![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Central London, as a rule, has a degree of overcrowding which you can measure on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is “Mildly annoying” to 10 which is “That does it, pass me my cattle prod and stand well back”. In comparison, one of the most striking things about Berlin is just how quiet it is. Even the pivotal points of the city, like the Museum Island or the Brandenburg Gate, never get above a 5 or so on the London scale, whilst Alexanderplatz, which is the Berlin equivalent of Leicester Square, probably doesn’t rate more than a 3 or 4.
It’s odd. There you are in the middle of a major world city with a population of millions and at times it feels almost eerily deserted. Pop down a side street and it’s perfectly possible to see absolutely nobody, and yet in spite of this it’s clearly extremely prosperous. I went past a gentlemen’s outfitters which appears to specialise in little but expensive tailored bottle-green plus-fours, which you’d think is as niche an interest as you can find, and yet they looked successful and not in imminent danger of shutting despite the clear absence of anyone on the streets who might be considered a customer. And that’s the story everywhere. The restaurants and bars have dozens of empty seats at all hours of day and night, the shops I went in had a volume of custom which would have had shareholders in the UK demanding management be sacked… and yet it all looks so rich.
Clearly I’m missing something about the German economy. Berlin is full of shops and offices, but strikingly few people. After London, it just felt downright weird.
Under normal circumstances I don’t take guided tours of places. When I’m on my own I like to strike out in a slightly haphazard way of the “that looks interesting, I’ll go and find out what it is” sort. However, this time I had the she-David with me, which is rather like having a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel that zooms off in random directions for no apparent reason, and so we’d signed up for a walking tour of the city largely so I didn’t have to keep looking round wondering where the heck she’d got to this time.
I’m actually rather glad we did this as I got an overview complete with details which my usual exploration technique might have missed. Did you know, for example, that the statue of Victory atop the Brandenburg Gate stares directly at the French embassy, and when the French rebuilt it a decade or so ago they louvered the windows so they stared back? I didn’t, but I was very pleased to learn it.
As the tour went on, it became clear that the Germans are very keen to highlight Frederick the Great as the exemplar of their history, and you can see why. Frederick had the slight misfortune to be born to be the leader of a notoriously warlike people (the Prussians) when he himself appears to have been as camp as a row of tents and had a father who, by way of parenting example, slit the throat of Frederick’s ‘best friend’ (hem-hem) in front of his own son when he was fifteen to show him he needn’t be getting any ideas like that thank you very much. Despite this, Frederick appears to have turned out pretty well. He waged wars to keep the nobility happy and conquered large chunks of Poland, whilst at home he was an enthusiastic supporter of the arts and also of integrating foreign populations. His opera house and churches were largely destroyed during the war, and the government have done a magnificent job rebuilding and renovating them with their soaring towers and neoclassical columns. They’re very much the optimistic buildings of a wealthy artistic and religious society and the sort of thing which is a blessing to any city.
As we walked, an idea occurred to me which wasn’t mentioned by the guide but I have to wonder if there’s anything in it, and that’s how German Imperial architecture changed over the centuries. Frederick built tall but elegant, but by the late 19th century when the Reichstag and the Berliner Dom were built the architecture had become heavier, blockier. Angular and squared off, as if huddled down against the chill wind from the east the Reichstag squats like an angry giant, fists raised and clenched to each side of it’s head. It’s not an attractive building compared to the results of Fredericks spate of construction, and I found myself wondering if that meant anything at a symbolic level.
Probably not. I’m might just be overthinking it.
My guidebook described Germany as having a ‘chequered past’, which is pretty much the politest way of putting it, and if there’s a building left standing in Berlin which exemplifies that past it’s the one the German Finance Ministry now inhabits – as it’s one of the few Nazi-era buildings left standing. It was built as a home for Herman Goering’s air force, and Goering had it built to be as downright indestructible as possible: constructed out of steel-reinforced concrete throughout it was for a time the largest office building in Europe, not that Goering had issues or anything, and survived the war largely intact when the rest of the city was almost entirely flattened. When the Communists took over after the war they looked at demolishing it and realised that doing so would be prohibitively expensive and so they refurbished it and painted a big mural on the wall depicting happy workers in the golden sunshine of the new socialist future they were about to create.
