Travel Log #11

July 15, 2009
Today, I am twenty-two years old and riding on the U-Bahn, Berlin's subway system. I have concluded that all faces on subways are the same: bored, worn out, and uncaring. I take the U-Bahn from Heinrich-Heine to Rosenthaler Platz on the U8 line, get off and walk up the stairs to the tram and take the M8 to Zinnowitzerstrasse, which deposits all of us right across the street from the building. This location is temporary and only until next week, because the Berlin semester is still in session until Friday.

When the administration said that LBSU would be intense, I believed them. However, even the professor has expressed concern regarding our schedule which is a little insane, especially considering the fact that we still need time to eat, sleep, and do the reading. The schedule is, despite its insanity, very good. We have a full regimen, no doubt: three hours of class in the morning, an hour or so for lunch, then a full afternoon of tours and occasionally films at night. The reading is anywhere from fifty to two-hundred pages per night. It is, in general, absolutely fascinating, particularly when we start discussing it in class. I do keep running into the sedative effect, though, when reading about rather mediocre historical figures. But for now, I will back up and give you my impressions of the details, all the while learning bits of German here and there and in doing so, becoming more aware of the back of my mouth, where this language tends to hang out.

On Monday, class was another basic orientation, with Anna, Mareike, and Atina Grossman (who is VERY excited). Eventually, we got started with the basic blah blah "welcome to my class" schtick. Afterwards, we had a forty-five minutes lunch break and then went on our first tour of Berlin. I, of course, forgot about my camera, so I only have pictures of on e thing. We were on a bus for most of the time anyway, and I didn't have a window seat.

The tour guide's name was Daniel, of Bavarian birth, but who now lives in Berlin because it is "cheap, convenient, and exciting". "I'm wearing this funny suit," he said, "because I just came from a meeting with some important people and then I spilled tuna all over it and ruined it."

July 16, 2009
We began the tour on the same same street as our building, Invalidenstrasse, in East Berlin. "And how do you know we're in East Berlin? There's always an easy way to tell." Tram tracks. Apparently there used to be trams in West Berlin, but because of stupid political petty gripe during the Cold War, they were removed. The GDR kept the tram tracks, so West Berlin had to get rid of their because tram tracks would make them so evil communist. Obviously. Now, there are plans in place for rebuilding the tram tracks and lines in the West. But (I'm guessing), that will be a long time coming because Germans argue over things like this more than Jews do.

We drive over the tracks and up the one natural hill in the city. "This is the only natural elevation in the city. All the other hills are artificial and built on top of rubble from the war," Daniel tells us. The bus drives onto Kastanienalle, "Casting Alley," a very trendy neighborhood that looks like the 1970s now but that was an abandoned part of city (at least by mainstreamers). This neighborhood was populated by, generally, youth rebelling against the GDR's communist system and had the highest density of immigrants. These immigrants, thought, typically came from the West, and was therefore devoid of Arabs and other Easterners (unlike the other side of the city). Then, it had a very large amounts of breweries; now, they have, for the most part, turned into pubs. One of the largest, the Kultur Brauerei, has a big bike rental inside. This area has been "regentrified" since the fall of the Berlin Wall and has transformed from one of the poorest and cheapest areas to the richest.

This tour lasted hours, so I will try to give you the highlights: the T.V. Tower, in Mittel, the second highest structure; the architect accidentally designed it so that a cross appears when the sun hits it. So they had a big cross dubbed the "Revenge of the Pope" by the people in a communist city. The end result? An arrested architect.

Karl Marx Allee: a whole street dedicated to communism; the "Soviet Wedding Cake". Basically, a whole street of fancy palace-looking buildings that are apartments built by workers in their free time. Lotteries were held to decide which workers would live there. At the end of the street there used to be the famous statue of Stalin, because the entire street was given to him as a birthday present. After he died, the people loved him so much, they tore him down. Being experts in industrial practicality, they melted him down and reformed his pieces into the animal sculptures at the East Berlin Zoo. Later, it was revealed that the man responsible for melting him kept one of his ears and half of his very large mustache, which apparently looks like a big croissant. Post-1989, he revealed these little remnants and they are now on display to the public.

July 17, 2009
So, yes. I have no time to write. So much reading, hours of tours, class, hardly time for any of us to eat or sleep, but we're still having fun. Anyhow, on with it!

