All Of The History

Berlin, day two, June 18th.

Again we didn't rush in the morning. I think illness aside we were both starting to get pretty tired by this point in the trip.

Today we took the underground a bit further south and made a beeline to the main thing we wanted to see: The Jewish Museum, which by all accounts came highly recommended. To start with was an architecturally interesting gallery/building, with three 'axis' dedicated to three fates of the Jews during WWII - holocaust, exile, or continuity.

The Garden of Exile was very similar to the Holocaust memorial we saw yesterday. The sloped ground with leaning concrete pillars that appeared to be upright did make you quite unsteady on your feet - it was effective at creating a sensation of disorientation and instability. 

The Garden of Exile, from the top. When you were in amongst the columns it was in no way apparent that out of the tops grew a bunch of trees...

The holocaust room was at the end of a wing of memorabilia and anecdotes from murdered Jews. You entered through a heavy door into a dark and cold room with immensely high walls. At the top a tiny amount of sunlight peeked in. There was also a ladder attached to a wall, reaching to the top, but it was out of reach.

The axis of continuity led to the main part of the museum, where the history of the Jews in Germany from ancient times up to the present was covered in a serious of exhibitions.

After yesterday's grim reflection on the holocaust, it was really good to go back and learn more about the history of the Jewish people in Europe and particularly Germany, and understand where the various discriminations came from. Seems as though up until about the 1800s discrimination was religiously driven, but then thing started to get a bit better and some of the laws that discriminated against Jews were being abolished.

But almost immediately after the law changes Hitler came to power and reversed it all, and it seems his version of discrimination was simply racially driven.

Learning about more about traditional Jewish practices and how this has been translated into modern times was interesting also. There was a cooky little section with monty-python like cartoons describing various beliefs and practices amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims, narrated in a refreshingly tolerant way. 

"Monty python" cartoon displays explaining various religions in a surprisingly straightforward a non-judgemental way, and also fairly humorous!

Curiously, a Kippah with the cast of Friends pictured on it...

Awesome.

Explaining about Jewish emigration (specifically to NZ at this moment) to avoid persecution.

The museum had one section on the Holocaust, spending as much time on it as it had every other 'chapter' in the history of German Jews. What was more interesting (because it was new information for us) was the section on what happened in Germany after the war: the trials of those involved at Auszwich, and what became of the Jews that were left from then til now. Since most of the German Jews left Germany or were killed, apparently most the othe Jews living in Germany now are actually immigrants from Russia. Racial tension was demonstrated to still be an issue at times – there was a short movie about controversy over a play that wanted to perform in Berlin (I think in the 80s or 90s?) about a Jew, who post-war gains power and then takes his revenge on the Germans by ruining the town. The local Jewish population viewed the play as dangerously antisemetic and performed a 'sit-in' on the stage on opening night, in which they engaged the audience and the director in a debate that went on for hours. In the end the play wasn't staged, but the director who was interviewed maintained that if they had just let the play be performed they would have seen that it wasn't what they thought. It was interesting hearing the different views.

Once we were finished with the museum we had lunch in the cafe to save us bumbling around looking for another food place nearby. Also the cafe was in this lovely glassed in courtyard and they had cheesecake!

 

The two buildings of the Jewish museum - the snazzy one to the right is where all the fancy architecture stuff is and the old museum to the left is where the main stuff is. It is architecturally deliberate that above ground there is no visible connection between the two buildings.

Then we walked up the road to 'Checkpoint Charlie', one of the main throughfares between East and West Berlin during the days of the berlin wall and divided Germany. It's a bit of a cheesey tourist spot these days but it did have a series of panels in the open-air dedicated to explaining in brief the journey from immediately post world war two, through the cold war, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany. It occurred to me while I was there that my parents would have been here when the Berlin wall was still up and everything still separate – so Mum and Dad it will be interesting to swap stories of the then and now when I get back!

Nearby, some more sections of the Berlin wall sported pop art graffitti...

To round off the spirit of the last day and a half we then headed over to the 'Topographie Des Terrors', the ruined site of some of the main Nazi offices in Berlin, complete with the longest stretch of still intact Berlin Wall, and a museum about the rise of Nazi power and the regime itself. 

The bonus is when you take other people's photos for them when they ask - they then take one of you! Always so nice to have some pics with both of us in the shot!!

Another interesting perspective on Germany and WWII – by no means sympathising with the Nazis it gave an account of how Hitler and the Nazis claimed more and more power and began preparing for war and the extermination of undesired groups of people. It again was chilling reading but also an important lesson in how a fairly 'ordinary' country, democratic, on it's way creating equality for all it's people (such as recent law changes allowing Jews more rights and freedoms), could turn into such a monstrous machine of war, death and hatred in just few short years.

By the time we had finished there it was after 6pm. I'd had a thought that we might go a bit further on the walking tour to finish off the day. However as we headed towards a square I wanted to see, dark clouds appeared from nowhere (it had been sunny and 30 degrees all day) and thunder grumbled disconcertingly. I remembered this hot, stormy feel from that day in Avignon (the one with the scary motorway crossing and the homeless guy running for the bridge) and knew it was about to absolutely bucket down. We were both jacket and umbrella-less as I had seen the weather forecast (sunny and high temperatures) and reassured Greg that today of all days it was not going to rain. So I was rather wrong. As the first drops fell we dived into a conveniently located underground station and headed for home base. This would have been an excellent save except then we arrived at the stop near the hostel the rain was in full swing by this time. The run from the underground to the hostel saw us totally drenched....

Back at the hostel we dried off and took a bit of time to relax after another heavy day contemplating Jewish discrimination, Nazi rule, WWII, and the cold war.

I did some research about dinner, and as about an hour later the rain had totally cleared up and it was sunny again, I managed to convince Greg that it would be a good idea to walk 1.5kms to find this place that was recommended in the guidebook. Well, to our hungry tummies it felt more like 3kms and it didn't help that we walked straight passed it twice before we found it, but eventually we were there! 

You have no idea how good this tasted.

It turned out to be more like a pub but it had a good atmosphere, good prices, and the food was delicious! Greg and I both got the homemade ravioli which was super yummy. Greg enjoyed a non-alcoholic beer since he thought he should stay away from alcohol til he was healthy again. Non-alcoholic beer is pretty much on the menu everywhere in Germany. 

Ceramic old style oven at the pub.

Greg declared he didn't care if it meant going in the wrong direction and then changing lines, he wanted to take the underground back to base rather than walk. So we did.

And that was day two in Berlin!