Statues on top of the Opera (with lightning rods)
Wilhelmskirche with construction cranes
The new construction of the Berliner Schloss
The Schloss Cupola from the roof
Reenactors after the open house (and after lunch)
Hackesche Hoefe
Government buildings near the Reichstag (Parliament building)
The Victory Statue at the center of Berlin’s Tiergarten
The Gripstheater at Hansaplatz
We had stayed up until almost midnight last night, so we slept until 8 am and even so I woke up directly from a dream! I call that sleeping in. I am sure it helped to sleep in a real bedroom (Laurie’s, actually–she vacated hers and slept in Stella’s room). When I got up and took a shower, Laurie was already making breakfast, and Kai was up, too–reading in the living room! We had a fun German breakfast and even got to get glimpses of the kitties bouncing around on the floor occasionally. By 10, we all were about ready to leave–Laurie to take Mauro and Kai with her on a job-related errand to Werbellinsee, about 90 miles from Berlin, and Mark and I, suitcase in hand, to the commuter trains. We got day tickets and then made our way to Berlin’s central station, found the lockers, put all our heavy stuff away for the day and went exploring. Since we’d been to Berlin before, we had no particular agenda and also didn’t feel like we had to do all the “sights.” That said, we started with a short subway trip on the new subway line, the U55, which connects the main station to Brandenburg Gate, and is currently being expanded to “close the gap” between that location and the old city center of East Berlin, Alexanderplatz. It was nice and empty because it is currently just 3 stations, and most tourists must get to the gate by other means. They were certainly at the Brandenburg Gate in great droves! We got away from the area as fast as we could, because we were a bit tired of the masses of people, and because, as last time, we couldn’t see THROUGH the gate anyway, because a stupid giant screen was in front of it. The European soccer cup has officially started, and I assume that the screen will be used for the usual public viewing street parties of the matches that started in the 2000s. So instead, we walked down the big promenade, Unter den Linden, until we got to the cluster of buildings that are currently undergoing major overhaul–the opera house, a church named St. Hedwig’s, and most dramatically, the former Berliner Schloss, which will house a big museum named Humboldt Forum. We realized as we were walking towards the construction site that this was their Open House, only held yesterday and today, during which people could go into the half-finished building (scheduled to open 2019) and ascend to the roof level to see the progress of the construction. We couldn’t resist and joined the crowds of Berliners (mostly not tourists) who were walking up the 240 steps to the roof to see how an 18th century palace could be reconstructed with modern concrete and rebar. The nearby exhibit with models had given us much to think about–the Berliner Schloss, at the end of Unter den Linden, and directly across from the big Wilhelmskirche, was significantly damaged during WWII, then razed by the Soviets in 1950 amidst protests; a new parliament building for East Germany was erected there in the 70s, and that in turn was torn down under protests in the 1990s. Then there was new controversy about rebuilding the Schloss from scratch with modern means but all the old features, including replicas of various statues and arches that we could see exhibited. Clearly, the people who were touring the building today were not protesting or anything, but I also didn’t have the sense that they were all donating like crazy, even though the Open House was meant at least partly as a fund raiser and PR event to garner extra support for this project. I don’t know how much taxpayer money was involved in rebuilding this, but I assume it was a lot!
We continued from the Schloss construction site to the river Spree and the teeny historic Nikolaiviertel in the vicinity of the 19th century brick town hall (Rotes Rathaus), where this part of Berlin started around the Nikolaikirche, and where there are actually a handful of older crooked alleyways–an unusual site in Berlin, which really does not have a medieval core like Prague or Munich (or even Osnabrueck for that matter) but was built up as a neoclassicist city with lavish boulevards, palaces, and monuments starting in the 18th century. Although it was already the capital of Prussia and home to the kings of Prussia in the 18th century, Berlin didn’t really come into its own in terms of a large urban population until the 19th century and started to really take off after 1870, with the founding of the Second German Reich–so for Germany, it is rather young city. Although the quick walk through this quarter was fun (and yielded a pasta lunch in an open-air restaurant that was very pleasant and gave us a glimpse at reenactors at lunch after their stint at the Open House), the most fun part was actually visiting the information booth about the invisible construction site for the mile or so of subway that is currently being completed. It’s done with one of those tunnel borers that builds walls as it bores away, and then gets dismantled, without ever having to tear up the surface. I’m sure that the Berliners are excited for the new subway link (not having that connection is sort of the last vestige of the East-West divide in the city), and Mark had fun with the tunnel boring technology.
Since we were now refreshed by our pasta lunch, we continued our walking tour along the Spree and then took the tram for just a station, to the part of town called Spandau, where we revisited the Hackesche Hoefe, a beautiful series of Art Deco buildings with striking blue tiles, and also strolled through a little park (Mon Bijou) that led us not only back to the river, but also to a flea market with a lot of tourist tchotchkes, like beer steins, military-history books, and Soviet-era military hats (mostly fake, I assume). From there, we walked on along the river, and came to another famous sites–the train station Friedrichsstrasse, which sat right at the border of East and West Berlin, and where West Germans could come to the East for a day visit, at least after the early 1970s, so that a special building was constructed to funnel people in (other than the teeny check point Charlie). The building, known early on by Berliners as the “Traenenpalast”–the Palace of Tears–because tearful separations took place there all the time, and because it reminded everyone of the divided city and of the impossibility of even as it eventually became the entryway for the famous party at the Brandenburg gate on November 10, 1989, when the border station was “mistakenly” declared openwas interesting, if a bit too obnoxiously eager to stress how horrible the East was. I would have been funneled through this building with my class when we had our 10th-grade field trip to Berlin in 1982, since we spent a day in East Berlin–but I do not remember the transit through Friedrichstrasse; it obviously didn’t strike me as memorable, even as I remember milling around on the East German Alexanderplatz and buying books at the giant book store on the plaza.
We continued along the Spree to the Reichstag, the 19th century monster building that is again the German parliament, and the modern buildings, with lots of glass (and again, ongoing construction) that are part of the government complex there. The Tiergarten, the big city park that used to be the hunting grounds of the Prussian King, follows right after, and we walked to through it to yet another palace, Bellevue, which was the home of some Prussian princess or other in the 18th century and became the residence for German presidents–but apparently some sensible person along the way decided that it was really ridiculous for an actual residence. So in the 2000s it became a purely official building, and the presidents live in a villa somewhere else. We made our way to the central plaza of the park, where the hideous golden statue of Victory is surrounded by the generals who won the Franco-Prussian War and made the kingdom of Prussia into the German empire. What was surprising is that as we walked away to find the nearby subway station, we very quickly got into what was clearly a somewhat scuzzy area; the subway station (Hansaplatz) would have struck me as utterly seedy and nasty with its graffiti (and police presence, although that was probably just because of the impending Europa cup soccer game), if it hadn’t turned out that the station has the Grips Theater in it. That was exciting for me–this is a children’s theater with a leftist, feminist, anti-authoritarian mission that was started in the late 1960s, and my parents would have taken me and my sister to a show there when we were in Berlin for a weekend holiday, in the summer of my fourth grade (1974?). I had completely forgotten about this part of our Berlin trip, but earlier today, on the flea market, I saw a book with a Grips Theater retrospective, so I had figured out which show we’d seen (I DID remember the set, because we kids were allowed to climb around in it during the intermission), and I had even seen that the theater was at Hansaplatz. So when I saw the box office and the Grips symbol, a lot of stuff came back! We used to have records with some of the plays and the songs that came with them, which were always very sassy and encouraged kids to be disobedient and to think on their feet. I remember multiple songs from the albums, even though I do not know whether any of them came from the play I saw.
After all that, the subway station turned out to be unhelpful, because no subway went to central station from there, so we walked the extra 500 meters to the next elevated commuter train. We’d done a lot of walking by then and really didn’t walk the half-a-mile back to the station! We grabbed some sandwiches to take on the trip for dinner (and had some gelato), retrieved our luggage, and got on our train back to Osnabrueck at 6:30 pm. Everything went smoothly until the last half hour of our ride, when we suddenly got delayed by track repairs, so we arrived 30+ minutes late and then had to wait another 20 minutes for a bus, given that it was late Sunday night. So we were very glad to be back at nearly 11:30 pm, and looking forward to hanging out at my mom’s and just NOT travel for a couple of days!