Then, when Germany was reunified in the early 1990s, the new government looked at demolishing it and realised that doing so would be prohibitively expensive so they refurbished it and added another mural, exactly the same size as the East German one and directly in front of it, showing a photograph of Berliners in 1953 who had taken to the streets to say, very politely, that they’d tried being socialists, they’d decided it was rubbish, and could they stop now please. The photograph was taken just before the tanks went in and dozens of people were killed. It’s really affecting, that combination of image and horrid reality, and it’s made more so that nothing much is made of it. It’s just there for you to draw your own conclusions.
And it’s here I’m going to digress to talk about two things: one which impressed me deeply, and one which just makes me really cross.
That ‘chequered past’ thing I mentioned earlier. As you wander through Berlin you notice something quite striking. There’s no holocaust museum, or Stasi museum or anything like that. What there are instead are ‘information centres’. Under the Holocaust memorial, there’s an information centre. Where the Stasi building stood, there’s an information centre. Where the SS building stood, once again, an information centre. In these centres the truth of that chequered past is presented without ceremony or any attempt to dress up or apologise. It’s cold, hard and utterly unflinching in the presentation of more than a half century of human misery, and I’ve got to say I’m just so astonishingly impressed by the German government for it. It must be tempting to put up museums and fancy memorials*, but there’s a danger they can become justifications or a means of hiding. There’s none of that. It’s an absolutely clinical presentation of facts and my respect for this is total.
But there’s always another side. As your feet take you about the city and perhaps a little away from the main tourist areas, you notice that people have stuck up flyers and posters on the streetlamps. Most of these are for bars and small museums (I did fancy the Ramones Museum, but didn’t have time) and the like, but a small number are political, for extremist groups. Various bands of supremacists of one stripe or another, or reds, or reds posing as greens inviting you to check their websites.
Then there’s a large memorial to Marx and Engels which the DDR slung up in the centre of the city which, a day or two after the wall came down, someone graffiti’d “Next time we’ll get it right” on it. It’s at about this point I start getting cross.
Berlin, as a city, is in many ways a huge memorial in its own right to the unworkable political and economic ideas of the 20th century and their consequences. It is a testament to the inability of the human race to learn from experience that it’s possible to live there and still think to yourself “White supremacy! What a cracking wheeze!” or “Marxism! I can’t think of any reasons why that wouldn’t work” whilst you’re standing next to a big photo of people who were run over by tanks the last time someone started thinking like that. I’m sure the people thinking this are perfectly nice folks I’d get along with if I met them** but if you happen to be sitting there thinking that the people who graffiti’d the Marx & Engels memorial were probably right, just take a few minutes and think about the direct correlation between the implementation of your ideas and people getting run over with tanks and consider the possibility you might be wrong.
Take as long as you like. I’ll wait.
Phew. It all got a bit serious there for a moment or two, didn’t it?
I’d got myself good and worked up thinking about all this as I contemplated a photo of someone getting shot trying to escape across the no-mans land at the Berlin wall, so there was only one thing to do: go and get good and squiffy at a dodgy East Berlin Heavy Metal bar. Lord knows where it was; somewhere in the backstreets of an area of East Berlin which appeared to have gone the way of Hoxton or Shoreditch in London – a formerly impoverished area where lots of arty hipster types had moved in and brought overpriced eateries and barbers shops with them. The bar was a holdout against this hipsterification and the walls were lined with hundreds of heavy metal album covers, all pre-1990. Clearly this decoration was the collected pride and joy of some old-time DDR metaller and I took to the place instantly, realising that back when I was listening to Poison and Iron Maiden in about 1987, so was some kindred spirit behind the Berlin Wall. I felt an affinity towards them which lasted just as long as it took for a heavily-tattooed rock chick to start shouting at me in German. I’ve no idea why. Possibly she resented that I’d had access to The Chart Show rock chart and Kerrang! when she’d had to make do with oompah bands and the Red Army Choir.
I can understand why that might leave someone bitter.
Reasoning that getting shouted at in a language you don't understand usually indicates a good time to leave, we were heading out of the door when pretty much the strangest moment of my entire visit occurred as, coming in just as I was leaving, was a bloke who I was and remain totally and utterly convinced was Gary Glitter. It was that stupid little beard he's grown poking out from under his cap which grabbed my attention and I did an extremely obvious double-take.
I suppose that if you're a disgraced former glam rocker East Berlin is as good a place as any to make your home - how many people will recognise you? Or care? Or possibly I'm wrong and it wasn't him, but I can't help but wonder.
And with that, the day was pretty much over. It was late, and cold, it was a heck of a long walk back up Karlmarxstrasse to Alexanderplatz and then to my hotel, and I had more places to go in the morning.
End of Part 2.
