20mm to Freedom

A little under a year ago I went to Berlin for the first time, and only time at this point. It has taken me a while to write about it for various reasons I won't get into.

At this point I decided the best thing for this space is to pick up where I left off and just get right into it. So, with out further ado:

I took the train, like I try to most of the time I travel, and it was a pretty interesting trip. My cabin was empty until I got to Dresden. Then two wonderful old German ladies joined me for the rest of the trip to Berlin. They mostly discussed either a trip to the hospital or convent, there was a lot of discussion about "swestern."

Before the ladies found their way into my cabin, a man, who to me appeared to be homeless, asked me for some money. I pretended that I didn't understand him and then my future cabin mates behind him became his victims. This would have been fairly uneventful -- I hardly call two nice ladies giving a beggar two euros each an event. The thing is, right after he got his money from them he proceeded straight to the lavatory, locked the door and remained there until Berlin. I would have expected a German train conductor to both notice and do something about a lavatory that was locked for nearly three hours, but this guy was safe.

Once I got to the hauptbahnhoff I was immediately impressed. There are trains going though the station on tracks 50 feet in the air. It was pretty cool. There was also a fairly good military presence. I suppose security isn't something Germans take a laize faire attitude about.

I pretty much started exploring right away. On this trip I only made it to two "museums" and another trip is definitely in order because there is so much more to see. I of course did see the wall in a few different places throughout the city.

The first place I saw that I can only describe as imposing was the Reichstag. It is just massive and an amazing structure. It's right next to the modern parliament complex and as far as I know no legislative business happens here now. The Reichstag is also very close to the Brandenburg Gate and a bunch of other stuff. This had me thinking that maybe Berlin was kind of small and that I could see quite a bit of it quickly. I was wrong. 

You see the glass dome on the top of the Reichstag? You can go up in it when you get a tour. You need to book a tour in advance -- next time I'm totally doing this. It's not far in advance, there are booths a few dozen meters away from the building where you can get a tour. I think it is mainly for security reasons, because there is a substantial security checkpoint outside the building. Like I said, Germans don't goof around with their security.

The obvious next place to go after the Reichstag was the Brandenburg Gate. It too is an impressive structure with a ridiculously beautiful park right behind it. I'd love to show some amazing photo of the gate here but there was a slight problem. There was some sort of soccer tournament happening in Brazil at the time and Germany was doing pretty well. As a result the was a giant television screen and stage set up behind the gate. It didn't really make for a great photo of the thing. I did take a photo though, because what trip to Berlin would be complete without one.

As you can see there is a big structure behind it. There was also a giant white barrier all around the bottom. I didn't photograph that here because it was really really really ugly. On the day of the soccer tournament final there were nearly 500,000 people crammed into the park behind the gate to watch the game -- and drink. I tried to get in, but there was just no way. I watched the game in a bar with some old German dudes, some of whom started crying when the game ended.

So, the next thing you have to see is Checkpoint Charlie. I thought, "I bet it's pretty close." I thought wrong. It is at least a few kilometers from the Brandenburg Gate perhaps two miles. I don't remember. I also got turned around trying to find it because it isn't exactly obvious unless you've seen it before. After you've seen it once there is no mistaking where it is. Conveniently located nearby are a few places where you can check out some remaining pieces of the wall as well. There are some museums and other things around Checkpoint Charlie and I'd have to say I bet it is COMPLETELY different than it was 30 years ago. I do know a few people who were there when it was an active checkpoint. Their photos look a whole lot different than mine. It was so crazy and busy that I decided it might be better to make my way back at night to photograph it with less people.

I was right. Even at this time of night, which was somewhere around 2100, I had to wait for tourists to stop taking photos in front of the thing before I could get this. Notice the McDonalds right behind it. Talk about making a stereotype come true. I found it interesting that there is still an American flag there, but I suppose it was for effect.

There was more to see of course and it did look pretty interesting during the day too. They had some neat signage and giant photos of both U.S. and Soviet soldiers to punctuate the idea that this place used to be a major border with security beyond what most of us will ever really know about.

They made it pretty clear which way you were going with these signs. On the obverse of this sign was the "You are leaving the soviet sector" message and a giant photo of PFC Beltbuckle your checkpoint sentry for the day.

