Free Berlin

"It was a bright day in [August] and the clocks were striking thirteen."  The opening line of George Orwell's novel came to my mind while walking around Berlin.  Plain rectangular high rises dot the former communist portion of the city suggesting sameness and uniformity.  Instead of signs declaring, "Big Brother is Watching You," there were equally ominous signs like this.

If it hadn't been for the multitude of performance artists, street fairs, and activists for peace in Syria, one could get the sense that Russian tanks might suddenly emerge around the next corner.  Berlin has been slowly transformed since the wall's destruction which began on November 9, 1989.  Now, it's a metropolis with a mixture of cosmopolitan shopping malls and restaurants with bits of history scattered about the city.

Our first stop was Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous checkpoint between the American and Russian border.  This is what it looked like before.

Now, the blockades have been removed, and a monument has been erected.  Two soldiers stand there all day holding American flags.  Similar to the guys in front of the Queen's Palace in London, they seem to have been instructed not to smile, but they do squirm around quite a lot.  It makes me wonder what mistake they made to end up being stuck with this job.  It's not quite the dreary scene that it was between 1961 and 1989 though.  In fact, there's a McDonald's next door if you get a hankering for a Big Mac.

"Katja, what should I wear for our outing today?"
"Oh Dieter, your green pants and vest will be perfect!  I'll wear my blue outfit with the jacket I sewed from a quilt."
I'm not sure what it is about Europeans and green pants.  I noticed it immediately when I arrived in Dublin.  Three guys walked by with green pants.  I momentarily wondered if they may perhaps be really tall leprechauns, but one was listening to an ipod, and none of them were dancing a jig or carrying a pot of gold.  I thought I could escape it, but unfortunately Germany (and likely much of Europe) has become obsessed with green pants.  They were everywhere.  Someone should really alert the embassy before this trend crosses the Atlantic.

Radek pointed out the stone trail that marks where the Berlin wall once stood.  It zigzags around the city with no apparent logic. 
"I always imagined it in a straight line.  Why is it all over the place?"  I asked Radek.
"It depended who got there first."

Well, that made sense.  At the time, four armies were converging upon the city, and all of them wanted to take control of as much land as possible.

When the Soviet Union took over control of East Germany in 1949, an estimated 2.5 million people fled to the west.  The communists realized this was a problem.  Who was going to do all the work?  Therefore, they began to close the border to keep more citizens from leaving.  In this famous photograph above, even a Russian soldier is seen leaping over a barbed wire fence to freedom.  "Sieg heil, Democracy!"

Another one of my misconceptions was that there was just one big wall along the border, similar to the Great Wall of China.  But less great.  More like a fairly good wall. 

Initially, that was the case.  The Russians realized that this was not enough to keep people from crossing the border, so in typical Russian style they created a hazardous maze of tank barriers, landmines, electric fences, automatically-triggered guns, and control towers every 300 meters.  In other words, nobody got across.  Not even Frogger. 

Although most of the wall has been destroyed, small sections of it are preserved, so tourists can take selfies in front of them.

Bernauer Straße (the weird B is pronounced as an 's' making it Strasse) was my favorite part of Berlin.  A long portion of the wall remains almost fully intact along this street, and goes on for kilometers.  At this point in the day, it became cloudy and rainy.  Everything was grey.  Grey buildings against a grey sky and a grey wall.  It was the perfect atmosphere for the scene.  One area still had the tank barriers, extra walls, and guard towers.  It was easier to get a sense of how impossible it was to cross.  This didn't stop people from trying though.  At least 136 people were killed in attempts to cross the border between 1961 and 1989. 

Many people did manage to escape however.  Since the wall was built next to a street lined with houses and apartments, initially people were able to climb out windows and run for it.  Once the Russians caught on, they increased security measures and demolished the homes adjacent to the wall.  This led people to become more creative.  For instance, they built a series of tunnels that went under the deadly wall zone.

There's more to Berlin, than the wall.  There are beautiful cathedrals such the Berliner Dom, museums, government building, statues, and monuments.  Radek and I walked throughout the city, visiting all the popular tourist spots.  He kept asking me if I would like to actually go inside some of the buildings because, after all, I may not get the opportunity to visit again.  I would always look at the price, go into mild shock, and decline.  Berlin is incredibly expensive.  However, we managed to spend two days there doing everything for free. 

Our only expenses were hotel, food, and the subway.  I should point out that Radek's idea of accommodations is very different than mine, so I let him choose the hotel.  It was literally the fanciest hotel I have stayed at in at least 10 years.  I decided that was best because when he saw my guesthouse in Thailand, he said he was "shocked."  I replied, "Good thing you didn't see the last place I stayed at."

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (or Holocaust Memorial) contains a football sized field of 2,711 large rectangular concrete slabs that vary in height.  The sign didn't give any indication of the symbolism behind the design, so I began to wonder what it meant.  The slabs reminded me of gravesites, but that didn't really make sense.  Radek's first reaction after inspecting a couple of them was different.  He pointed out some large cracks in the cement and said, "There is something really wrong here.  This shouldn't happen." 

After wandering around the monument for a while, I decided that it's main purpose was to serve as a giant playground.  It was a great place to play hide and seek.  The slabs made nice benches for people to sit upon and have a snack.  They also provided some fun jumping opportunities for children to leap across from one to the other. 

When I got home, I researched the monument and learned that it was "designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason."  Oh, OK, or I guess it could mean that.