Berlin

Berlin, the largest city in Germany  has a difficult history, which it acknowledges through memorials, museums and monuments. It also has a bright future as it continues to embrace a city of two halves creating a cosmopolitan  metropolis of some 3. 45million people. It is a great mix of the old, which is reflected in the restored old buildings and the new, with their stunning new buildings. It was within this great mix we lived in an apartment, situated  in old East Berlin only metres from the wall. The wall is one of the things Berlin continues to acknowledge. We visited the East Side gallery where the wall continues to stand for over a kilometre and is covered in fantastic graffiti art. When the wall fell many East Berliners painted the wall in graffiti to reflect their new found freedom. Painting graffiti had previously been illegal for them. The wall is also acknowledged in many other places by cobblestones that replace the walls foundations. These can be found in  any parts of Berlin, cutting across footpaths and grass showing where the wall once divided this city. I found it interesting that the wall did not cut cleanly through Berlin but wound its way zigzagging across the city with no apparent logic. I also hadn't realised that there were 2 walls separated by a space of many metres which was called no mans land. This no mans land was rigorously patrolled. It was the area where many were shot trying to escape after successfully climbing the East Berlin wall but before they got over the wall on the West Berlin side.
Related to this, we also went to an exhibition about the Stasi - the secret police who operated within East Berlin. The monitoring of people and their movements, and the informers who dobbed in family and neighbours was frightening. As many as 1 in 6people were informers and people never knew who would inform the Stasi. The loss of freedom, the thought control by the state and the disappearance of loved ones without trace was scary. It confirmed what I had already read in Anna Funder's book Stasiland. A book that originally opened my eyes to life in East Berlin. East Berlin was allocated to Russia after WW2 and the rest of the city was divided amongst 3 other countries as reparation . We visited checkpoint Charlie, the American Sector of Berlin and stood by the sentry box that has an enormous picture of an American soldier announcing the fact.
While Berlin is noted for the cold war and the resulting division between Berliners it also was the centre for Hitler and his men to plan and direct W.W.2. We visited the remains of the buildings where Hitler, the Gestapo and SS orchestrated one of the world's terrible wars.  The monuments and museums to this war, including the museum "Terror des Topographies" are very stark and sterile. We have had many debates as to why this is so. Is it the German clinical organised way or is this the level they want to acknowledge what went on in those terrible years. The most haunting museum was the Jewish memorial museum that outlined the massacre of millions of Jews. Images of families annihilated and tragic stories of the terror, pain and fear were thoughfully displayed. I stood next to a Jewish husband and wife. He said his dad's family had all been wiped out in 1941. I stood behind the wife as she loudly sobbed for all that they as a family had lost. To say it was moving, hardly captures the experience. We also went on a "walking tour" of Sauchenhausen, originally a work camp and later a concentration camp. Our tour guide Paul was extremely knowledgeable and held our attention for over three hours as we walked through that desolate place where people were stripped of their clothing, identity and dignity as they arrived, before entering the gates that proclaimed and promised "Arbeit macht frei" - work will set you free. The cruelty, humiliation and torture of innocent people makes you reflect on what your own response would be both as a person on the inside of one of these camps or as one on the outside. We trudged quietly back to the train in the dark and cold, much more aware of what really happened and reflecting on the wide gamut of acts, both courageous and sinister that human beings are capable of.
We also stood under the Brandenburg gates both in the daytime and at night ( when they are wonderfully lit). These gates were once one of the few ways to enter Berlin. They suffered considerable damage in WW2 and were rebuilt in 2000. We walked through some of the extensive Tiergarten, parklands that cover 210 hectares of the city. In this same part of town is the Reichstag (Parliament) but we didn't visit the new glass dome that replaced the original cupola on 1999.  We have it on German authority that you must book 3 days before you want to go and no... there are no exceptions just because you have travelled 20, 000 kms  to see the sights of Berlin and are only in the city for 3 days. We do not change the rules! 
We went to the top of the TV tower at Alexanderplatz ( that is really their sky tower) and saw as far as the eye can see. We went up all 6 floors of KaDeWe, the biggest department store in Europe and ogled the food floor and looked at everything we couldn't afford on the other 5! We got our head around the S bahn and U bahn passing through many times the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Europe's biggest train station, an amazing glass structure with 6 levels of trains lines and shops. We wandered around amazing buildings on Museum island and we finished it all off with a great pub meal at Wilhelm Hoecks which has been around since 1892. The food was plentiful, delicious and cheap and we fell in love with the draught lemonade, made just like draught beer but non alcoholic. Berlin grew on us, challenged us and stirred emotions within us as we stood where the history created was recent enough for us or our parents to have been alive for. JT