*What remains of Hitler’s bunker sits buried beneath a run-down car park at the back of the block of flats. There’s no memorial, except inasmuch as a run-down car park behind a block of flats is pretty much the best memorial I can think of for the fellow.
**This is a lie. I actually think they’re probably twats who I’d despise.
It’s odd. There you are in the middle of a major world city with a population of millions and at times it feels almost eerily deserted. Pop down a side street and it’s perfectly possible to see absolutely nobody, and yet in spite of this it’s clearly extremely prosperous. I went past a gentlemen’s outfitters which appears to specialise in little but expensive tailored bottle-green plus-fours, which you’d think is as niche an interest as you can find, and yet they looked successful and not in imminent danger of shutting despite the clear absence of anyone on the streets who might be considered a customer. And that’s the story everywhere. The restaurants and bars have dozens of empty seats at all hours of day and night, the shops I went in had a volume of custom which would have had shareholders in the UK demanding management be sacked… and yet it all looks so rich.
Clearly I’m missing something about the German economy. Berlin is full of shops and offices, but strikingly few people. After London, it just felt downright weird.
Under normal circumstances I don’t take guided tours of places. When I’m on my own I like to strike out in a slightly haphazard way of the “that looks interesting, I’ll go and find out what it is” sort. However, this time I had the she-David with me, which is rather like having a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel that zooms off in random directions for no apparent reason, and so we’d signed up for a walking tour of the city largely so I didn’t have to keep looking round wondering where the heck she’d got to this time.
I’m actually rather glad we did this as I got an overview complete with details which my usual exploration technique might have missed. Did you know, for example, that the statue of Victory atop the Brandenburg Gate stares directly at the French embassy, and when the French rebuilt it a decade or so ago they louvered the windows so they stared back? I didn’t, but I was very pleased to learn it.
As the tour went on, it became clear that the Germans are very keen to highlight Frederick the Great as the exemplar of their history, and you can see why. Frederick had the slight misfortune to be born to be the leader of a notoriously warlike people (the Prussians) when he himself appears to have been as camp as a row of tents and had a father who, by way of parenting example, slit the throat of Frederick’s ‘best friend’ (hem-hem) in front of his own son when he was fifteen to show him he needn’t be getting any ideas like that thank you very much. Despite this, Frederick appears to have turned out pretty well. He waged wars to keep the nobility happy and conquered large chunks of Poland, whilst at home he was an enthusiastic supporter of the arts and also of integrating foreign populations. His opera house and churches were largely destroyed during the war, and the government have done a magnificent job rebuilding and renovating them with their soaring towers and neoclassical columns. They’re very much the optimistic buildings of a wealthy artistic and religious society and the sort of thing which is a blessing to any city.
As we walked, an idea occurred to me which wasn’t mentioned by the guide but I have to wonder if there’s anything in it, and that’s how German Imperial architecture changed over the centuries. Frederick built tall but elegant, but by the late 19th century when the Reichstag and the Berliner Dom were built the architecture had become heavier, blockier. Angular and squared off, as if huddled down against the chill wind from the east the Reichstag squats like an angry giant, fists raised and clenched to each side of it’s head. It’s not an attractive building compared to the results of Fredericks spate of construction, and I found myself wondering if that meant anything at a symbolic level.
Probably not. I’m might just be overthinking it.
My guidebook described Germany as having a ‘chequered past’, which is pretty much the politest way of putting it, and if there’s a building left standing in Berlin which exemplifies that past it’s the one the German Finance Ministry now inhabits – as it’s one of the few Nazi-era buildings left standing. It was built as a home for Herman Goering’s air force, and Goering had it built to be as downright indestructible as possible: constructed out of steel-reinforced concrete throughout it was for a time the largest office building in Europe, not that Goering had issues or anything, and survived the war largely intact when the rest of the city was almost entirely flattened. When the Communists took over after the war they looked at demolishing it and realised that doing so would be prohibitively expensive and so they refurbished it and painted a big mural on the wall depicting happy workers in the golden sunshine of the new socialist future they were about to create.
Then, when Germany was reunified in the early 1990s, the new government looked at demolishing it and realised that doing so would be prohibitively expensive so they refurbished it and added another mural, exactly the same size as the East German one and directly in front of it, showing a photograph of Berliners in 1953 who had taken to the streets to say, very politely, that they’d tried being socialists, they’d decided it was rubbish, and could they stop now please. The photograph was taken just before the tanks went in and dozens of people were killed. It’s really affecting, that combination of image and horrid reality, and it’s made more so that nothing much is made of it. It’s just there for you to draw your own conclusions.
