Dresden & Berlin, Germany

En route to Berlin we stopped for lunch in Dresden, a city which was bombed off the map during the Second World War. Sadly, the bombings carried out killed mostly women and children, many of whom were refugees. The ancient part of the city has been rebuilt, and still emanates Gothic charm.

Court and I had very different feelings about Berlin. For all intents and purposes, it has been reinvented as a fun, modern city with lots to see and do. (Great shopping, excellent restaurants, crazy German discotheques...the whole nine yards.) In spite of these things, however, I just couldn't get comfortable. It felt...dark, to me. The whole time we were in Germany I felt unsettled (which I felt sad about because I have met some truly outstanding Germans in my life, and I was excited to visit their country). I've spoken to some other people who have told me Berlin had the same effect on them - next time I'll visit some other cities and hope for the best. :)

Berlin, as I'm sure you all know, has a terrible modern history. Most recently, the Berlin Wall - which still stands in certain points, and which we photographed extensively (see below) - but before that, it was the headquarters of the SS and home to the Führerbunker. 

We wanted to learn as much as possible while in Berlin, so we opted to do a Third Reich walking tour with a fantastic local guide (which turned out to be a very thorough history of not only WWII, but up to the present day). She walked us around the Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate, Brandenburg Tor, and Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (previously mentioned in one of the posts about Mauthausen). The Memorial itself is a massive series of cement tombs set in long rows. The size of the tombs vary, making you feel quite disoriented and isolated when you walk among them.

In the centre of the memorial the tombs are so tall they block everything else out.

Across from the Memorial (on a diagonal) is an nondescript parking lot of loose gravel. Below it, however, are the remnants of the Führerbunker. Talk about getting chills. Our guide told us that while all entrances have been sealed, the bunker still exists because all attempts to blow it up have failed. As she pointed out to us, doesn't that seem odd, given the technology we have at our disposal in this day and age? Someone asked her why it hasn't ever been made into a tourist attraction (whaaaaat?) and she said because the German government is terrified it would become another meeting place for Neo-Nazi youth who still live in Europe.

Not far from the bunker we visited the Topography of Terror museum "[A]t the site where the headquarters of the Secret State Police, the SS and the Reich Security Main Office were located during the “Third Reich”. The building itself no longer stands, but the outdoor exhibit includes plaques which denote where certain offices were located (some the foundation remains). Chilling.

Our last stop on the tour was the famed Checkpoint Charlie (the only civilian path between East and West Berlin during the decades of the wall). You can actually pay a small fee to get a stamp in your passport there (which we elected not to do). Where the guards used to stand there is a large portrait of the "last US solider" to leave the area after the fall of the wall in 1991. Interestingly enough, our guide pointed out that the medals and stripes on the soldiers uniform in the photo make it impossible that he was, in fact, the last one out. (I can't remember exactly how she put it, but it was something about how he would have had to have been in Germany, gone somewhere else to fight - the Gulf War, perhaps? - then returned to Germany just in time to shut down the checkpoint.)

For the rest of the day we explored the city on our own. One of the most significant sites we took in was the famed Bebelplatz, where we gazed down upon the rows and rows of empty bookshelves visible through a skylight-type window. 

This installation is to commemorate the Nazi book burning ceremony of May 10, 1933 in which over 20,000 books were set ablaze. "...Among those works burned were the writings of beloved nineteenth-century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote in his 1820-1821 play Almansor the famous admonition, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen": "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A bronze plaque embedded in the Bebelplatz proclaims this.

I was happy to leave Germany behind as we headed to our next stop: Amsterdam!