Berlin

Berlin

In Berlin, there are years of horrific history to uncover. But while uncovering that difficult history, there’s a common thread: Berlin has a special way of turning something horrible into something that we can all learn from.

When we first arrived in Berlin, we were greeted by a large fish tank taking up most of the hotel lobby! It was pretty amazing. We settled into our hotel, the Radisson Blu Berlin. After that, we set out for our first meal in Berlin and we wanted it to be something special, so we went to the city’s oldest restaurant, Zur Letzten Instanz. Lots of famous people have eaten here, most of whom I haven’t heard of, but maybe you have! Okay, okay, some I do know- Beethoven, Napoleon, Charlie Chaplin… and it’s pretty cool to sit there knowing that you’re dining in the same place where these historical figures took their meals. Maybe one day my name will be added to the list! I don’t know what all those famous people ate, but I ordered the chef’s favorite, meatballs. They were so good, as were the amazing parsley mashed potatoes (see photo above: the mashed potatoes are green because they have parsley in them- YUM!). We ate on the patio because all of the tables inside were reserved (we arrived just as the place opened and were able to get seated on the patio, but I’d recommend a reservation if you want to go there one day and can plan). We peeked into the inside dining area and it doesn’t exactly look like the oldest restaurant ever, but you can see that they have tried to keep some of that original, classic ambiance. For dessert, we ordered the apple pie, which they made fresh! It took a while for the pie to come, but it was worth the wait… it’s not every day that you get some fresh-out-of-the-oven apple pie. After dinner, we walked home with our bellies full, stopping by the Berlin TV tower, a big tower that the Soviets built to show off during the height of the Cold War.  It was important to them that they seem powerful and so this tower was supposed to loom over the Western part of the city and make the point that the Soviet, Eastern side, was stronger and more powerful than the West. Now the tower is a tourist attraction. It is something that’s meant to be intimidating, built in the form of something beautiful. It looks like a giant toothpick with a humongous golf ball stuck through the top. We weren’t intending to leave Berlin without going to the top, but you’ll have to keep on reading to hear about that. At the hotel, we dived-bombed into bed. 

