This wall relief is on display at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin:
It is from the temple-palace at Tell Halaf and was made from basalt and limestone.
Tell Halaf is a dig site in northeastern Syria, near the Turkish frontier and was the first find of a Neolithic culture, dating to the 6th millennium BC. The name Tell Halaf is a modern name. Tell means “hill” and Halaf meaning “made of former city.” The original name is unknown.
Max von Oppenheim excavated the site at the turn into the 20th century. Some of his finds were destroyed while on display during World War II. The surviving pieces went into storage until the beginning of the 21st century. Now more than 30 sculptures are on display.
This is a panorama. We got to climb to the top of the rotunda of the Berlin Cathedral, prominently featuring the iconic Fernsehturm:
You see those words all over the parts of Berlin we tromped around in, and it is sobering.
You get the sense in that great old city that this has been a psychologically hard place to live. I know from books and film footage how bad things were in the city during the war. I’ve read about the divided city and remember the Wall falling. I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and seen historical footage.
It isn’t history or grainy footage or an abstraction when you’re there.
“The past intrudes into our society,” said Wolfgang Thierse, president of the Bundestag.
Now I’ve seen the bullet holes in the buildings. I toured the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, documenting the East Germans who conceived incredible ways to get across to West Berlin. I read there about the frustrations of oppressed East Germans who didn’t get the support from the West they’d hoped for during the uprising in 1953. We met people in Berlin who grew up in East Germany, of course. One guy told us about how his mother, who was an East German tour guide, was disciplined for once calling it the Wall. (East Germans said “the anti-fascist protection barrier” was for keeping out spies.)
The city is living with a lot. Pick any emotion. That burden must be heavy.
And then you see these:
Those are stolpersteine, “stumbling blocks.” The monuments, created Gunter Demnig, commemorate a victim of Nazi oppression. They remember individuals – those who died, survived or emigrated – who were condemned to prisons, euthanasia facilities, sterilization clinics, concentration camps and extermination camps.
Jews, Christians, gypsies, homosexuals, blacks, communists, the disabled, they’re all represented by stolpersteine. More than 48,000 have been laid in 18 countries. You see them all over Berlin. (And in some cities they are still, apparently, somewhat contentious.)
Hier wohnte means here lived. Ermordet means murdered.
One historical tidbit for the day. This is the Protestant Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, built in the 1890s. It was badly damaged in a bombing raid in 1943. The present building, a church with an attached foyer and a separate belfry with a chapel, was built between 1959 and 1963.
The damaged spire of the old church remains as a memorial hall, which opened in 1987.
The Memorial Church today is a famous landmark of western Berlin, and is nicknamed by Berliners “der Hohle Zahn”, meaning “The Hollow Tooth”.
We wentto the zoo, which came highly recommended. The Berlin Zoo, all 86 acres of it, has 1,500 different species, the most of any zoo in the world. All told, there are 20,500 animals inside. It gets more business than any other zoo in Europe. Here are some of our new friends:
There’s a petting zoo. We bought a few delicious food pellets and The Yankee picked out an animal …
I’m not sure what she thought would happen, but she was a bit surprised by it:
We took a train trip some 20 miles from Berlin to Potsdam today. Lovely city, it was a royal vacation place. We learned of all sorts of Prussian romance, family angst and intrigue. Here are a few of the sites.
First, a few panoramas!
This is Cecilienhof, where the famed Potsdam Conference of Truman, Churchill/Atlee and Stalin met to hammer out how the Allies would administer the post-World War II world. Cecilienhof was built from 1914 to 1917. Soviet soldiers repaired the streets connecting Babelsberg to Cecilienhof before the conference. They built a bridge and did all of the landscaping, including that Soviet red star that Churchill and Atlee and Truman had to pass by each day. Inside, 36 rooms and the great hall were renovated and furnished with furniture from other Potsdam palaces. Click to embiggen:
Here’s another pano of sorts. This is Marmorpalais, or Marble Palace, is a Neoclassical palace that remained in the Hohenzollern family until the early 20th century. It was as a military museum under communist rule. After restoration in 2006 it is now open to the public. Click to embiggen:
This is the Babelsberg Palace. Built in the English Gothic revival style, it was built in two phases over the period 1835–1849. For more than 50 years it was the summer residence of Prince William, later Emperor William I.
Down a well-manicured, quiet little lane, are some bungalows you can rent. I choose this one:
This is a rear view of the Protestant Church of Peace in the palace grounds of Sanssouci Park:
Inside the church is an original Venetian mosaic from the early 13th century. The crown prince Frederick William purchased it at auction. The mosaic shows the enthroned Christ with the Book of Life, the right hand upheld in blessing. At each side stand Mary and John the Baptist. Next to them stand the apostle Peter and Saint Cyprian, martyred by beheading in 258 and patron saint of Saint Cipriana. The Latin inscript reads, according to Martin Luther’s translation: “Lord, I have love for the site of your house and the place where your glory resides.”
This is a copy of the 1839 marble statue created by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. You can see this statue in Copenhagen, Salt Lake City, Legoland and beyond.
Yesterday we saw the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Here’s the Brandenburg Gate in Potsdam. It was built in 1770 and 1771 for Frederick II as a symbol of Prussia’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. (Hence the Roman triumphal influence.)
The story goes that Frederick II couldn’t settle on one architect, so he chose two. Each side, then, has a different aesthetic. The man that designed this side was a student of the architect who did the other side:
The Brandenburg Gate has been freestanding since 1900. Also at the gate, at your feet, is this representation of the Prussian eagle:
Frederick the Great wanted to grow plums, figs and grapes here, so he had a terraced garden installed here. The view was so nice, he decided, that he’d build himself a summer residence above his gardens. Just behind where I’m standing to take this photograph you’ll find Frederick II’s tomb.
Germans compare it to Versailles, though it is notably smaller. Built between 1745 and 1747, hence the Rococo, there were 10 original rooms. Things have been expanded over the years. The king wanted to be a man without a care, sans souci, he said. Hence the name, Sanssouci.
Saw this in downtown Potsdam. It was easily the sign of the day:
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:
