For a number of reasons, we’ve been traveling a great deal in the month of September (7 cities, 6 countries). Just recently we found ourselves in Berlin, where we both been before. But that was in another era, you might say, more than twenty years ago. We expected to find changes, but the truth is that each of us had only hazy memories of the place. (John had only spent a day or two there.) So we were open for anything. We stayed in a hotel in the Alexanderplatz in what was formerly East Berlin. This square had always been an important public space in Berlin. Today, alas, it looks everywhere else, populated by McDonald’s, H&M, Uniqlo, Primark, and the like. We miss the days of the KaDeWe (which, luckily, is still here)!
One of the things we were keen to see was the Pergamon Museum on Museum Island. The namesake work – the Great Altar of Pergamon – was not on display, since the museum is undergoing a full refurbishing. But Laurel’s old favourite was there in all its glory: the Ishtar Gate and processional walk from ancient Babylon and the time of Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BCE). This breathtaking work had been disassembled back in the early 20th century and re-assembled, brick by brick, in Berlin. It’s truly awe-inspiring, maybe even better than we remembered. Also still on display is the main gate of the marketplace at Miletus, an impressive installation from around 100 CE.
On our last day there, an old friend was kind enough to show us the neighbourhood around Alexanderplatz. This is, more or less, where Laurel stayed when she was studying German in Berlin. We had a lovely walk down the long Karl-Marx-Allee with its mixture of old and new businesses and apartment buildings. We learned about the statue of Stalin that once stood there from 1951-1961. Then he showed us something really cool. A part of the outer wall of the old Berlin Wall has been transformed: on this remnant numerous artists, each assigned a panel, have created works that areclever, humorous, sad, and thought-provoking. We were struck by the contrast between what had been the gloomy area of no-man’s land and the numerous people sitting out and enjoying themselves by the river on a glorious warm and sunny day.
We wandered over to the Brandenburg Gate, one of the central monuments of Berlin (this we remembered!), and then made our way to the unusual and sombre Holocaust memorial. The latter consists of numerous rectangular slabs, of varying height, giving the impression of a graveyard there in the middle of the city. Not far from there, oddly enough, is a plaque that marks the spot where Hitler’s bunker once stood. Since the bunker itself no longer exists, the plaque tries to mark it out and discuss it without glorifying it.
We concluded in a proper German way, at a local Wirtshaus (tavern) with our friend eating traditional food: meat and potatoes, washed down by a whole lot of beer. It was a lovely way to end our visit which had been enjoyable and more than a little thought-provoking. But that, we have discovered, is pretty much the way it is in Berlin.
