Berlin's History (12th September)

We've booked in to do a walking tour and so we meet at 9:45am to head to the meeting spot. Turns out the trains in Berlin (very unusually) are in chaos due to problems with their brakes so the group coming from West Berlin are an hour late. Our tour guide Mike (great name) was born and raised in Wellington, so we are immediately ok with the late start. Mike is awesome he studied 20th century history and decided to move to Europe, where he met his wife who was born and raised in communist East Berlin. His inlaws worked for the East Berlin government and actually helped to build the Berlin wall - crazy!

One of the rulers of Berlin was King Frederick the Great who was loved by all and was a brilliant military mind. When Napoleon took Berlin and passed Frederick's statue he told his troops to bow, because if Frederick was still here none of them would be! Mike's most favourite story was how when he went to battle he wore a bright red jacket so he troops wouldn't know if he was injured and bleeding and would continue to fight the battle (perhaps that is why Hitler wore brown pants!) When he wasn't fighting he invited various different groups of people to live in Berlin - the Lutherans, the catholics and he'd build them their own church to help attract them to the what was known as the 'tolerant city'.

The symbol of Berlin is a bear and just like the elephants there are many different bears around the city that we can take photos of as the tour progresses.

A major part of Berlin's history is the infamous Berlin wall. The wall wasn't initially there in 1945 when Berlin was separated into East and West. So many people could live in East Berlin (where it was cheap and everything was subsidised) and work in West Berlin (where they would earn four times as much). But there were a number of Germans who didn't like communism. So 3.5 million East German's came to East Berlin, walked across the street into West Berlin and then flew out to live in West Germany with democratic policies. Communism needs productive people in order for it to work and while it is great that everyone is equals, human nature is that we want to get ahead in life. The East German authorities needed to stop the flow of people to what was seen as a more prosperous West and in 1961 decided to build a wall. No one was told it was going to happen, instead the the Stazi (German special forces) were woken in the night and told to put up a barbed wire fence around West Berlin, but just inside the East Berlin border. This was the first of fours generations of wall. The final was reinforced concrete with a curved concrete sewerage pipe on the top. Previously there had been bared wire, but escapees were using it to get over, so the pipe was slippery and much harder to cross and the reinforcing stopped cars and trucks driving through it. There were actually two walls with at least 50m if not 150m between the two. The gap was called the death strip as rumours were spread that the gap was filled with bombs, dogs, trip wires, and all things that would kill you - in reality these didn't exist. Interestingly, around 25% of escapees through the wall were Stazi guards, who were so close to the border that they took their opportunity for freedom. So there was no fighting in the cold war it was really just a stand off between the Russians and Allies' governing styles, carried out in Berlin and Germany. In 1989 the Iron Curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down. There was a stark contrast between the sides. In West Germany the wall was technicolour with graffiti, whereas on the east side it was perfectly white (remember the death strip stopped it being written on!). Problems still exist today. The wall fell in 1989 and in 1990 Germany was united as one. This meant that people in the East were being employed under Communism were no longer needed because actually you only need two people performing the role, rather than the 10 that were there. Unemployment sky rocketed (in some places it is still up at 50%) and the East side were poorer than the West. To compensate the West are charged a tax to help fund the benefit for the old East and this is still charged at present. The unification happened almost too quickly and the Germans are working through the issues today.

We go to Checkpoint Charlie which has heaps of information on the walls around the area as to what went on. It's the most famous checkpoint as presidents, diplomats and movie stars would fly into West Berlin (via the agreed fly zone with the Russians over East Germany) and then if they had to go to East Berlin, they would pass through the checkpoint. There was a cafe on the West side which wasn't really used as a cafe, rather it was full of American and English spies who would watch and document what the Russians were doing.

Another big part of Berlin and Germany's past was World War II. The Germans don't want the atrocities to happen again and so they have a massive education program of their people so that the next generations understand. You have to visit a concentration camp by the time you are 18 (in fact sometimes they are taken three different times). Additionally it is hard for Germans to be proud of being German. For example, the last FIFA world cup, the first two games they did not fly the German flags at all, despite their team playing well. However in the 3rd and 4th games the flags were everywhere as German's were proud of their team. As soon as the World Cup was over, the flags were put away again. As proud Kiwis and Australians we hope that the German's can be proud of their good achievements in the near future. So the tour takes us to Hitler's underground protective bunker, where he lived for the last four months of his life because he was so paranoid. After the war they tried to blow it up a number of times including in the 1980's. However no amount of explosives could destroy the 4 metre thick concrete roof, let alone walls and floor. As such it has been filled with concrete and there is a sign above the ground. There is controversy about this recent sign because German's don't want it to become a shrine to Hitler or a place for his supporters to gather. They don't want to make it into a museum either because that would make him a martyr.

The tour finishes at the Brandeburg Gate, which was built in 1700's as part of the original town walls. It's an amazing gate which has seen a lot of action over it's time - from Napoleon taking the quadrigula statue off the top to Paris, to the bombs and pock marks from gunfire. It's a very cool structure though.

We head back to the Jewish memorial (which we walked through on our tour) in order to see the museum below. The memorial has 2071 stones of various heights. The ground between the stones undulates, so at times it is hard to see the sun. The memorial was designed with no real symbolism or meaning, rather the designer wanted each and every person to determine what it meant to them. Perhaps the different sized stones represent the ages, the undulation of the ground the constant unknown that the Jews faced and the grey colour the way their life was at that time. Either way we think it is pretty cool, but get annoyed when people stand on the stones as for some reason we think it's disrespectful. Under this memorial is a museum telling the story of the Jewish Europeans who were murdered and persecuted during WWII.

The museum is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. Couples and groups wander around separately digesting the information. It's horrific and the numbers hit us as to the scale of the exercise. 3.2 million Polish Jews were murdered. Auswich exterminated 20,000 people PER DAY. There were 2,000 concentration camps set up all over Europe. However not everyone died in the gas chambers, the Nazi's had a plan to starve everyone and therefore many people died from starvation.

During the tour, Mike had mentioned that there are other memorials for other groups of civilians exterminated by the Nazis (eg homosexuals, invalids, gypsies) because it is worth remembering that around 4 million non Jews were also eradicated -including Poles for just being Polish. The museum was well thought out and it was great for us to understand a massive part of history and something that is so recent. Grandad Tagg served in the Australian army in WWII so it isn't that long ago.

Afterwards it was time to do something completely different and so we took to getting high again. This time it's the Reichstag - Germany's parliament building. When Berlin became the capital again (after 1987) they modified the Reichstag building by putting a glass dome on the top. German's are proud of their democracy and as such you can see from the dome, down into the debating chamber or you can go down to the visitors area of the chamber at any time. Given their past, we can understand why they value such an open form of politics. The view of the city from the dome is awesome and they've even incorporated an audio guide to point out significant landmarks as we walk up. When building the dome they also took the time to make it energy efficient. It captures all the sunlight in summer and channels it via mirrors into the ground. There it stays until winter when the energy is used for 80% of the buildings heating. Pretty cool stuff!

Tonight is also awesome because we've booked in to do the pub crawl. It starts at 8:00pm in our hostel reception. We get a free beer (Becks Gold) when we start, so that means Mike gets two! The rest of the night consists of drinking with others on the pub crawl (most of whom are from Busabout) at five various bars. It was quite good, but unfortunately the last bar/club was terrible. Not to worry we have a big day tomorrow so at 2am we called it a night.