And it’s here I’m going to digress to talk about two things: one which impressed me deeply, and one which just makes me really cross.
That ‘chequered past’ thing I mentioned earlier. As you wander through Berlin you notice something quite striking. There’s no holocaust museum, or Stasi museum or anything like that. What there are instead are ‘information centres’. Under the Holocaust memorial, there’s an information centre. Where the Stasi building stood, there’s an information centre. Where the SS building stood, once again, an information centre. In these centres the truth of that chequered past is presented without ceremony or any attempt to dress up or apologise. It’s cold, hard and utterly unflinching in the presentation of more than a half century of human misery, and I’ve got to say I’m just so astonishingly impressed by the German government for it. It must be tempting to put up museums and fancy memorials*, but there’s a danger they can become justifications or a means of hiding. There’s none of that. It’s an absolutely clinical presentation of facts and my respect for this is total.
But there’s always another side. As your feet take you about the city and perhaps a little away from the main tourist areas, you notice that people have stuck up flyers and posters on the streetlamps. Most of these are for bars and small museums (I did fancy the Ramones Museum, but didn’t have time) and the like, but a small number are political, for extremist groups. Various bands of supremacists of one stripe or another, or reds, or reds posing as greens inviting you to check their websites.
Then there’s a large memorial to Marx and Engels which the DDR slung up in the centre of the city which, a day or two after the wall came down, someone graffiti’d “Next time we’ll get it right” on it. It’s at about this point I start getting cross.
Berlin, as a city, is in many ways a huge memorial in its own right to the unworkable political and economic ideas of the 20th century and their consequences. It is a testament to the inability of the human race to learn from experience that it’s possible to live there and still think to yourself “White supremacy! What a cracking wheeze!” or “Marxism! I can’t think of any reasons why that wouldn’t work” whilst you’re standing next to a big photo of people who were run over by tanks the last time someone started thinking like that. I’m sure the people thinking this are perfectly nice folks I’d get along with if I met them** but if you happen to be sitting there thinking that the people who graffiti’d the Marx & Engels memorial were probably right, just take a few minutes and think about the direct correlation between the implementation of your ideas and people getting run over with tanks and consider the possibility you might be wrong.
Take as long as you like. I’ll wait.
Phew. It all got a bit serious there for a moment or two, didn’t it?
I’d got myself good and worked up thinking about all this as I contemplated a photo of someone getting shot trying to escape across the no-mans land at the Berlin wall, so there was only one thing to do: go and get good and squiffy at a dodgy East Berlin Heavy Metal bar. Lord knows where it was; somewhere in the backstreets of an area of East Berlin which appeared to have gone the way of Hoxton or Shoreditch in London – a formerly impoverished area where lots of arty hipster types had moved in and brought overpriced eateries and barbers shops with them. The bar was a holdout against this hipsterification and the walls were lined with hundreds of heavy metal album covers, all pre-1990. Clearly this decoration was the collected pride and joy of some old-time DDR metaller and I took to the place instantly, realising that back when I was listening to Poison and Iron Maiden in about 1987, so was some kindred spirit behind the Berlin Wall. I felt an affinity towards them which lasted just as long as it took for a heavily-tattooed rock chick to start shouting at me in German. I’ve no idea why. Possibly she resented that I’d had access to The Chart Show rock chart and Kerrang! when she’d had to make do with oompah bands and the Red Army Choir.
I can understand why that might leave someone bitter.
Reasoning that getting shouted at in a language you don't understand usually indicates a good time to leave, we were heading out of the door when pretty much the strangest moment of my entire visit occurred as, coming in just as I was leaving, was a bloke who I was and remain totally and utterly convinced was Gary Glitter. It was that stupid little beard he's grown poking out from under his cap which grabbed my attention and I did an extremely obvious double-take.
I suppose that if you're a disgraced former glam rocker East Berlin is as good a place as any to make your home - how many people will recognise you? Or care? Or possibly I'm wrong and it wasn't him, but I can't help but wonder.
And with that, the day was pretty much over. It was late, and cold, it was a heck of a long walk back up Karlmarxstrasse to Alexanderplatz and then to my hotel, and I had more places to go in the morning.
End of Part 2.
*What remains of Hitler’s bunker sits buried beneath a run-down car park at the back of the block of flats. There’s no memorial, except inasmuch as a run-down car park behind a block of flats is pretty much the best memorial I can think of for the fellow.
**This is a lie. I actually think they’re probably twats who I’d despise.
