# 2: Berlin.
This post is about the beginning of our trip to northern
Germany, but I did not write it until a week later, for two reasons: I didn’t
have time to write; and it was too emotionally intense. You would not have
liked anything I would have written then. I am going to write a post that is
not a travel guide to Berlin, but a reaction to my experiences there.
A lot of people who have been to Berlin say they love it. I
did not love it (I am not a big city kind of person, and Berlin is a huge,
sprawling city), but I did go to many very meaningful places, and will tell you
about them. Warning: my time in Berlin was spent mostly at World War II/Nazi
era-, and Communist era-related sites. So if you are either not a history buff
AT ALL, or don’t want to get sad, don’t read this post.
Here is a partial list of the places I went to in my 3 full days
there. Donald joined me at many of them.
*The Berlin Wall and the Death Zone. The Death Zone (also called the Dead Zone) is
called that because if you were caught in it, you were shot dead. It is also called
that because in many places, it was stripped, denuded of any and all grass,
trees, shrubs, so as to give the East German guards clear sight. Today, many of
these areas are being turned into gardens and parks; on the outskirts of the
city, where West Berlin met the rest of East Germany, some Death Zone areas
were not as carefully denatured, and have become park-like on their own. The
Berliners have decided to maintain a system of Green Zones that are being built
on the old Death Zones. Here is the new park that is in front of our hotel, and runs from Postdamer Platz (more on that later) to the end of "our" street, which is about where the Berlin Wall turned one of its many corners; the American sector would have been on the outside of the Wall here and around the corner. These photos give you a good sense of how freaking wide the Death Zone was in many places. The greenway here is a raised area, used by many young people for picnicking and socializing. By the way, these images give you some sense of how long and wide the boulevards are, which means walking anywhere can be a serious endeavor. Our hotel is the building at the end of the street on the left-hand side of the photo.
In this photo you can just make out the red lettering of our hotel sign, Scandia.
What we call The Wall was
actually a layering of two up-to-15-foot high walls, with, in between them, barbed-wire and razor-wire
fencing, mines, lookout posts, high-intensity lights, a “road” wide enough for
GDR guards to drive from lookout post to lookout post, and a wide, empty,
denuded strip of East German land on which all this sat. Our hotel would have
been inside the East German side and close to the GDR-side wall. Outside the
layers of wall would have been the American sector.
These are the buildings across the new park, across from our hotel.
These buildings with
the amazing architecture were all built since 2001. Until then, the entire area
had remained an undeveloped wasteland, even on the West Berlin side. created by Allied bombing and by the
Battle for Berlin. Before the War, it had been a
busy, bustling area. To see photos of the area, especially the main plaza at the OTHER end of "our" street, Potsdamer Platz., before the War and after re-development in the 2000s, just search Potsdamer Platz in Google Images.
To see photos of the Potsdamer Platz area at the end of the War and during the Cold War, just search in Google Images for Potsdamer Platz post War.
I, and later, we, walked along many parts of the Wall and of
the Death Zone. Thankfully, while the Berlin people tore down almost the entire
Wall, they have left marked on the ground where the Wall used to be, so one can
see how the city was divided.
Also, there are numerous memorials, where parts of the Wall have been left standing on their old sites.
These Wall segments are exactly where they would have been, in Potsdamer Platz.
· * A large-scale panorama of The Wall, painted from
numerous photographs taken from different angles in West Berlin, showing life
on both sides of The Wall. This exhibit is extremely well-done, and includes additional photos. Worth seeing.
·
One segment of the huge panorama, looking from the West Berlin side to the East Berlin side. When you go up to the image of the Wall, it is life-sized, and you are the same size as any human figures on the West Berlin side. It's quite amazing.
*Brandenburg Gate, a huge tourist draw.
After The
Wall was built, neither side could access the Gate. It was in the Death Zone.
