Berlin

July 6-10

In case you missed the last chapter, our heroes just finished a week in northern Germany and traveled by train to Berlin. What a city! We had four days jam-packed with history, culture, art, delicious food, and delightful conversation. We were so happy that niece Sophia could join us – ’twas such fun to explore and learn things with her!

We asked our friend Roald to pick some favorite parts of the city to visit. He describes Berlin not so much as a particular place, but as an overall experience. Well put. Everywhere there are beautiful parks, plus crazy good (and inexpensive) restaurants with tables on the sidewalk to watch the steady stream of people all going somewhere. There is art and architecture and delicious pastries and quiet places and lovely walks.

We had a fine hotel near Alexanderplatz very near train and bus stations, so getting around the city was pretty slick. Here’s a glance at the ground we covered: the blue line is a bike tour route we took; all the black circles with white stars show places we visited.

A great way to see the city and learn a lot in a short amount of time is to take a bike tour. In 3.5 hours we biked close to 20 km (12.4 miles) and saw fifteen or more notable Berlin sites: Museum Island, Konzerthaus Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie, Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten & Victory Column, Reichstag, and Berlin Wall Memorial, plus more! Our guide was terrific – super informative and prepared with maps and photos.

We invested two afternoons into some heavy museum visits: the Stasi Museum and the Jewish Museum. The Stasi Museum is located in the former headquarters of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of East Germany from 1960-1989. Since 1990 and the reunification of Germany, the Stasi Museum has been used to inform visitors about the Stasi and its activities as a “protection and security organ” during the SED dictatorship. It was chilling to see the ways Erich Mielke (MfS) manipulated surveillance systems to support Head of State Erich Honecker as leader and primary decider across all aspects of East Germany: head of party and state, secretariat of the Central Committee and Politburo (where all political, economic, and other basic decisions were made), Chairman of the State Council and National Defense Council. We also saw the propaganda that was fed to the people in an attempt to build loyalty for the state and suppress any concerns that the SED had stolen their freedoms and right to choose their leaders. No one knew who might be working for the Stasi (one of the largest secret police agencies in the world): at it’s largest, it employed 91,000 people. Spouses, family members, best friends — no one knew who they could trust anymore, and we saw examples of the information collected by Stasi on their friends and neighbors. It was grim, I tell ya.

The Jewish Museum is also incredible. Tracing the Jewish people all the way back to BC and how the diaspora spread around the world after encountering persecution after persecution, through the ~15 years of the Weimar Republic where Jews enjoyed a short stint of cultural flourishing before the Nazis took all that away, and of course the exhibitions about the 1930s-1940s were horrific. While not detailing the Holocaust specifically, the museum does an incredible job of showcasing the increasing discriminations and deportations that led up to trains filled with people shipped to concentration camps. How could this happen? How can this hatred and dehumanization still be happening today? Very, very disturbing perspective on humanity.

*whew* After both of these museum experiences we had to find beers and sunshine. We also enjoyed lots of other delicious food and drink across the City!

An icon of Berlin is the Ampelmännchen (“little traffic light man”) in all the crosswalk signs. East and West Berlin had different traffic signals – Amelmann came from the East and stuck around.

We’ll wrap up this post with a few more sights from Berlin. Next post – our last stop in Europe: Lillehammer Norway!