the Berlin Wall, which still stands in only three locations throughout the city. It’s deteriorated over the years from people pecking at it, so they had to put up a fence to preserve it. Where the wall used to stand, they have laid a double row of distinctive cobblestones, and it always has a plaque that says “Berliner Mauer 1961-1989.” You can follow the cobblestone line all the way through the city if you want. It’s crazy to think how much struggle and heartache the wall has caused, and that only twenty years ago, it totally encapsulated west Berlin and its people.

The next stop was a place that has unfortunately been subject to commercialism of the highest degree. It’s called Checkpoint Charlie, also known as Checkpoint Disneyland by the locals. There is a great deal of history there, however. During the time when the wall was up, there were only a few checkpoints where people could go from one side to the other. Checkpoint Charlie was the third, after checkpoints Alpha and Bravo. They were mainly used for military, as the soviets would not allow ordinary citizens to go from one side to the other. However, under a pact with the Soviets, they had to allow the allies to move freely anywhere in Berlin, including the soviet sector. Well, one day, the soviets decided that they weren’t going to let the American soldiers through, even if they did have a pact. The soviets sent tanks to make sure that didn’t happen. Well, we weren’t going to let the soviets push us around, so we sent some tanks of our own. And right there, at Checkpoint Charlie, the Americans and the soviets faced off, with each other in their sights and their fingers on the triggers. For sixteen straight hours they faced off, with World War III being perhaps only one shot away at any time. Luckily, no one opened fire, and both sides eventually retreated. There’s a great picture there of the two tanks staring each other down, just waiting for someone to make a move.

Our next stop was Bebelplatz, a large square where in 1933, Nazi students raided public and university libraries, rounding up books that had been banned by the Nazis for the ideas they contained. These included works by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Helen Keller, just to name a few. They then ritualistically burned all 20,000 of them in the center of the square. Now, in the same place, you’ll find a glass window on the ground, which looks down into a sealed room full of pure white bookshelves, all of which lay empty. Near the window is a plaque with a quote by Heinrich Heine (his were among the books burned), which reads “Where they burn books, in the end, they will also burn people.” Quite fitting, given the subject. The strange part is that he wrote that in 1820, 113 years before the Nazis and the book-burning ever took place. On that same square is Humboldt University, a very famous school that had such greats as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and even Albert Einstein.

Moving on, we went to a place called Alexanderplatz, which once held Nazi rallies of over a million people, but now is a green square with museums and the Berliner Dome. Behind the Berliner Dome to the right is an interesting landmark – it’s called the TV tower, and it’s the third-tallest structure in Europe. It was designed by a Swedish architect during a time when the oppressive government was trying to rid Berlin of all religious symbols. They scoured the city and removed everything, no matter how large or important. However, the TV tower does something peculiar when the sun hits it – it has a bunch of silver tiles in the middle, and the radiating sunlight forms the shape of a crucifix when it hits them. And since the TV tower is the tallest structure in the city, you can see it from just about anywhere. Once the government realized what was going on, they tried a number of measures to prevent the light from forming that shape, but to no avail. Thus, it is now called the “Pope’s Revenge.”

We finished our tour here on the steps of one of the museums, and our guide recounted the story of when the Berlin Wall came down. The tour had been awesome, and I wish I could have tipped her more than I did, but all I had otherwise was a 20-euro bill. I think she got a lot in the end, though.

Afterwards, I sat on the steps of the square for a bit and then re-visited some of the sites we hit, so that I could look at them more closely. Germany was playing Croatia tonight, and a guy on the tour told me it started at 8, but as I walked by a café, I realized he was wrong and it had started at 6. I got some dinner at the café and watched the game, which Croatia commanded to an early lead. Halfway through, I transferred to a local sports bar, where there were a lot more people and a lot more energy. I had a few Warsteiners and watched the rest of the game, but Germany couldn’t beat Croatia. Had they won, I was gonna go out that night, but since they didn’t, I just headed home.

The hostel I’m staying at is in the middle of nowhere, so it takes forever to get home. It’s actually right on the edge of a forest, where they apparently have wild boar that occasionally come near the hostel. The people that run it are pretty cool though, and they were actually all drunk when I got here on my first night, which is kind of funny. Ironically enough, I met some more people from University of Maryland here. On my train from Amsterdam, this guy overheard me talking when I said I was from Maryland, so he came up and introduced himself, saying he was also from Maryland. A long story short, we both went to UMD, we both majored in business, and we spent four years in the same building together and had never met each other once. That blew my mind, that after four years, the thing it took for us to meet was to both be on a 4pm train from Amsterdam to Berlin, sitting only a few seats apart in the same car.

But anyway, I think I’m going to meet up with Fab sometime soon (I haven’t seen him since I’ve gotten to Berlin) and do another pub crawl. We had fun in Amsterdam, so we might as well try it in another city. That'll probably be the only night I go out in Berlin, in order to save money. I’ll keep you updated…