The British controlled the sector on the West Berlin side. The Brandenburg Gate connects the Tiergarten
(it turns out this word means “garden of beasts,” because it was an old hunting
ground/forest centuries ago) with the wide avenue called Unter den Linden,
Under the Lindens (trees). This boulevard today has—near the Gate—the American, French,
Swedish, and Russian embassies (the Russian one is an entire city block, and is
right next door to the city’s snazziest historic hotel, the Hotel Ablon. Think
what you will, but I would want a bug-sweep before I stayed there). Around the
first corner, on Wilhelmstrasse (more on this later, when I can solidify my nerves
to write about it), are the British and the Czech embassies. Just past the Gate
was the French sector, which is where the Reichstag building (old seat of
power, new seat of the combined government of Germany) sits. A fire
within the Reichstag building gave Hitler the excuse to begin mass arrests of
communists (he blamed the fire on them). It was heavily
damaged in Allied bombing, and sat that way, literally just a few feet outside
the Berlin Wall, until that Wall came down and the 2 Germanies were unified,
when it was re-imagined with its cool glass dome on top.
· * Memorials for the murdered Jews of Europe,
(This photo is from the web, and shows the claustrophobic sense of isolation when one is within the memorial)
t
e Roma and Sinti (a subgroup of Roma),
(inside the memorial is a black-bottomed pond with e small fountain in the center. Around the pond are bricks fixed into the stones, with the names of the dozens of concentration camps that Roma and Sinti people were sent to and died/were murdered in),
h homosexuals (this somewhat odd memorial consists of a gray concrete box with a short projected film of men kissing), people who were shot dead
while attempting to escape over The Wall, (these take the form of crosses mounted on fencing, withe names of some of the people who are known to have been shot while trying to escape), a beautiful and moving sculpture of a mother cradling her dead soldier-son, which is an anti-war memorial ,
and, finally, a large memorial, part of a mass burial ground, for the thousands of Soviet-Russian and Ukraine-soldiers
killed in the Battle for Berlin. The
following website has a detailed description of the battle, including the
tactics and movements on both the Soviet and German sides. It, along with the information provided on the plaques at the memorial, make for a truly horrific read.
The memorial was built within the British sector, and the Brits respectfully took care of it after the Wall was constructed, including allowing the Soviets access to it for special memorials. After the Wall came down, it was returned to the Russians.
Some things I learned from this website and
from the emotionally intense memorial to the Soviet soldiers include: the
political Nazi leadership of Germany either killed themselves or ran, like
cowards, at the end; however, they issued orders that the military and the Home Guard, composed primarily of boys and old men, was NOT to surrender
under any circumstances, and to therefore allow the destruction of the city and
the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. The elite Wehrmacht troops,
charged with defending the Chancellory (where Hitler killed himself), at the
end staged a mass escape, trying to break through Soviet lines in order to
surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets (the Russians and Ukrainians were vengeful, furious, and vicious to the Germans as they occupied German soil. They had themselves lost over 25 million people to the War, and had been murdered as military and civilian prisoners of the Germans, worked to death defined as subhuman. No one in fascist Europe wanted to surrender to the Soviets). Very few made it through
the Soviet lines; those who did manage to get out of the city ran into Soviet
troops outside it.
The following website is of images of the
Battle of Berlin.
· *The Stasi Museum. This is not to be confused
with the Stasi Prison, which I/we did NOT get to. The exhibit shows how, when it
became apparent the Communist GDR regime was collapsing, the Stasi began shredding
documents, and many East Berlin citizens rushed the Stasi offices to rescue the
documents. Since then, they have been working to recover the shredded
materials, in addition to saving and releasing the rescued records. The museum
highlights the files of a number of individuals who were spied on, arrested,
persecuted by the Stasi, and what happened to them. It shows clips from
Stasi films of people they distrusted (church-goers, young hippies, punks,
“bums,” athletes, academics), and describes other spying techniques. A chilling
visit.
· *The Tiergarten, which is oh so, so, so beautiful.
