Day 21 – July 17: The Bock Girls in Berlin

We left our apartment this morning in the rain, so glad that the raincoats and umbrellas we’ve been carrying around for three weeks were finally being put to use!  I discovered on Facebook that Katie Clark and her girls (South Pas friends) were in Berlin and we’d be overlapping for one day.  We made a plan to meet at noon at the Brandenburg Gate for lunch.  That gave us a little bit of time to get oriented to the city and figure out how to get around.  We stopped for a quick baked good at a delicious bakery in our neighborhood and navigated the U-bahn and S-bahn systems to get to our meeting point.

 

It was super fun to catch up with all the girls and hear what everyone is up to – they also had their former German exchange student Jenny with them - over our Italian lunch.  We decided to tag along with them to their next destination - a big flea market, which seem to be very much a part of the Berlin experience.  To be honest, I was happy just to follow Katie on and off subways and trams so have no idea exactly which flea market we went to.  We were entertained by street performers and poked through stalls of clothing, art, bags, and little trinkets for about an hour.

From there, Katie really wanted to go to the DDR museum.  It was still a little drizzly so we decided to continue on with them (instead of our planned audio walking tour).  Except for being almost unbearably hot inside, the DDR museum was a great follow-up to our conversation on the train yesterday with the couple who had lived in the DDR (GDR).  Our conversation with them started at the mention of the cars so it was fun to see the cars in the DDR exhibit. 

You had to wait sometimes 16 years to get a car that hadn’t changed its design in over 25 years and was completely unreliable and for which they had no parts to repair.  If you ever needed to get it repaired, you were expected to bring in the parts with you (that you somehow scrounged up).  The biggest unexpected part to me was that East Germans were often nudists on the beach!!  I was a little shocked by the full graphic photos of people sunbathing, swimming, and playing tennis in the buff.  It was an expression of freedom that was otherwise hard to come by. And the East Germans looked pretty good!

We walked together back to the big Alexanderplatz and headed our separate ways.  Katie and family were off to pack as this was their last day.  By this time the rain had stopped, and I felt pretty determined to do our audio walking tour of the city though it was getting pretty late.  It was 6:30 pm by the time we got to the start of the 2-3 hour walk – the Reichstag building. 

Memorial to  the 96 Reichstag members who opposed Hilter
and were some of his first victims

To give ourselves some necessary sustenance, we first stopped in the little café outside and Julia and I split a piece of cake and Rachel had an interesting KitKat ice cream cone.  Feeling more ready, we started the walking tour by learning about the history of the Reichstag building before heading down through the Brandenburg Gate and by the Michael Jackson baby balcony hotel to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (the name a big deal in that it admits a crime was committed).

Memorial to people killed trying to escape East Germany

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

On the train Professor Marcus said he thought the memorial had failed in that it was too abstract and didn’t really capture the magnitude of the crime.  I liked the memorial but agree with what he was saying. Walking into the Pinkas Synogague in Prague you totally are hit by the personal nature of the crimes – and there it is only a small, small fraction of it all. To read all the victims’ names at this memorial would take over six years! We were just 5 minutes too late to be admitted to the Information Center there.  We walked a block away to the site of Hilter’s bunker, where there is nothing but a sign indicating it.  It is hard to balance wanting to inform without celebrating him.  We walked back to the big Unter den Linden street and went underground to hear about how the underground used to be allowed to run through East Berlin but not stop.  So the stations still existed but were guarded so that no one could get on or off – the trains just passed through.  Days after the wall came down, the stations were back open so they still look very much as they did before the war.  As we were down in a station and getting tired, we decided to pause the tour for the night and head back to our place for an early night. 

When we finally got to our stop, Nollendorfplatz, we entered right into the middle of the Lesbian and Gay City Festival – streets full of live music, dancing, information stalls, food, drink, lots of leather.  A big party.  We seem to have hit Pride festivals in every city we've been in this summer, though Berlin's big event is next weekend.  We picked up some food with the intention of getting back to our apartment in time to watch a movie, but by the time our various food elements came together we were so tired, we ate on the floor, watched some John Oliver clips and fell sound asleep.