The next morning, my mother pulled out her Rick Steves walking tour book and we got started. Before we set out, I was glad to have a good old American breakfast at the hotel. German food is new and exciting, but sometimes it’s nice to have a little reminder of home. After filling up on omelets and muffins, we took off for our walking tour of the city. Our first stop was the Reichstag Building, the seat of the German government. Just outside, there was a touching memorial to the elected government representatives who were killed because they opposed the Nazis when Hitler took power. There’s also a line in the street showing where the Berlin Wall used to stand. In first grade, I read a book about the Berlin Wall.  All I took away from the book was that the Berlin Wall was a famous wall- so in my imagination, I thought it would be like the Great Wall of China. When I got to Berlin and heard the Rick Steves audio clip, I realized how wrong I was (maybe off by about 13,000 miles!). The Berlin wall was built to separate East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War, dividing the city between the Communist side and the Western side.  Families were torn apart when the wall went up and some people even died trying to escape from the Communist side.  The wall wasn’t something beautiful and wonderous, it was something dark and scary.  We stood quietly by a memorial of white crosses commemorating some of the people who lost their lives trying to escape over the wall that from here is now only visible as a line in the street.  After standing there a bit, we took a breath and kept walking along the road until we got to the Brandenburg Gate. The Brandenburg Gate is a very grand gate that is topped with some very cool statues. It was built to represent peace in 1789, which is ironic because much of the history I saw in Berlin was filled with conflict. Right nearby was the American Embassy. So close to home! The guard outside was nice and asked where we were from in the States. We looked around the Pariser Platz, a large square behind the gate. Off to the side was a bank called DZ Bank. We had to wait a bit for workers to enter and exit because it’s a bank, not a tourist attraction, but the guard let us into the lobby. We were there to see the architecture and it was pretty cool- it looked like a fish out of water. The architect is Frank Gehry. His architecture is beautiful and definitely worth the detour. Even as someone who’s not so into architecture, I could appreciate the talent of Gehry and the magnificence of the building. Our next stop was the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It’s especially powerful because Berlin was the place where the Nazis ruled and oversaw the genocide. The memorial is a sea of concrete blocks. It’s very disorienting, and that disorientation is effecting. It’s a memorial to something dreadful, turned into something moving and meaningful. After walking among the concrete blocks for a while, we headed over to what seemed like an ordinary parking lot a few streets away.  But this is no ordinary parking lot, it’s a parking lot built over the bunker where Hitler lived his last days and eventually ended his own life. Above the destroyed space, there’s a plaque with information about the bunker and what happened there. After the war, the bunker was destroyed so that future Nazis could not pay tribute to Hitler there. The plaque was densely packed with information and there were people crowded all around reading. I only got to read a small paragraph, which was enough for me, before being whisked (and partly shoved) away to our next destination, the Hotel Adlon. A twelve-year-old might not know or care about this site. I had never heard about the “infamous baby dangling incident” when Michael Jackson dangled his baby over the railing. I would have liked to watch a video before going there, just to be ready! To give credit where credit is due, my parents did show me the video while we were standing in front of the hotel.  I would not have dangled a baby over my hotel railing!  We continued down Under den Linden (a street named for the linden trees that you can walk under) and grabbed some currywurst along the way. Currywurst is a special Berlin street food and it was so so so good! Even my father, who is vegetarian, tried some. Currywurst is my new favorite food … it contains sausage and curry sauce. It tastes like ketchup, hot dogs, and curry. During the war, there were limited rations and people got bored with sausages. After the Nazi regime fell, occupying armies came into the city.  The British soldiers had curry powder with them as part of their army rations. The local street vendors in occupied Berlin got the idea to combine their meager sausages with the curry packets carried by British soldiers to create this yummy food… and it became a signature dish of the city! Even though the meal is a callback to the horrible times of WWII, the locals have turned it into a delicious cultural emblem. After having lunch, we headed on to Bebelplatz and the book burning memorial. A great book to read and movie to watch before going to Berlin is the Book Thief by Markus Zusak. In the book, they burn books that don’t spread the ideals of the Nazi regime. It was interesting to see a memorial to that. As not only an avid traveler, and also an avid reader, it was exciting to see these two things intertwine. One quote that was engraved on a nearby plaque is, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” – Heinrich Heine. Even though it was a brutal part of their history, Berlin does not hide it and instead chooses to show it in a significant way. Across the street is Neue Wache, a memorial to soldiers who were killed in World War Two. I found it very moving. It’s a large statue under a skylight. For me, the most powerful thing about the memorial wasn’t the statue, but the big open space around it. It’s a remembrance of a devastating time in history that I found to be represented beautifully. We continued along and walked by Lustgarten, a park on museum island. There were lots of street performers, including a man balancing a big glass ball on his head. It was pretty amazing and mind-blowing. Before dinner, we took a cruise around the sites on the river that the city is built around, recapping all of the exploring that we had done during the day. After the boat, we took an elevator up, up, up and into the TV Tower.

We ate dinner at the TV Tower’s restaurant, Sphere, to celebrate my brother’s birthday. I got salmon and it was so good! Salmon is my all-time favorite protein. I get it almost everywhere I eat, and Sphere didn’t disappoint! It was my first revolving restaurant and it had great views. The food, the ambiance, and the views made the restaurant A-list. We also got to do something pretty special, which is to see the city from a different perspective. You really see how big the city is. Afterward, we got ice cream and called it a night. 

The next day, we headed to The East Side Gallery, which is a long stretch of the Berlin Wall that is preserved. What is the Berlin Wall? Well, as established above, it is NOT anything like the Great Wall of China! The Berlin Wall is a wall that divided the city in two after the Second World War, on one side was the West, the capatalists, and on the other was the East, the communists. The wall fell in November 1989. Artists have decorated what is left of the wall and now this big section is a long art gallery. It was my favorite thing in Berlin. I thought that the way they made something threatening into something artistic says a lot about the culture of Berlin.

