I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided we should only have four days in Berlin in our Grand Tour of Europe late last year. It’s a city neither of us had visited before and I thought, incredibly naively, that once you’d “done” the holocaust and the former Wall, that would be about it.
We could not have been more wrong, but we had been misled by friends who’d arrived without specific plans, decided to take an organised bus tour of the city and said that they felt they had seen it all before they had truly arrived.
However, before we even left the airport, it felt very different. There were no luggage trolleys anywhere near the bag collection carousels. I found hundreds of them all chained together in a passageway – this is what happens when people have to part with a Euro coin to release one, when they have wheels on their suitcases anyway.
Having worked out that our pick-up to the city was trying to contact us on Whatsapp, rather than waiting out side, we eventually made it to the small apartment hotel we’d booked into.
Called the Homaris Boxi Studios, it was in Boxhagener Straße, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, the latter part of that hyphenation supposedly being the trendy part of Berlin although we found ourselves firmly in the Friedrichshain area, a fairly lengthy Bolt – an alternative to Uber – ride from the action.
We had booked three walking tours – one based on the TV series Babylon Berlin, another a history tour and the third all about British Rock star David Bowie. We cancelled the first because there was a timing clash at their end and we realised we weren’t that familiar with the locations on the TV series anyway.
The second tour, we thought was one hour, for some reason, but turned out to be closer to three. We walked a long, long way and crammed a lot in. Berlin looks magnificent with wide boulevards and beautiful old historic buildings. Well, kind of old and pretty historic. The city was almost flattened and many of the older buildings were rebuilt or significantly repaired or restored.
What we discovered was that, even though the Berlin Wall fell 35 years ago the city still has a split personality. For instance, the pedestrian crossing lights in former East Berlin feature a cartoonish character called Ampelmann, complete with a little hat.
Also, as our guide explained, you can tell when you’re in former East Berlin because the trams are still running. After the war, the Americans and British ripped up the tramlines in their half of the city because they saw a future in which everyone would use cars and light rail would be obsolete. Sound familiar?
There are so many things to do and places to visit. It would take four days to do any kind of justice, just to Museum Island – an area of the city with five major museums and a modern art gallery all within metres of each other.
Nearby, one of the most poignant reminders of the political lurch to the extreme Right that presaged the Holocaust in Germany is the Empty Library on the spot where in 1933, German students burned 20,000 books from many, mainly Jewish, communist, liberal and social-critical authors, before a large audience at the university’s Old Library and in the middle Bebelplatz.
There you can look down through a window in the ground to see a room of empty white shelves. Think of that every time you hear about a library being pressured to remove books because someone wants people not to even know there are other ways of thinking.
Checkpoint Charlie is a must-see, of course, even though the barriers have gone and the actual checkpoint booth is in a museum somewhere else in the City
Our tour took us to one of the remaining sections of the Wall, where you’ll find the Topography of Terror exhibit and library which includes the remains of cells where the Gestapo tortured dissidents, Jews, gays and Roma people before sending them off to concentration camps.
After we walked to a sad and inconspicuous carpark under which is buried the bunker where Adolf Hitler killed his wife, Eva, and shot himself rather than be taken alive by the vast Russian army that was laying siege to the city.
And we ended up at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe aka the Holocaust Memorial, which is where our tour guide left us after extracting well-earned donations. The tour is advertised as being free but you can give the guide what you think it was worth; only budget-challenged backpackers would baulk at handing over ten or twenty bucks or even more.
Next week, we’ll explore Belin’s world of spies and strangeness. But before we go, I have to mention the one thing we forgot to do which was to buy a Berlin Welcome Card which not only gives you free rides on public transport but offers genuine discounts at museums and restaurants. Next time!
