Berlin 2007

On September 30 I met my friend Anette (pronounced Anetteh) at the Wannsee S-Bahn station, a 40 minute train ride from central Berlin. Wansee is the large lake where the notorious conference was held in 1942, in which Himmler and Eichman helped formulate the "final solution to the Jewish problem," by planning to kill all 11 million Jews in Europe.

We took a bus from Wansee to the jetty and then a ferry to the island.

We saw some interesting animals including a silver fox that walked within 20 feet of us.

After unification in 1989 someone discovered that the Gestapo basement was largely intact under all that dirt. This basement had a notorious reputation in its time because it contained a prison and torture chambers, and people who were sent there rarely came out alive. The federal government had the site partially excavated and turned into a museum named Topographie des Terrors. In approximately a 100 yard walk from beginning to end it photographically depicts the rise and fall of the Nazis and some of the horrors they committed from 1933 to 1945 in chronological order. This is a tiny representation here.

Another reminder to the Germans, and the world -- never again!

Sometimes the allies sent as many as 1000 planes carrying many tons of bombs in a given raid with specific targets but only an approximate ability to hit them. And there were more than 300 air raids on Berlin alone, resulting in "only" 30,000 civilian deaths and massive destruction. The typical air raid would be over in about 8 to 12 minutes (I heard a recording in a museum of an actual raid in 1945, from first siren to the all clear - it lasted eight scary minutes-the noise was deafening) and the bombs simply landed where they scattered. The longest and most massive air raid was on Feb.3, 1945, and it lasted 55 minutes. Houses, churches, hospitals, schools, museums, historical sites were often hit, along with some of the actual targets. Thousands of civilians were killed, along with a few bad guys. Today we call it collateral damage. Such is war.

There are typically two German verbs found on the tablets attached to the churches and other historical buildings here, and those are "zerstorben" and "aufbauen" (which I will designate as Z&A in the fotos): destroyed and rebuilt. The first two churches listed here, Marien Kirche and the Nickolai Kirche were both destroyed. Not completely of course, but severely damaged. They were slowly and eventually rebuilt, using as much as possible the original 13th and 15th century plans and as many as possible original bricks found in the rubble. You can see some different collored bricks in all the rebuilt churches and other buildings. To show the randomness and innacuracy of the bombing, the targeted Gestapo headquarters remained largely intact but the churches in the neighborhood were destroyed. Do you suppose god had anything to do with that?

Some chruches were left essentially as they were found at the end of the war -- basically as a permanent reminder to Germans as to what happens when you start a war. The most salient exsample is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at the major intersection at the Zoo Garden in central Berlin. The clock was repaired and is today accurate, but the church is left as a ruins -- as a clear reminder to all. A new 1970s modern one story avant guarde church with a 6 story modern bell tower was erected adjacent to the ruins. A touch of incongruity.

You will see plastered over bullet holes in buildings that made it through the war, or that were rebuilt, but in some others they left the holes as they were in 1945 - again, as a reminder

Where I live is in the District called Mitte, which means "middle" in German and is in fact in the middle of Berlin. There are some 21 districts in the city with names that reflect the names of the former small towns that were incorporated into Berlin as it expanded over the years, such as Charlottenberg in the west and Kreuzberg in the east.

Across the bridge next to me is the Museuminsel, or Museum Island, which is in fact an island surrounded by the Spree River and its canal and which contains approximately six major museums, the Berlin Cathedral and many other cultural venues. Across from the island, in the early 1200’s, a small trading and fishing village was established on the outer banks of the Spree, and it was called Berlin. Across the river, on the island, was established a sister village called Cologne, and eventually they became the single town of Berlin. Some 600 years later the village became a metropolis of about 4 million people. Today its population is about 3.5 million.

