We took a walking tour today. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a great idea for all of the parts of me that aren’t attached to my feet. My poor, poor feet. Traipsing over all of the cobblestones has proven me a lightweight.
But never mind all of that. To the tourism!
(As you scroll through the pretty pictures, please remember there’s a nice video lower in this post as well.)
This guy makes up for whatever he’s losing in aerodynamics with an abundance of panache:
This is the Altes Museum, built between 1823 and 1830 to house the Prussian royal family’s art collection. It was restored in 2010 and 2011 and now holds the Berlin State Museums’ antiquities collection.
Do you remember all of those films of Adolf Hitler delivering speeches outdoors? A lot of them happened on those steps.
Up next is the Deutsches Historisches Museum, which is devoted to German history. Photos, film, sculpture, art, weapons, coins … there are apparently more than one million artifacts inside.
The building itself is the Zeughaus, or old Arsenal. Built between 1695 and 1730, it was an artillery arsenal for the display of cannons from Brandenburg and Prussia. It was turned into a military museum in 1875. In 1943, Hitler survived an assassination attempt there.
This is the law building at Humboldt University. Underground, in the courtyard, there is a display remembering the burning of the books under the Nazis. You stand over a glass pane that is flush into the ground. You look into a room that is full of empty bookshelves. There are said to be enough shelves there to house all of the estimated 20,000 books thought to be burned here in the Bebelplatz in May of 1933.
The plaque reads “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”
Below is the Französischer Dom, the French Church of Friedrichstadt. The first parts went up from 1701 to 1705 for the Huguenot (Calvinist) community. At that time, Huguenots made up about 25 percent of Berlin’s population.
The Huguenots, French protestants, migrating for centuries throughout Europe, to Africa and North America to avoid persecution and violence and even war at home. The Germans needed people and so a deal was made. Some 50,000 settled throughout the country and about 20,000 in this region. The French language was spoken in the church for a century. They ultimately decided to switch to German in protest against the occupation of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806.
Now, across the courtyard is the Neue Kirche, or New Church. In this church they spoke in German. The original church went in about the same time as the Französischer Dom above. Originally it was a Calvinist congregation, but more and more Lutherans came to worship and in 1708 it became a Calvinist and Lutheran. This is the third church on the site. The congregation uses the other building for services.
In between the two churches is the concert hall we saw yesterday. The statue there honors the poet, philosopher and historian Friedrich Schiller, a prominent German dramatist and lyricist:
The penultimate stop on our walking tour was of the holocaust memorial. (A stop or two before it we saw the Fuhrerbunker, which is marked by only one sign amid nice, modern apartments.)
Anyway, The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a 4.7-acre site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are organized in grid rows and vary in height. Construction began in 2003 and the site was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, the 60th anniversary of V-E Day.
Peter Eisenman, who designed it, called it “the place of no meaning.” Our tour guide, another American who’d moved abroad, delivered the entire passage and it is quite beautiful. I can’t find it online right now, but there are two or three different stories with Eisenman apparently giving different quotes and interpretations to what he was doing. The man’s an artist, so you just allow for that, I suppose.
The land is open for foot traffic, and our guide invited us to walk through the stelae and find our own interpretations. As you move into the heart of the field, the rest of the world seems to fall away. Except for the children. And on that you can be torn. Perhaps a little reflection or reverence is called for. But then, having read more from Eisenman, perhaps not. Perhaps those voices and that silliness are just as appropriate in this place. Hard to say. Abstract art.
This was my favorite spot:
The famed Brandenburg Gate:
The 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch, one of the best-known landmarks of Germany, marks the site of a former city gate over the road from Berlin to the town of Brandenburg. It was commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia as a sign of peace. Heavily damaged in World War II, and inaccessible since it stood next to the Berlin Wall, the Brandenburg Gate wasn’t fully restored until 2002. When we were there the area was being prepared for a soccer festival.
On top is the 1793 Quadriga of Victory. Napoleon took it during his occupation of Berlin in 1806, and it was returned in 1814. The olive wreath was joined by an Iron Cross after that, but the East Germans took that down — too Prussian it seems. It was restored after German reunification.
The Greek mythology frieze was part of the recent renovation:
This is inside Neue Wache, the New Guardhouse. The German Neoclassical building went up in 1816 as a as a guardhouse for the troops of the crown prince of Prussia. Since 1931 it has been a war memorial.
After reunification, the New Guardhouse became the “Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Dictatorship.” Then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl suggested an enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz‘s sculpture Mother with her Dead Son. The sculpture is directly under the oculus, and so is exposed to the rain, snow and cold, symbolizing the suffering of civilians during World War II.
Also, the moving light. We visited in the morning and again in the evening so I could repeat the shot:
Really changes things, doesn’t it?
Because we had the tickets and to get off our feet — see the title above — we cruised the Spree River that runs through the center of Berlin. I shot a video:
Another great day!