While I was looking at the checkpoint I heard some commotion on the "American" side of the checkpoint near a museum for it. I wandered over to see what was going on. As it turns out some Germans were having a protest in the middle of the street that leads to the checkpoint. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that they didn't have a permit for this protest since it was in the middle of the street and all.

They were carrying on and making a bunch of racket in addition to climbing on buildings and blocking traffic in the street. Then, in the most spineless move of protest I have ever seen, they evaporated as soon as police sirens got close. The only thing more impressive than their cowardice was how quickly they disbursed. It was literally less than 30 seconds and there was no way to tell who had been participating and who was just an innocent bystander. Perhaps the repercussions for such activity are more intense in Germany than they are in the U.S. but I was still disappointed with them.

Like I said, from Checkpoint Charlie it is easy to go see a defunked section of the Berlin Wall and start to understand why people didn't just hop over, or under, it.

There isn't much to say here. It's a 20 foot tall reinforced concrete wall with a cap on the top to make it more difficult to climb over. Someone who was an experienced, or fairly desperate, climber might not have too much trouble with this. Understand though that 30 years ago this would have been pretty smooth. That would have complicated things a bit and I'm willing to bet there were very few East Berlin bouldering gyms at the time. The problem gets a little more compounded however.

When you go the the Berlin Wall Memorial it becomes more clear. It wasn't just one damned wall. It was a wall, a huge section of open space patrolled by dogs and soldiers, and another wall. So, it's a little easier to see why more people didn't just hop the thing and sprint to freedom. I have a lot more respect for people who were able to get around this thing. 

The memorial shows a lot more and there are small circles on the ground where people were killed trying to get over the wall. 

The S-Bahn station here, Nordbahnhof, is fairly interesting because it was closed for a very long time. The reason is that the metro lines went under both zones of the city. It would have been pretty easy to just sneak into the train tunnel and then walk to a station outside the soviet zone. The soviets put a stop to that quite quickly and used all manner of motion-sensing equipment and alarms to keep people from doing just this. This station is a small museum about how people tried to escape through the metro tunnels. It's also an active station. A quick note about the Berlin UBahn, the doors open when the trains are still going about 20kph so be ready for that if you go.

Overall the wall is humbling thing to see and honestly, at the memorial you would have to be pretty dead inside not to feel something about how oppressive it must have been to live with this thing in your backyard. Compound that with the fact that in many places you could most likely see progress happening from your bedroom window with no way to do anything about it and you'll understand why some people risked everything to get out.

So, then there is Potsdamer Platz which I guess was supposed to be part of Hitler's impressive Berlin redesign. You can say a lot of things about the crazy little dictator, but you can't say he didn't have BIG plans. The big tower thing in the previous picture is at Potsdamer Platz as are a few other things, like hotels and fountains and a church or two. It's a pretty large open space and there is a lot going on there.

Even Poseidon needs a groovy pair of kicks, right? I really just thought it was amusing that someone would chuck a pair of shoes on this fountain. You see this done all over the world on power lines, but not very often on fountains.

As I said, I was in Berlin at the same time that some big world-wide soccer tournament thing was happening. The final game was going to be between Germany and Argentina. Next to one of the fountains at Potsdamer Platz some Argentines decided to play a little pickup game of soccer. Now, I'm not one to say if this is appropriate or not, the place is a public square after all so good on them. Turns out one of them got a little over excited and kicked the ball to the top of a fountain. Rather than just write the ball off as a loss, because soccer balls are expensive, a rescue was arraigned.

Now, I only assume that this gentleman is Argentine. I base my assumption on his skin color, yes I'm racially profiling this guy, and his Argentina blue jacket. He seems to be taking in the view after going to retrieve his precious ball. I really do hope he isn't taunting the Germans about the soccer game because seriously, everyone knew Germany was going to win. I have some other photos I like less where he is clearly taunting someone.

The other thing I noticed from Potsdamer Platz was the sheer scale of construction that is, or was, happening in Berlin. I took a photo to illustrate my point -- duh isn't that why I do all of this? There were more tower cranes than you can see in the photo and I can count at least 12. I think the flower that best represents Berlin is the tower crane.

