Introduction to Berlin

It was about seven degrees this morning when we decided to go out on the New Berlin walking tour. Our tour guide for today was Rachel – she was an American who has been living in Berlin for the past 4 years – she was both very knowledgeable about Berlin and presented our tour in a fun and high energy way. I thought the tour was excellent. We covered the main sites and the commentary was of a consistently high standard. It was funny, entertaining, full of facts and objective.

Our tour began at The famous Brandenburg Gate, the only remaining gate from Berlin’s 18th-century town wall. It’s topped by the Quadriga, a sculpture of a winged goddess of Victory steering a horse-drawn chariot and then moved on to the following sights:

Hotel Adlon - (Unter den Linden 77), a faithful reconstruction of the 1907 original and again the preferred shelter of stars, royals, and heads of state. Yes, this is the same hotel that Michael Jackson dangled his son from the balcony.

Reichstag - since 1999 home of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. the futuristic glass dome, added by British star architect Lord Norman Foster, as part of the building’s recent overhaul.

Just south of here on Ebertstrasse is the Holocaust Memorial, a football-field-size labyrinth of gray concrete blocks that is as accessible as it is disorienting. A free subterranean exhibit hauntingly documents the suffering of Jews during the Nazi period.

This was then followed by a visit to the former site of Hitler's Bunker - The Führerbunker - which is no longer in existence as they do not want groups of neo-nazi's or extremists filling the area, however last year the area was covered in rose petals to remember his death.

We then continued our walk onto The Berlin Wall. We passed some great graffiti and old buildings shot up with ammo and some pipes which drained water from a construction site because Berlin is on a swamp.

Once at the Berlin Wall I thought was going to be a lot smaller, however the remnants are approximately 50 to 100 metres. However, very subtly the wall is still there, they have two rows of small cobblestones on the roads to outline where it originally was.

From here we moved onto relive cold war history at Checkpoint Charlie and stopped for half an hour for some lunch at Aroma Cafe.

We then headed straight to lovely Gendarmenmarkt - considered Berlin’s most beautiful square and accented by two churches, and the Konzerthaus concert hall.

After this came Bebelplatz. This site is best known for the book burning ceremony held on May 10, 1933 by members of the S.A. ("brownshirts") and Nazi youth groups, on the instigation of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis burned around 20,000 books, including works by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and many other authors. Within this square there is a glass memorial giving a view of empty bookcases, which commemorates the book burning. Furthermore, a line of Heinrich Heine is engraved, stating "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" (in English: "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people"). Students at Humboldt University hold a book sale in the square every year to mark the anniversary.

Then onto Neue Wache (The Guard House). Originally built as a guardhouse for the troops of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the building has been used as a war memorial since 1931. Inside there is an enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz's sculpture Mother with her Dead Son. This sculpture is directly under the oculus, and so is exposed to the rain, snow and cold of the Berlin climate, symbolising the suffering of civilians during World War II.

Our last site of the day was the Berlin Cathedral and Altes Museum also known as Museum Island. The tour delved deeply into the history of Berlin and too much to write about all in one post. If you are ever in Berlin, I highly recommend in taking a free walking tour as we had such a great time and even met a girl from Prague who is going to meet up with us next week when we arrive.