Date of Visit: 23 - 25 October 2011
"Ich bin ein Berliner!" Ok, I'm not President John F Kennedy, but I'm in Berlin!
Berlin has always been a place that I wanted to visit, given it's unique history within a short span of 100years. From WWI to WWII to the Cold War, it has been the center of attention. Therefore I'm really glad to be able to finally set foot onto Berlin.
Let me bring you through Berlin in a chronological manner. We begin with the Brandenburg Gate (German: Brandenburger Tur). Built in 1791, this gate is a former city gate of Berlin. If you look carefully, you will notice that the middle gate is wider than the rest. This is because it is the special gate used solely by the King of Prussia.
One interesting fact is that the statue on top of the gate, called the Quadriga, was removed and taken to Paris after Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806. Then in 1814, Prussia defeated Napoleon and restored it back onto the gate.
The Berliners apparently like the Brandenburg gate so much that they pasted the shape of the gate all over the windows of their subway trains.
I'm not sure if anyone of you heard of Humboldt University before, but it's supposed to be a very famous university. Founded in 1810, this university has produced many great thinkers, philosophers and geniuses, such as Karl Marx and Albert Einstein. This university is home to 29 Nobel prize winners. Not bad at all.
The Reichstag building was built in 1894 to house the German reichstag, or parliament. It was burnt down in 1933, some say by the Nazi, as a political tool to remove oppositions. However, it is rebuilt and after the reunification of Germany, houses the German parliament (now called the Bundestag). The glass dome in the middle of the building is open to public, and it looks down into the parliament hearings. It's supposed to make politicians feel that the people are watching them and they should have the people's best interest at heart.
Now we have arrived at the time period of WWI and WWII. Being the capital city of the losing side for both wars, Berlin was virtually flattened by the Allied forces. Therefore, there isn't much photos to take around here. The only surviving building is the Ministry of Air (Luftwaffe Headquarters). Several theories have surfaced regarding why the building was miraculously spared, which includes the building being an land marker for Allied bombers to bomb Berlin (ironic right? air force hq being used by enemy air force as marker). Another theory is that there were many spies working inside the Luftwaffe at the moment, so the Allied did not want to risk killing their own spies.
This building now houses the Finance Ministry of Germany. However, there still remains some wall painting by the DDR on the outer facade of the building.
As mentioned earlier, Berlin was heavily destroyed after the war. So most of what we see now is actually reconstructions. It is not cheap to rebuild everything, but I guess that the rebuilding effort helped the economy grow in one way or another.
Germany was torn up after the war, and each of the major allied forces were given a "slice" of Germany. Berlin, too, was torn up and distributed. Soon after, Germany and Berlin was divided into East and West side respectively. The infamous Berlin Wall came up not long after to prevent people from crossing into West Germany.
The walls were heavily fortified and anyone who went anywhere near the wall will be shot on sight. Despite this, there were many people out there with creative ideas on how to get across the wall. Some flew, some surf, some dug their way to the west side. You can see me attempting to climb the wall below.
During the period where the wall was standing, certain people can move between both sides through dedicated checkpoints. There were 26 in totals, named Alpha, Bravo... etc. The most famous was Checkpoint Charlie, but it has been very poorly reconstructed. This checkpoint is made famous because all the big politicians used this checkpoint to cross the border, thus it was always in the news.
After the wall came down in 1989, street artists realised that the walls still standing is actually a very good piece of canvas for them to draw on. Soon, almost all of the walls are painted. There is a section of the wall, called the East Side Gallery, that showcases the paintings. They are newly painted though.
Here's something you might not know about the wall. Not everyone in the Eastern bloc are very happy when the wall came down. In the DDR, the people are guaranteed housing, jobs and food. After the wall came down, many of the people actually lost their jobs and eventually their homes. So the learning point here is that there will always be another side to the story.
In 2004, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was completed. It is commonly mistaken as the Holocaust memorial, but the memorial is actually for a very specific group of people only. This memorial consists of 2711 concrete slabs, each of varying height, arranged in a grid pattern on a slope. The exact meaning for each of the features of the memorial is and will be never revealed, so that it's meaning can be interpreted individually and no conflict can arise. I find standing among the huge concrete pillars to be very humbling, makes me feel small and vulnerable. The place is actually quite huge, one can easily get lost inside it if it weren't built in a grid. It is really a nice and significant memorial.
We have pretty much covered the important sights of Berlin. Now are the interesting "fun" stuff:
The O2 arena was opened despite the protest from the locals. They find it to be an eyesore which does not match the surrounding buildings. When building the stadium, they actually relocated certain portions of the old Berlin Wall so as to allow the rich patrons of the stadium to walk up into the stadium after they disembark from their yachts in the nearby river. Local residents were so pissed off that they egged the VIPs on the opening day of the stadium.
Talking about egging, every year in July, the 2 neighborhoods from each side of the bridge will engage themselves in a rotten food fight. It is really disgusting as they will prepare rotten stuff just for this fight. Gross. If you are interested, you can read more about it here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,568607,00.html
The huge tower(on the right) is the TV tower. It is built in the former Eastern Berlin, just to showoff to the West side that they can do it. It is possible to go to the top, but the weather was horrible when I was there, so I decided not to waste money going up.
On my second day, I went on an alternative tour of the city. Basically, the tour brings us to see the very vibrant street culture in Berlin. It is technically illegal to spray paint the walls, so the artists bent the rules by painting it on paper then pasting it on the walls. Anyone dare to try on SMRT trains? Below here are some of the more interesting paintings commonly found in Berlin.
Here are some paintings by the same artist. The paintings are all similar, with a little girl called lucy killing a cat. They're called "Little Lucy".
There are many stories behind each of the paintings, but I can't really remember them because I got bored halfway through the tour. Lol.
And thus, I ended my visit to this magnificent city. Berlin is really an interesting city. Forget about what others may say about it being boring. Just look at it's history, there'll always be something to see and do in Berlin.
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