So, I did visit a few "museums." I use quotation marks because they were anything but traditional. I wanted to visit them both and I was pretty excited before I went. One was awesome, with only one smallish problem, the other was a HUGE, massive, depressing disappointment as well as perhaps a good learning experience and affirmation of my beliefs about certain things.

The really really cool one was the Berlin Underworld Society. If it's under Berlin and interesting, these guys probably have a tour of it. Take a look at their website to be sure, it's in English. I was interested in most of the things they had to offer, but only had time for one -- the flak tower tour.

You can check one of my many Vienna posts to find out a little more about flak towers, there will be another Vienna post at some point. 

Hitler built a few of these towers in Berlin. They tell you quite a lot about them during the tour, but in addition to being AAA firing platforms they were also bomb shelters. The tour guide also speculated that they were also designed to become grand palaces after the war. Grand, bomb-proof palaces.

So, how do you destroy a giant reinforced concrete structure designed to withstand the force of the largest bomb anyone in 1940 could imagine? The answer, if you're French, is that you don't. There were a few of these towers in the city when the war ended and since areally-delivered ordinance (read bombs) of the day just wasn't capable of even scratching these structures they needed to be blown up by expert sappers from the ground. Only the French found a way to screw this up. Lucky for me, because they have tours -- inside. Unfortunately, they don't allow you to take photos. My guess is that they misunderstand copyright and trademark issues and want to cover their asses. Hey, they are spelunkers not lawyers.

This is what remains of the tower. FDC was in a different tower and controlled all the gun towers. This thing looks like it is on a hill, it's not really. It is surrounded by a giant pile of rubble that has become a hill. This is not something rare for Berlin. The allies did some pretty substantial destructive work on the city. Now the flak tower is a climbing wall and park. It overlooks a neighborhood called Gesundbrunnen, which is crawling with Islamic peoples who refuse to assimilate for the most part.

The next place I went to was also built on the rubble created when Berlin was destroyed by the allies. It's called Teuflesberg and it means Devil's Mountain. Most of the rubble from the war was collected and piled up near the Olympic Stadium forming a huge hill, the largest in the city in fact. On top of that a listening station was built. This grand place had electronic ears that scanned the skies during the cold war and intercepted messages from the soviets keeping Europe, and by default the world, safe from the Red Menace. I know one person who visited the place once when it was operational -- at least that is what he told me. It is ALL he told me. 

I was really expecting something moderately impressive. In reality the place needs to be bulldozed to match the rubble that it is constructed on top of. Somewhere after it was decommissioned and all the important equipment removed it became an artist community. A counter-culture, free-love, use-all-the-drugs-you-want-and-be-responsible-for-nothing artist community. Someone bought it and had grand plans -- but then he got high.

So, if you're interested in seeing why counter-culture societies don't work, by all means visit the burnt out wastoids at Teuflesberg. It's pretty clear that at one time it was a come-in-and-check-it-out-everyone-is-welcome kind of place, then someone got a little wise and decided a complex that should be condemned isn't a place you just want people wandering into to play around in. There is a group of "artists" who live there and get high in addition to giving "tours" of the place. If you do take a "tour" don't expect to learn anything, you'll really just have a fucked-up drug user walk around and kind of make sure you don't kill yourself by falling off a building with no walls. They do have a pet pig though "Swiney" he's cute. The views are also really cool.

Here you can see that most of the walls here are covered with graffiti. Yes, some of the artists have some talent at least when it comes to copying other people's styles and imagery. I can honestly say the only "original" thing most of these people have done is lived in this place. It can't be easy because they don't have access to the municipal water or electric services. It's funny what happens when you don't pay bills because that's not what counter culture is all about.

Like I said, the place has some pretty good views since it's the highest place in the city. It also reaffirmed my belief that socialism doesn't function when every member of your society decides that "art" is their work. I'm willing to bet that this place subsists primarily on charity and benefit payments from the German government. It's a shame too, because it could have been something great.

I'll stop with my complaints about counter culture now.

As it turns out, there is a river in Berlin. Who knew, right? A popular past time is sitting by the river in a lounge chair and drinking beer. This is something I can totally get behind. People do something similar in Prague, but without the lounge chairs. In this respect the Czechs seem to have things a little bit more together, but who am I to say?

