Day 8: Berlin, City of Symbolism and Sad History

Everything the Germans do, they do for a reason. I cannot tell you how many times today I have heard the word "symbolic". They destroy a 500-year-old castle because they don't want a symbol of feudalism in their city. They built their government buildings in a "Federal Ribbon" across the old wall site as a symbol of reunification. The Nazis burned books in a square surrounded by some of the biggest libraries and universities in the world as a symbol of dominance. There are captured canons built into the Victory Tower thing as a symbol of, well, victory. There are statues upon statues symbolizing division, reunification, diversity, futility, peace, borders, everything. Hitler (very symbolically) cut down a bunch of Linden trees on the famous Unter-den-Linden to make room for his armies.

Yep. It's a symbolic place.

For (yet another) instance - today as we walked to the Brandenburg Gate, we came upon a very impressive unmarked memorial - it was only after much searching that we found a small plaque listing the rules of the site, given by the Jewish Holocaust Victims Memorial Society or something that we concluded that it was the Jewish Holocaust Memorial. It was a huge square, a gigantic field of rectangular stone blocks laid out in a grid. They varied greatly in height, and the ground undulated beneath them, so as you walked between them you could never quite tell if they were as short as your feet or twice your height. It felt like descending into the ocean - just as dark and directionless and eerie. No color at all, and you could see far far away down the aisles but all of your sense of direction was gone. You felt alone, and lost, but exposed. It was a beautiful memorial, very evocative, and it seemed to capture the specific kind of dehumanization and horror and tragedy that was the Holocaust while being respectful and contemplative and meaningful.

After that, we moved on to the Brandenburg Gate (fairly impressive) and then to the Reichstag (even more impressive). We visited the preserved section of the Wall, which was strange. It's so...eerie, seeing something that was and is so hated standing as the destination for gawkers. But that's the thing - Berlin is certainly not sentimental about these chunks of wall; in fact, they're laying all over the city, shoved in corners and covered in graffiti, old and new. The line on the ground marking the old path of the wall is hardly noticeable if you don't know what you're looking for, and new buildings sit irreverently right over the top of it. People don't forget - the city is littered with reminders, from the constant construction to the many memorials and statues. But they don't let it weigh them down.

On a related note, a guy in military uniform was stamping passports with all the stamps you'd need to get from East to West Berlin - NINE stamps! I had him stamp a separate page for me. Later we went to Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing place between the two sides, belonging to America. I'm still inexcusably vague on that whole situation, but it seems crazy that stuff like that could have happened as recently as the 80s.

:-/

Sure, there's lots of depressing history in this town, but here are a few things that I love: The tiergarten, the royals' old game grounds, are now a huge recreational area making Berlin one of the cities with the most green space in the world. And they have a really old zoo with the most varieties of animal species in the world (I think) at like 1,600+. And in the 1700s there were four times as many French people ad there were Germans because the plague wiped out all of them and the population of Berlin dropped below 6000 before the king invited the French to come live there. And we saw an excavation site of the bottom floors of a castle that was torn down in the fifties. And this architect named Schinkel literally worked himself to death in the 18th century building a massive amount of buildings and bridges in Berlin - there's a Schinkel on every corner, the Berliners say! And all throughout town you see these huge, bright pink pipes sailing over the streets. They look like some kind of marker, but they're not - they're construction pipes, pumping the water away from the hundreds of constantly changing construction sites in the city. As our tour guide put it on the sightseeing bus your we took, there will always be construction sites in Berlin, so why hide from it? The pipes are as much a part of this city as the statues and the stores, and the city embraces them just like all the rest.

I think that's pretty darn cool.