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The two most iconic murals are ‘My God, Help Me To Survive This Deadly Love’ and the Trabant (trabant or “trabi” is a classic East German car that, even though it doesn’t work so well, is something special that they could call their own) breaking through the wall. The Trabant was my favorite. I liked how it was so bright and colorful, and also very unique. My brother’s favorite mural was probably the one featuring lots of nudes. Along the way, different locals kept trying to stop us to get us to sign something for charity. They were pretty pushy, but we kept on going. When we walked the length of the gallery, surprisingly short for the longest open-air gallery in the world, we headed to Checkpoint Charlie, which is a reconstruction of what was the most famous US Army checkpoint from when Berlin was divided after WWII. Back then, during the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie was one of the few spots on the wall where, if you had the right papers, you could pass from East berlin into the West.  It isn’t named after a guy named Charlie, it’s just the third checkpoint that they built. A (Alpha), B (Bravo), C (Charlie)! All of the walking had us hungry, so we stopped at Beets & Roots for lunch. It’s a funky little place with nice (and big!) salad bowls. Instead of them asking for your  name, like at Starbucks, we got assigned an American celebrity name. We were… (drumroll please)… Brad Pitt! It was a nice quick lunch. After this, we saw a memorial to George Elser. Elser was a German who tried to assassinate Hitler before the war and was eventually killed by the Nazis. His story is amazing, involving a slowly hollowed-out column and a home-made bomb.  There’s no plaque near the memorial, it’s just a large sculpture outling Elser’s silhouette, so it would be easy to walk by the memorial without really taking in the story. Luckily, Atlas Obscura has a great write up! We read the story about Elser, thought about his amazing heroism and how close he came to stopping Hitler.  Then we headed on to the Topography of Terror, a history museum built over the site that housed the Secret Service Office of the Nazis, the dreaded Gestapo, during the war. In the end, though we walked around the outside, we only used the bathroom at that museum, because it turned out that the displays are not palatable for children. When we asked, the museum staff said that they do not recommend the audio guide for kids under 14, so we decided that a respectful walk around the grounds was the right way to experience the place for now. On the way out, we spotted a sign warning tourists to beware of people asking them to sign petitions for charity, saying that is a common distraction used by pick-pockets!  We all paused and thought back to the people who tried to stop us earlier at the East Side Gallery, to get us to sign for charity.  Were they just attempting to distract us before stealing our wallets? Scandalous! We checked our pockets and were relieved to see that we still had everything. We headed on over to the DDR Museum, which is the opposite of the Topography of Terror Museum- it’s designed for kids to enjoy! DDR means the East part of Germany – known in German as “Deutsche Demokratische Republik” or “DDR”  (in English: “German Democratic Republic” OR “GDR”). The DDR museum was fun and hands-on, but also informative for someone who isn’t just looking for games, screens, and touchable artifacts. I tried driving a Trabant, the car that was featured breaking through the Berlin Wall in my favorite East Side Galley mural.  According to the museum, it was the only car available if you lived in East Germany back then, and it wasn’t easy to get.  Of course, if you did finally get the car, it didn’t work very well, but it was a source of pride.  I wasn’t very good at driving the simulation, but at least I have another four years until my driving test! Maybe I’ll have to come back to Berlin to practice more at the DDR Museum before I take it!  Learning more about what life was like in East Berlin made me feel lucky. Back in East Berlin, people didn’t have much at all… a variety of food was scarce, technology wasn’t reliable, kids were lucky if they had one toy. It made me grateful for everything I have. Speaking of how lucky I am, after the museum, I headed back to my cozy hotel room and swam a bit in the hotel pool. Then we grabbed some currywurst (yes, I loved it SO much that we had to have it multiple times during the visit) and ice cream (because… ice cream!). All throughout Berlin, I had not only seen the city’s horrific history but also how its people have turned terrors of that history into artistic things that keep us all in touch with the past in a special way. It made me want to contribute to something like that in the future. Getting inspired is just another plus to visiting Berlin.

STAY TUNED FOR MY NEXT ADVENTURE… HAMBURG!

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