In an attempt to experience this lounging by the river and drinking beer I made my way one afternoon to the banks of the Spree, that's the river's name if you hadn't guessed. Sadly there weren't any lounge chairs available, but I saw some other neat stuff.

I was able to take a seat on a small retaining wall by the river and watch two Russian men pull fish out of the river. These guys were doing pretty well. The only way I knew they were Russian was because a Russian family with a young daughter walked by them and the daughter spoke with the men for a little while. 

My Russian isn't what you'd call "great" or really even "extant" for that matter, but I know enough to know it was Russian. She stopped to say something to them before leaving and gave me a cute frame.

Near there was a riverside flea market type thing that was wrapping up but it was a little overpriced and there wasn't anything I was interested in. I was able to grab this photo of a puppet-show theater on wheels and a badass ice-cream truck.

The whole shebang was happening next to a museum. I didn't go inside the museum, but I saw a real-live stone cutter making some column caps in a shed next to the museum. It was very cool to see the restoration/recreation process from this perspective. I'm not so sure there is an effective way to have a machine do this work. He was going off an original which was highly worn and needed to use a lot of creativity and experience to fill in the gaps and make a new one. This level of craftsmanship is something I have a lot of respect for. 

This stuff will probably be 3D printed in the future. Let's hope not. 

That is pretty much it from this trip to Berlin. I really enjoyed it. The city is completely different from Prague. There were of course good parts and bad parts, but I've just written the Cliff's Notes here. As I said, another trip is in order and I will surely write about it again.

Pretty much your standard fare here with skulls and bones stacked on top of each other. The light was nice inside the basement part of the chapel though and someone had placed a small flower arrangement on one of the corner areas. I won't bore you with a multitude of stacked-bone photos. If you really want to see those you can look back to my first post about the place.

The upper gallery of the church was open and I decided to venture up there. If you can I think it is worth seeing. There is a lot of information about the history of the place and how the construction progressed from 1380 or something. The place is OLD. My favorite part of the history was a story about how the monks at the Jesuit college next door took over the church for a while and replaced the baroque roof with a renaissance one. Everyone hated it, except the monks of course, and as soon as the town got control back the first thing they did was replace the baroque roof. The church also happens to be one of the only ones in the world, if not the only one, with dual flying buttresses. I couldn't really find any information on it on the internet. You can see in the photos the double buttresses, and baroque roof.

As I was wandering around the church I noticed that people were setting up for some sort of symphonic concert. I didn't think a whole lot of it and I assumed that whatever event it was would begin long after I left. Then something started to happen about 16:00.

They started warming up. It was loud and chaotic and yet still impressive and beautiful. The acoustics in the place during the warmup were absolutely amazing. It was so loud that the above flautist was forced to play mere inches from this pillar to even have a chance of hearing himself. The funny thing was this tumultuous cacophony of noise was anything but an assault. It really did sound beautiful thanks the the design of the church. Then about 16:30 this happened.  

The warmup changed into a rehearsal of one of the pieces in set for the performance, complete with violin soloist. While the piece itself was beautiful, it wasn't really the most amazing composition I've ever heard. The sound however, was nothing short of moving. There really isn't any way to describe it with mere words. It was all around you and literally the most amazing "concert" I have ever seen in my entire life. The only thing I could think to do was try and record it at least a little bit. There is a video at the bottom here that I took with my phone. Watch it, listen to it. The sound is still impressive even though it was recorded with a crappy phone microphone. It was so moving and inspiring that I was actually glad the mine tour was sold out, because if it weren't for that unfortunate inconvenience I never would have experienced this beautiful moment. 

I made this panoramic photo with my phone before I left and you can see how barren the square is. There is this modest fountain, some patchy grass and occasionally a few people wandering through. I think if the town didn't have such an evil past it might have seemed a bit happier. The sordid past combined with the effects of years of less-than-stellar economic movement have left this place in perpetual state of mourning. Later in the day I walked by a playground with lots of kids playing in it and honestly, their laughter seemed muffled in the air. The air really does seem to be heavy with sorrow -- still.

