I booked a free walking tour for us on our second day in Berlin and it started at Brandenburger Tor. It was one of 18 city gates within the Berlin Wall that was erected in the 1730s. The gate led directly to the city palace along Unter den Linden, the renowned boulevard of linden trees. The gate represented peace and the design was based upon the Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens.
Atop the gate is the Quadriga, a chariot drawn by 4 horses driven by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. After Napoleon conquered Prussia, he was the first to use the Brandenburg Gate for a triumphal procession and took the Quadriga to Paris. After his defeat in 1814, the Quadriga was restored to Berlin and Victoria's wreath of oak leaves was supplemented with a new symbol of Prussian power, the Iron Cross.
The Gate on our last day when it was sunny....
Unter den Linden - best known and grandest street in Berlin in the 19th century.
The tiles on the road marked the Wall as it stood.
This was our guide but I can't remember his name now. He was really really good and the tour took about 3 hours. Some people actually left midway through to avoid tipping and others tipped so little they might as well not have bothered. I saw a group of Asians tipped him EUR10, i.e. EUR3 each and EUR1/per hour each. That's disgusting. Damon and I tipped him EUR10 or 15 each I think.
Next up was something a little bit more intense:
The controversial memorial also known as the Holocaust Memorial consists of a 19,000 square metres site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The concrete slabs are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.8 m.
Our guide told us that the designer did not put a meaning to these slabs, instead inviting people to put their own interpretations on it such as:
1. The slabs represented a graph on racism throughout the ages, from being just beneath the surface (0.2 m) to its height during the Nazi occupation (4.8 m)
2. The slabs represented tombs of all the Jew victims.
We then walked a short distance to this unassuming carpark. Underneath this carpark lies the bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide. He took up residence here on 16 January 1945 and committed suicide by gunshot on 30 April 1945. He married his mistress Eva Braun just before they committed suicide. She died by ingesting cyanide. Apparently, he was a confirmed bachelor because he wanted to be seen as being married to the cause and to Germany. But once they started losing the war, the Germans were losers and a lost cause in his eyes so he was then free to marry his Russian mistress. What a weirdo. The bunker remains unmarked and sealed off to the public.
The Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus or the Air Ministry Building as it is more commonly known, is the seat of the Finance Ministry. It was the largest office building in Europe at the time of its construction and housed the German Ministry of Aviation, headed by Herman Goering, a prominent Nazi.
At the north end of the building, a plaque commemorates the protest meeting in June 1953. Basically, things were supposed to improve after the war but it didn't. Workers were forced to work for reduced wages while work quotas kept being raised unreasonably. Finally, the workers went on strike and marchered through the city center. Some 25,000 gathered in front of this building to protest unreasonable working conditions. But Soviet military troops and tanks appeared and cleared the area by firing directly into the crowds. The protests turned political and they demanded the resignation of the East German government. The government decided to use force to quell the uprising.
A blown-up photograph of the 1953 protestors shortly before their gatheirng was surpressed.
The banner stated - We the building workers, demand that the production quotas be lowered.
There was also a mural on the walls just inside the building, depicting happy workers. This is in direct contrast to the plaque right in front of this mural.
Right opposite the Wall was this bratwurst outlet which we ate at the next day. It was NOT good.
Checkpoint Charlie:
Checkpoint Charlie or Checkpoint C was the name given by Western Allies to the best known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War. It became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of east and west. The original booth came down when the Wall did but the place has turned into a tourist circus with fake troops and fake booth available for photo ops.
Fake military memorabilia for sale:
Our guide taught us how to tell which side of the Wall you are on, depending on the words but I've forgotten now.
Me looking smug on the 'right' side of the Wall....
Damon looking oppressed on the 'wrong' side of the Wall.
Our guide then took us to Gendarmenmarkt, a square where the Konzerthaus (concert hall), Franzosischer Dom (French Cathedral) and Deutscher Dom (German Cathedral) are all situated. There was a Christmas market happening when we were there (Of course!) so we couldn't see the Konzerthaus. I can't remember why they built two identical cathedrals so close to each other anymore.
The French Cathedral is the older of the 2 cathedrals and was built between 1701 and 1705. It was modelled after the destroyed Huguenot church in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, France. It has a viewing platform, a restaurant and a musuem.
The Humboldt University of Berlin is one of Berlin's oldest universities but that's not the reason why we were brought here by our guide.
After 1933, the university was affected by the Nazi regime like all other bodies. It was from the university's library that some 20.000 books written by 'degenerates' and opponents of the regime were taken to be burned on May 10 1933. The plaque bears an epigraph from an 1820 work by Heinrich Heine: Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen - That was only a prelude: where they burn books, they ultimately burn people.
This glass monument consists of a glass panel opening onto an ungerground white room with empty shelf space for 20,000 volumes of books.
The Neue Wache (New Guard House) houses a controversial memorial - In 1969, the 20th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, a glass prism structure with an eternal flame was placed in the center of the hall. The remains of an unknown soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim from WWII were enshrined in the building - suggesting that both are victims deserving to be remembered.
The building was rededicated in 1993 as the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny. The memorial piece was removed and replaced with a sculpture - Mother with her Dead Son.
The walking tour terminated in front of the Berliner Dom, an amazing looking church. We didn't find the time to go in for a look unfortunately.
