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| Erin's Journal for 9-16-02, Part 1 This was our first full day in Berlin, and we wanted to use it wisely to figure out what to see in such a huge city. Neither of us has been a history buff until we started these travels, so we didn't know much about the specific things that had been happening here during WWII and before. We decided to take a bike tour, since we'd gotten so much out of the one we'd taken back in Barcelona. According to some flyers we found at our hostel, Mike's Bike Tours, the group we'd used in Barcelona, had already stopped doing tours for the summer season. We went with Insider Tours, which was also great. We met up with our tour guide at the hostel, waited for other people to sign up, then grabbed bikes and went to meet the 3 guys that had shown up at the alternate start point. There were only 5 of us on the tour plus the guide, Kenny, so it was nice and easy to follow him and hear him during our almost 5 hour tour We started at the Berlin Parliament building (Reichstag), which has been the site of some amazing events in recent history. Kenny recounted how Hitler's rise to power had put this building into a symbol of his power, and how at the end of WWII, Stalin had sent his troops to take the building from the 5,000 Nazi soldiers who'd vowed to hold it to their deaths. Sure enough, they all died, but before the building was taken, they'd taken out 17,000 Russian troops as well. This was all so Stalin could have a publicity photo of the Soviet flag flown from the top of the Reichstag! The most expensive picture in history, as Ken put it Before we rode through the 'central park' of Berlin, Tiergarten, we stopped at the House of the Cultures of the World (roughly translated), built by the Americans in the 60's as part of the revitalization of Berlin (and a not-so-subtle sign of the benefits of capitalist money!). In Tiergarten, we noted the monument to all those Russian soldiers who died in the fighting for Berlin. We also stopped at the Sieges-saule (Victory Tower), a monument of the golden statue of the goddess Nike, which was originally in front of the Reichstag but which Hitler had moved to the center of town for his birthday (and strategically aimed facing Paris, foretelling his victory there). In fact, this whole monument was meant as a slap in the face to the French, with its granite friezes depicting ages-old victories of German over French. When the Allies took over Berlin, the French asked the British for permission to destroy it - it ended up in the English Quarter after WWII - and of course, the Brits said no!!! After that nose-thumbing monument, we rode off to view other points of interest, including the parking lot which covers the former site of Hitler's bunker (where he killed himself), the much-debated site of the proposed monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, and the famous Brandenburg Gate. The gate is under renovation and covered with a shroud (and has been for years), but we saw a postcard, and it is one of the oldest monuments of Berlin. It was erected to commemorate the victories of the German countries (they were separate states for a long time) under the rulership of the Kaisers. It was erected along a particular avenue through the Tiergarten so that victorious German armies could march through town - but the first victorious army to pass through its arches was Napoleon's! That age-old French thing, again We moved on to the proposed site of the American embassy, which now houses an exhibit of painted bears. These are all over Berlin, just as the angel statues show up all around Los Angeles and painted cow statues decorated Seattle. (Bears are Berlin's representative animal.) Finally, we got to the Wall. |
| This is one of only 4 remaining sections of The Wall, which also has an exhibition beneath it in the remains of the brick bunkers where people were tortured, imprisoned, and often killed in East Berlin |