All of Mitte from the Brandenburg Gate east was in the former Soviet zone, and thus was behind the infamous Wall, which came down after 28 years of service to the communist government. It was called by the commies “The anti-fascist wall,” meaning it was meant to keep out those terrible, free and prosperous fascists on the west side who might come in and pollute our values. It certainly was not to keep in the poor saps on the east side who wanted out of the “workers paradise.” Before the wall went up and before the shooting of the easterners who tried to leave, some two and one half million Germans fled from east to west. Such is the way with totalitarian double-speak.

Language note: wherever you see “berg” as part of a German town name it means it was on or near a mountain or a hill, as that is the meaning of the German word. Whenever “burg” is part of the town name, it means the town was associated with a castle, or later a fortified town, as is the meaning of the German word. In the U S we have towns with “burgs” and “bergs” all over the place, nearly none of which has anything to do with the original German meaning of mountain or castle.

After the wall fell in 1989 the re-unification has been slow and painful. The new government left in place most of the drab communist buildings but tore down a couple of monstrosities that were full of asbestos. They also changed back to the former names of many of the streets named by the communists for the usual panoply of Russian heroes, but left the name of a major boulevard as Karl-Marx-Allee, and left intact a small park called Marx-Engels-Forum at the east end of Mitte, and also left the bronze statues of the two early communist philosophers in the middle of the park. But after all, at least they were German, and famous at that.

About 90% of central Berlin was severely damaged or destroyed by allied bombing in both the east and the west of Berlin. I just read that the Mitte, where I live, and which was in the western part of East Berlin, was the most severely damaged part of all Berlin. This was because most Nazi buildings were located here, including the Gestapo, the SS, the Reichschancellery, and Hitler’s living quarters, and also his bunker where he took refuge during the last two weeks of the war and where he committed suicide on 30 April, 1945. I highly recommend the movie called "The Downfall" which depicts (accurately I am told) those last two weeks of the war, including the suicides and surrender. This demonstrates, again, what can happens when people believe anything fanatically deeply, whether it is based on god or some other ideal.

For another example of wanton destruction, there was a famous pre-war commercial area called Potsdamer Platz in the Mitte, which was considered a sort of crossroads of Berlin and consisted of dozens of low rise 18th and 19t century shops, theaters and stone buildings. It was a large and popular area with no military value and it was bombed flat in 1945. Later the communists did nothing with it but simply cleared the rubble and left it largely a barren wasteland. They designated a large swath of it as a “death strip,” and anyone traversing the area would be shot dead by the East German border guards, so they could maintain the purity of their system.

After the wall fell and the new democratic government took over, investment money poured into the place and now it is once again a bustling commercial area, only this time with high rise buildings made of glass and steel. Sony Corporation built a large office tower and a radically interesting building there, and the complex now provides just about anything a good capitalist, or even communist consumer could ever want.

My apartment is in the Hotel Grosser Kurfurst, which sits aside the Spree Canal which connects with the Spree River a block away. It was on the banks of this river that Berlin was settled some 800 years ago, within a few blocks from where I now reside.

The grosser what? You may ask, as I did at first glance.. What could be grosser than a Kurfurst. What the hell is a Kurfurst? In English the word gross, at east to teenagers, means something terrible, or yukky. But in German the word gross means “big or great.” So we have a great something here. A Kurfurst is an elector which means nothing today, but in the 17th and 18th century Germany it was an honor conferred on German princes by the pope, I believe, that gave them a vote for the Holy Roman Emperor. So being a Kurfurst was a big deal in those days.

There were several Kurfursts, or electors. appointed during those centuries but there was only one grosser Kurfurst, and that was Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern who ruled this Brandenburg area from1640 to 1688. He did much for the city of Berlin during his reign by leading it to unprecedented peace and prosperity, and so for that reason he is remembered as the great elector, or the Grosser Kurfurst.

So this hotel is named for the Grosser Kurfurst, the Great Elector, who had his palace on Museum Island just across the canal from here. Now the name makes sense. His equestrian statue promenently adorns the lobby.

The top picture is of the Braandenburg gate in 1945---enlarge by clicking. Everything was destroyed around it.

Then the bottom picture I took 60 years later