It's too bad. I saw people leading normal village lives. People riding their bikes back from the grocery store. People enjoying sidewalk beer gardens. Teenagers joking and carrying on in front of the grocery store on the main square. If it had just always been a fortress it would have been a really amazing thing to see. Not that it wasn't amazing, it's just that the impressiveness of the structure was stifled by the tens of thousands of deaths that happened there. It's as if pain and grief has seeped into every stone.

I looked around the square after arriving and walked to the citadel, or small fortress. It's really easy to know when you are outside the old fortress city because you will see the gates, long since disused. 

This is one of the old city gates. One of the roads into town is next to this gate. I suppose it was easier to build next to it where the bridge was. A little further and I came to the cemetery that is placed outside the walls of the citadel which comprised the bulk of the ghetto. There is no way they could make a grave for each person who died there and they most likely haven't found everyone because they were tossed in mass graves and later cremated, their remains dumped in thin paper boxes and left to God knows what fate.

In the first photo of the cemetery you can see the walls of the citadel in the background. It's a very short, solemn walk to the main gate, where the ticket window for the camp is.

You can take a guided tour, but if I can avoid it I usually do. The pamphlet they give you for the self-guided tour is plenty. There is actually a lot of information in it and each part of the camp is numbered. They start you off slowly and you think a little bit to yourself that "this isn't so bad." I wish I could say it stays that way. I think every person will have the gravity of what happened here hit them at a different point of the camp. For much of the first half of the tour it was just surreal and felt more like touring an old movie set. That might have something to do with the fact that the Nazis also used Terezin as a place to show the world that the "ghettos" weren't so bad and were just a bunch of Jewish folks living in discomfort. Maybe no worse than how the Japanese had it in the U.S.

See, this doesn't look so bad. It's the initial processing area. This is where you were registered and logged when you first arrived at the camp. It just looks like an old office from the 1940s. There is a room off to the right side where all the records were kept and that was a bit more depressing, but there was a glass door barring entry so I just peaked in. All the records were kept in open cubbyholes. There were thousands of them. 

"Work makes you free" these famous words appear in iron over the gates at Auschwitz in Poland. They are probably most infamous for their placement above that gate, but they still have a powerful effect here. Not wrought from iron, but still powerful. Keep in mind that many people from Terezin were sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald to die. Directly behind this gate you can see the open door and barred windows of one of the dormitories. 

To me, this looks like a movie set. It is the dormitory you can see just behind the arch. The only things that brought the gravity of what I was looking at to me were the flowers laid on the bed as a memorial and the "toilet." It was an indoor outhouse with a window in the door so you could see if it was occupied. There were definitely more than 20 people living in this room, that must have been pretty terrible. In the dorm across the hall someone had lain a few roses on the bed a long time ago.

I don't know who made the decision for minimal maintenance here, but I get mixed feelings about it. I'm not sure it would be right to clean the place until it was spotless. At the same time, there were cobwebs and bird's nests all over the place. The open doors are left that way, perhaps forever. Maybe it's good to leave the doors open for the rest of time, they were closed for too many for too long. There are of course some sections of the camp with chained, padlocked doors. I am guessing that is because they are in a state of dangerous disrepair. On the other hand, this is a memorial and a grave to thousands. Some reverence is in order, maybe try to keep the birds out.

The photo above doesn't really show that the wall was covered in dirt and cobwebs, but it was. This is inside one of the solitary cells in the same block as the bathroom. Each one at least had a window. They were cold, as were the dormitories. The dormitories each had a small stove. The solitary cell block had a small stove for the whole block. I can only imagine how cold it was during the winter.

This massive device was in the delousing and bathing center. It's a giant autoclave for clothes, not an oven for burning bodies. This building also had two very large public shower rooms, like what I've seen in a few films. They consisted of a network of pipes overhead with shower heads hanging down. There was a pretty large boiler in the building, so I assume there was a chance for some hot, or at least warm showers. The showers were only hooked up for water, as far as I've read they were not used to gas people.

Then there was this. This plaque basically says, in Czech, that it stands on the site of a mass grave. At some point in the summer of 1945, 601 bodies were pulled out of it and buried in the national cemetery, the one just outside the citadel walls. The statue you see at the top left is a memorial marking the place where the executions happened. I have a pretty strong feeling that there are a few more mass graves in this earth that will remain covered. Six hundred one bodies is barely a fraction of the total number of people murdered here.