We woke up and had breakfast at the hostel before heading out for our bike tour threw Berlin. We headed due south to Alexanderplatz, the sort of unofficial city center for Soviet East Berlin. Although the administrative things were closer to the East/West division, Alexanderplatz is really where the Communist architecture and such is most apparent. We did our bike tour through the Fat Tire Bike Company that my roommate Lauren works for in Paris. We got these big, goofy looking bikes and started heading south from Alexanderplatz. Our first stop was Marx-Engelsplatz, a big open area dedicated to founders of Communism Marx and Engel that the Soviets built in an East versus West city beautification program.
We got a kick out of taking pictures with Marx and Engel highlighting our Ray Bans sunglasses, Burberry polos, and other designer items. We then headed across the Spree (the river that runs through Berlin) onto Museum Island. This place was interesting because it features – in addition to Berlin’s most famous museums – a massive open lawn where the Prussian royal palace for central Berlin used to be. However, it was so devastated after World War 2 that the Soviets decided to tear it down since it represented the old aristocracy that Communism despised so much. In its place they built a massive concrete cube that was a big civic union flush with restaurants and housing. When Berlin was reunited in 1989, the Western interests didn’t want a massive Communist cube building to be at the heart of reunification, so they used an asbestos problem as justification for ripping the whole thing down. At present, the site is a big empty lawn while the city of Berlin raises funds to rebuild the old Prussian palace from absolute scratch.
We then headed to Bebelsplatz, which is more in the center of East Berlin, and the site of the historic Nazi book burning in 1933. The plaza is bordered by St. Hedwig’s cathedral – for a long time the only Catholic church in Berlin, the law and judicial library, and Humboldt University, where the majority of Germany’s intellectuals – from the brothers Grimm to Einstein – studied. In the middle of the ground of the plaza is a memorial to the book burning, a sheet of glass looking down to a room of empty bookshelves, enough to hold the more than 20,000 books by un-Aryan authors burn that night. Next to the memorial is a plaque with a famous quote by Heinrich Heine from 1820: “Those that would burn books will soon burn people.” Ironically, Heine’s books were probably at the top of the pile since he was both Jewish and a homosexual.
We then rode to the French plaza, home to dual French and German protestant churches and the symphony hall where the Berliner Philharmoniker performs. Here we learned that Hitler saved all the sculpture in this square by having the statues removed shortly after coming to power in 1933. The statues were wrapped up and sunk in the various lakes around Berlin to protect them, and ended up being about the only thing truly original in this square when it was rebuilt. From there we rode to Checkpoint Charlie and checked out of the few remaining segments of the Berlin Wall, which was right next to the former Luftwaffe and later Stasi headquarters. By now we were straddling the former East / West division and so we biked up north through the former “no man’s land” and saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Brandenburg gate, and the Reichstag. We biked through the massive Tiergarten and had lunch in a beer garden there next to the zoo. We then made our way back to Alexanderplatz via the Tiergarten’s main street that Hitler envisioned would be the East-West axis of his new Berlin.
It started to rain on us when we were biking back to Alexanderplatz, so we decided to stay close to home that night and just went down Rosa Luxembourgstrasse for a nice German dinner. I got a Stolzer Heinrich (or “proud Henry”) that was a sausage, potatoes, and sauerkraut dish, and a delicious schoffenhauser hefeweissen brew - certainly enough to put me into a food coma before bed for the second night in a row. I love German food and beer.
We woke up and had breakfast at the hostel before heading out for our bike tour threw Berlin. We headed due south to Alexanderplatz, the sort of unofficial city center for Soviet East Berlin. Although the administrative things were closer to the East/West division, Alexanderplatz is really where the Communist architecture and such is most apparent. We did our bike tour through the Fat Tire Bike Company that my roommate Lauren works for in Paris. We got these big, goofy looking bikes and started heading south from Alexanderplatz. Our first stop was Marx-Engelsplatz, a big open area dedicated to founders of Communism Marx and Engel that the Soviets built in an East versus West city beautification program. 
We got a kick out of taking pictures with Marx and Engel highlighting our Ray Bans sunglasses, Burberry polos, and other designer items. We then headed across the Spree (the river that runs through Berlin) onto Museum Island. This place was interesting because it features – in addition to Berlin’s most famous museums – a massive open lawn where the Prussian royal palace for central Berlin used to be. However, it was so devastated after World War 2 that the Soviets decided to tear it down since it represented the old aristocracy that Communism despised so much. In its place they built a massive concrete cube that was a big civic union flush with restaurants and housing. When Berlin was reunited in 1989, the Western interests didn’t want a massive Communist cube building to be at the heart of reunification, so they used an asbestos problem as justification for ripping the whole thing down. At present, the site is a big empty lawn while the city of Berlin raises funds to rebuild the old Prussian palace from absolute scratch. 
We then headed to Bebelsplatz, which is more in the center of East Berlin, and the site of the historic Nazi book burning in 1933. The plaza is bordered by St. Hedwig’s cathedral – for a long time the only Catholic church in Berlin, the law and judicial library, and Humboldt University, where the majority of Germany’s intellectuals – from the brothers Grimm to Einstein – studied. In the middle of the ground of the plaza is a memorial to the book burning, a sheet of glass looking down to a room of empty bookshelves, enough to hold the more than 20,000 books by un-Aryan authors burn that night. Next to the memorial is a plaque with a famous quote by Heinrich Heine from 1820: “Those that would burn books will soon burn people.” Ironically, Heine’s books were probably at the top of the pile since he was both Jewish and a homosexual.
We then rode to the French plaza, home to dual French and German protestant churches and the symphony hall where the Berliner Philharmoniker performs. Here we learned that Hitler saved all the sculpture in this square by having the statues removed shortly after coming to power in 1933. The statues were wrapped up and sunk in the various lakes around Berlin to protect them, and ended up being about the only thing truly original in this square when it was rebuilt. From there we rode to Checkpoint Charlie and checked out of the few remaining segments of the Berlin Wall, which was right next to the former Luftwaffe and later Stasi headquarters. By now we were straddling the former East / West division and so we biked up north through the former “no man’s land” and saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Brandenburg gate, and the Reichstag. We biked through the massive Tiergarten and had lunch in a beer garden there next to the zoo. We then made our way back to Alexanderplatz via the Tiergarten’s main street that Hitler envisioned would be the East-West axis of his new Berlin. 
It started to rain on us when we were biking back to Alexanderplatz, so we decided to stay close to home that night and just went down Rosa Luxembourgstrasse for a nice German dinner. I got a Stolzer Heinrich (or “proud Henry”) that was a sausage, potatoes, and sauerkraut dish, and a delicious schoffenhauser hefeweissen brew - certainly enough to put me into a food coma before bed for the second night in a row. I love German food and beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment