Berlin
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2008
1
7
13
Trip End
Jul 31, 2008
Berlin,
Germany
Friday, July 11, 2008
Berlin seems to be mostly under construction. There are streets blocked off here, a series of four lifting cranes crowding a vista there, scaffolds covering entire buildings... every five minutes or so, one walks underneath these scaffolds to negotiate the strasses (streets). It's almost as if there should be a giant apology sign at every intersection: "PARDON OUR MESS!"
We did warm up to the city a bit last night and today though.
Last night, Thursday, we hit the row of five museums on the island where Berlin was first settled that sits on the Spree River. It was proclaimed a UNESCO world heritage site not too long ago. We happened to walk up the stairs to this massive, ornate complex that turned out to be the new Egyptian museum. Coincidently, on Thursday nights from 6pm to 10pm, it is free to the public. We took advantage and saw all kinds of great ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic (post Alexander, mixing Greek, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and any other culture that happened to fall under Alex's boot). We actually saw a copy of Homer's Iliad, the page on the death of Hector, from 230 BC. Pretty neat. There was also a bust of Pericles from the island of Lesbos and one of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt. They're pretty famous sculptures and one would recognize them from history books. It was very cool to stumble upon them on the other side of the world.
The sculptures in Berlin are everywhere (hanging from the sides, tops, and bases of buildings, in the middle of streets) and they are dramatic copper and bronze works that give the impression of great strength and fluid movement. They're truly beautiful and moving. I would say Berlin ranks right with Paris as far as public works of art that create classic, world reknown vistas. We go to Rome in a week and a half, so I'll definitely get back to you on that. Berlin's ranking might fall a bit...
Today we visited the Anne Frank Museum and the Holocaust Memorial. A pretty heavy day in a series of heavy days devoted to this subject of genocide.
The Anne Frank Museum exhibited dozens of pictures covering Anne's childhood from birth to just before she and her family went into hiding. You can see her in the classroom, at the beach, playing with her sister, Margot (there's plenty of pix of Margot as well), and hanging out with her buddies. Anne is portrayed as a very normal, fun-loving child. It sets up the second part of the exhibit which documents the rise of the Nazis and their occupation of Amsterdam. We had seen much of this history in the Anne Frank House and the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam.
The difference in this Anne Frank museum was the multi-media presentations including present day children of Anne's age. They talk about their dreams and aspirations, what they think about war and different cultures. Then, a voice that is supposed to be Anne's comes on and interacts with their points of view. This makes Anne relevant and it was a nice touch at the finish of the exhibits.
The Holocaust museum blew me away. The memorial can be seen on line if you like. I've got about two minutes left on this internet cafe card. Suffice to say that the museum is broken up into several sections and the photographs and videos are brutal and unflinching. The most powerful set of pictures were of entire villages being shot to death in ditches after being made to strip off their clothes.
Ok. going to add to this abit, a couple of days later... Yeh, there were pictures of what I just mentioned and they were raw, like getting hit in the face with a below zero, icy wind. The humiliation, the fear in these pictures... ...you could smell it. There was nothing these people could do against a company of automatic weapons. They were rustic, plain, simple folks, living their lives day to day for generations while events they could not have fully believed were edging total destruction closer and closer. Finally, the trucks pulled up in the dusty village square where the water pump was.
The barking of orders in harsh german... The rifle butts crashing in doors... the wimpering of the women and children and the protective shouts of the village men, who could do nothing, least of all protect...
The villagers were rounded up in trucks and brought to a remote area. Or, up until 1942, they were stuffed into the backs of trucks, and while the trucks were driving, carbon monoxide was pumped into the compartments asphyxiating sixty or seventy peope at a time. Then the trucks backed up to pre-dug ditches. Those natives who dug the ditches were then also shot.
How those hideous days unfolded must have been the stuff of the worst human nightmares...and there were literally hundreds of those days, all over Europe, from 1939 until 1945.