A forested parkland, very, very large, that runs, on the north side, from Brandenburg Gate, down past
the architecturally-interesting new government buildings, past embassies and
more museums, past…… On its southern side, it begins at Potsdammer Platz. Tiergarten Strasse used to be lined with mansions, including ones that high-up Nazi officials lived in. They came on the market cheap when the Jews who had owned some of them either fled or were arrested. One of the mansions was where the plan to first sterilize, and then murder, physical and mental "defectives" was first put into operation. In building their "super race" of humans, Nazi philosophy defined anyone who, they argued, could not contribute to The German Nation (this included people they defined as "too lazy" to work) as subhuman, and thus unfit for survival. Slavic peoples, Jews, Roma, physically and mentally handicapped people, homosexuals, those with mental illness, all fit into this category. They could not be "real" Germans.
The mansions along the Tiergarten were destroyed by bombing, or, if they had survived bombing raids, by the final battle.
This gorgeous park has a wide avenue
running up its middle, and a central plaza, which is also a traffic circle,
with a huge monument in it. I’m not going to bother with the history of this
monument, etc (although it’s cool that I saw it from the plane as we were
flying into Berlin, and wondered what it was, as it stood out so much), other
than to say that Hitler had this avenue reconfigured so as to be a triumphal
avenue for him to ride down, through the Brandenburg Gate, on his way to
Imperial Majesty, I guess. He DID see himself as the Emperor of not only his
Empire (the Reich), but of Europe (the Third Reich would follow after the First
Reich/Empire, which was the Holy Roman Empire (begun by Charlemagne), with the Prussian/German Otto I as the Emperor,
about a thousand years ago. The Second Reich was begun by Bismarck, and ended with Germany's defeat in WW I. At any rate,
the reason this sticks with me is because the Memorial to the Soviet Soldiers
was purposely placed along this triumphal route, as a sort of middle-finger to
the Germans.
The Tiergarten was also the site of
absolutely vicious fighting in the final days of The War in Europe.
Hand-to-hand fighting, with the entire Tiergarten covered with dead and dying
men. There are thousands of men buried
at the Soviet memorial, and thousands more German—and Soviet, both Russian and
Ukrainian—soldiers buried in hundreds of cemeteries around Berlin and its
outskirts, along with tens of thousands of dead civilians. The final count of
the dead will never be known, as they discover more bodies all the time, anytime
anyone digs anywhere.
Any trees that were left in the park after
the fighting were cut and burned for firewood by the starving people of Berlin. People also grew food on the grounds.
This is what this beautiful park looked like in 1945.
By the way, the Berlin Zoo, which is the
subject of another blog, also figures into this story. The zoo is at the very
top of the Tiergarten. There was a German flak-tower and large bunker at the
zoo, which still had some animals in it, despite having been bombed repeatedly in
1943 by British bombers (by the way, a subject I had never considered before: many, many, many zoo and farm animals and pets were
killed in bombings all over Europe, as well as in the Pacific, African, Middle
East, and Asian arenas of the War—this was true in the First World War, as
well, as in true in most wars. The large-scale deaths of farm animals are among the reasons famine often follows wars. It is certainly not the same thing as genocide, and
certainly not as important as the humans of all nations who suffered terribly
and were killed, but it is certainly an aspect of war I had not thought of
before. And there is something really awful about animals who cannot comprehend
what is happening and who ought to have no part in it….). Many zoos all over
Europe were ordered by local authorities to shoot their dangerous animals
BEFORE they were bombed, so as to prevent wild animal escapes. Most zoo animals were
starving, anyway, as Europe’s zookeepers had been called up to serve. Most of
the zoo animals in Berlin were killed, one way or another, and those that had survived up until the final battle either starved to death, were butchered for food, or had to be hunted
and shot in the streets, where they had run in terror. Surviving zoo animals were also used for labor.
Zoo animals shot dead.
Dead zebra (while another looks on) at the zoo.
This is one of the elephants killed in a bombing raid.
You can read about it,
and also see more photos, at these websites, if you have the stomach for it. Me, I’m
going to take a break from this horror for a bit, before telling you about the
other Berlin sites I visited.
