Mitte

Walking north towards Mitte, I discovered that the district that used to be East Berlin was my favorite in the city. M described the buildings as “faux-old”; it’s true, most of East Berlin has been re-constructed in the last fifteen years. However, I loved the Mitte’s plazas and tree-lined boulevards, its churches and embassies, museums and opera houses. We admired the French and German Cathedrals before walking east on Unter den Linden to visit Bebel-Platz, the sit of Nazi book-burning. M especially appreciated Micha U.’s installation of a white, bare room lined with empty, white bookcases underneath the plaza, viewed through a small window embedded in the ground.

The Neue Wache, a memorial to the “victims of war and tyranny” worldwide was difficult to see. The sculpture, one of a woman holding her dead son, is a sobering one.

Mitte has so many museums that visiting all of them would keep a visitor busy for a week; there is a reason the area is knows as Museum Island. After checking out the Berlin Cathedral, we visited the Pergamonmuseum. Initially skeptical about traveling to Berlin to view artifacts from antiquity, I was quickly won-over when I saw that an audio-guide was included in the admission fee and that the museum’s collection, although comprehensive, wasn’t going to keep me from further exploring Berlin for more than a few hours.

We viewed the Pergamon Altar which was built in 170 BC where I admired the friezes that depict the war between Greek Gods such as Zeus and Athena with the Giants. The Mshatta façade was impressive as is the museum’s collection of Ottoman rugs and tiles which reminded me of the art we recently saw in Istanbul. My favorite exhibit in the museum is its Ishtar Gate, built in sixth-century BC Babylon. I loved the Gate’s bluish-blackish clay mosaic decorated with images of dogs and other animals.

North of Museum Island we visited the Neue Synagogue whose Ottoman dome was so striking on the otherwise commercial street. On the Oranienburger Strasse we ate Japanese food in American-style portions for a third of London’s prices. At the Silberstein Café, we enjoyed salmon-cake teriyaki and soba noodles with vegetable tempura, a perfect introduction to Mitte’s successful restaurant scene.

We passed by the Brandenburg Gate and the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, a group of grey stones that look of similar height when in fact they sit on a sloping floor, on our way to the Jewish Museum. Unfortunately, the museum’s “Garden of Exile” looks eerily similar to the memorial. We concluded our trip the next morning with a walk along the Kun’dam where we explored Berlin’s high-end shopping and observed the city’s preparation for the imminent World Cup.

Potsdamer Platz & Kreuzberg

We began the day with visiting Potsdamer Platz (UNESCO WH) before making our way south to Kreuzberg where we viewed the “Topography of Terror” outdoor photo-exhibit and what remains of the Berlin Wall which was dismantled in 1989. The photo-exhibit focuses on the history of the Nuremberg Trial. Many of the sites in the Kreuzberg and Mitte area focus on the events of World War II and the Soviet occupation of the area following the war. We made our way east to Checkpoint Charlie which sits amidst delis and snack bars as global as Subway and as local as “Snackpoint Charlie.” In a discussion of postwar Europe, Nicholas F. describes the West as encouraging “heritage,” the construction of museums to commemorate history, as a way of dealing with a painful past. The preponderance of museums, large and small, earns proof for this coping mechanism so ubiquitous in Berlin.

Tiergarten

We made our way to Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent to NYC’s Central Park, and what Chris I. describes as “the real heat of Berlin… a small damp black wood.” The park was overrun by tourists, a few homeless men and joggers. We visited the Siegesgaule (Victory Column) inside the park which celebrates Prussian military victories from more than one hundred years ago.

On our way to the Reichstag, we passed by the Soviet War Memorial. We went up to the Reichstag’s dome from which we admired the panoramic view of Berlin as well as could see downwards past the floor of the building to where Bundestag convenes.

That night we had an authentic German dinner of sausage, meatloaf, turkey, and potatoes at the Europa Center’s Bavarium Berlin where the décor resembled that of a grandmother’s home (floral-designed lamps, fake flowers for centerpieces, and wooden furniture) with wholesome cooking to match. For desert we had the warm apple strudel swimming in a sugar lake of vanilla with chocolate swirls. Need I say more?

Arriving in Berlin

We arrived in Berlin via Frankfurt along with twenty-five thousand German men.  I was acutely aware that I was one of only a handful of women on a full flight to Berlin, and upon arriving in Charlottenburg, the district in West Berlin where we stayed, a German from Frankfurt told us that the “equivalent of your Super Bowl” was that night: a soccer championship game between the Frankfurt and Munich teams.  We were surrounded by clusters of teenage boys and grown men drinking liters of beer and singing soccer fight songs showing off their team loyalty by the color of their scarf or hat.  I thought about how the scene was only a prelude to what Berlin would look like in another month when the World Cup takes place in the city and surrounding areas of Germany. 

Apart from the rather rambunctious groups of singing Germany men, Charlottenburg is what M likes to call, “generic Europe”: a large shopping area populated with popular European clothing stores like Mango, Zara, and Benetton as well as American ones such as Adidas and high-end European designers like Lois Vuitton.  Of course, we saw a smattering of Turkish businesses, usually banks and travel companies; Turks comprise of the largest minority group in Berlin.  We also noticed (and avoided) the Ka Da We, Europe’s largest department store. 

It took visiting Berlin to finally understand U2’s “Zooropa,” a song inspired by the district’s Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten, a seedy bus station in the middle of Berlin’s center for conspicuous consumption.  Bono’s lyrics, “a bluer kind of white,” “be a winner,” “eat to get slimmer,” make sense in the mess of billboards, luxury car dealerships and fast food establishments like Subway and KFC.  “Zoorapa” is a conglomerate of marketing slogans and laments postmodern cities whose landscaping is evolving towards the “generic.”  Even in 1939, Chris I. laments Charlottenburg’s busy commercialism when he describes it as a “cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of town…” Like U2 decades later, Chris I. describes West Berlin as bordering generic or void of authentic cultural markers.