We drove up to what is left of the Berlin Wall in the East. It's all painted now, at the behest of a gallerist from Scotland who invited a lot of different artists to paint it, as he believed the wall, which was originally constructed specifically to obstruct the dirty capitalists from entering into East Berlin and the GDR, was a work of art. Now, it is the city's main attraction. Well, one point to the communists: those "filthy capitalists" got hold of all the pieces of the wall that were torn down and sold them for profit.

Finally, we crossed the river and were in West Berlin, where there are willows everywhere. This is an immigrant neighborhood, filled with Turks, who were initially brought in temporarily to build the economy. They ended up staying. Also, for whatever reason in this neighborhood, police are absolutely forbidden. The people hate them and riot against them every May 1.

One thing about Berlin, that I will talk about more in another log, that greatly interests me is its guilt complex. You can't go anywhere here without being constantly reminded of the war and the Nazi era. Bear in mind that we are at least three generations removed. Yet the endless fights over so-called "politically contaminated" buildings persist and stand in a deadlock--these "politically contaminated" buildings were built and used by multiple generations of government: the Empire, the Nazi regime, or the GDR. Now, many of them stand empty as people fight over whether to reinhabit them, or knock them down and rebuild (we wouldn't want to sit at the same desk as Eichmann, would we?? or at the same window). But that isn't very economical: rip down a building because of people who used to walk its halls and build a new one? Too expensive. One example: the previous Prussian city capitol building, which was later turned into a GDR government building was demolished and is now just a big lawn with people picnicking on it. Perhaps this is an erasure of history, but it may be a good idea to have an empty space in the midst of so many reminders. This is the "Empty Heart of Berlin" and there is, very much so, an absence much greater than a building here.

On this tour, the one thing that stands out in my memory most is the Square of Absence. This memorial is located in the square designed by the kaiser and placed directly across from Humboldt University (where I am attending classes). "Step on it," Daniel encouraged us. "What do you see?" Truthfully? At first, absolutely nothing. "That's right." I saw nothing but an eerie nothingness, a darkness that seemed tangible, like the plague, and my reflection hanging upside down, with the sky beneath my feet. "I see bookshelves," Rachel, who was standing next to me said. "What? Where?" And she pointed down into the square. Then, from a slightly different angle, I could see rows and rows of empty bookshelves lining the walls of an empty room beneath the ground. "Yes," Daniel said. "This is the point. To see nothingness, to hang into it, upside down, and to stand up, tall and solid on this side, in the air. The famous Nazi book burnings by the students took place on this spot. Over there," he turned and pointed to a part of the plaza on the other side, "is the famous, eerily prophetic quote written by Heinrich Heine: 'Wherever you burn books, you will burn human beings.' He would have been devastated to learn that his beloved Germany and countrymen were to turn this statement into a prophecy. He was talking, of course, not about the road down which he thought Germany was going, but about the past and the Russian pogroms." On the Square of Absence itself, four people by four can stand on it and fill up the space. Stand on it with fifteen other people and maybe you get a slight idea of the worth of a human being in a body. Below, bookshelves enough to hold 20,000 volumes stand empty, and commemorate the ideas that were incinerated on this spot. So we stand, four-by-four, learning the worth of a body and the weight of its ideas, all the while feeling dizzy, because nothingness holds us up from below and infinity presses down on us from above.

Next, we saw the Brandenburg Gate, at its axis of history and geography, with the four Allied embassies surrounding it: The United States, the British, the Russian, and the French. We walked through an art museum and a bank to get to one more memorial: the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. The meaning of it is open for interpretation, but people picnic on it and jump from block to block (called steles). It integrates the present with the past: life goes on and always will. This is my interpretation, at least. Its was designed by Eisermann, who didn't want it to have any imposed meaning, or center, or edge. So, you never know if you're in the middle or at the edge or beyond the memorial when you're near it. This was part of the controversy of its dedication. Another is that it is sometimes "too beautiful" of a piece to be a memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe; and another is "why just Jews?" so there are single blocks that have been erected on the outskirts of the main memorial for homosexuals and other groups. There are 2, 711 blocks, or steles. The number is not significant. It is merely the number that fit on the plot allowed for the memorial. So, the memorial simply is, at the very center of the city. It exists as a reminder, as a playground, and as a point of unrest.

I could go on but those were the high points, other than the Adlon Hotel, where the late Michael Jackson dangled his baby out a window a few years ago. Berlin is an emotional enigma for me, and the conversations I have been having with the other students, along with the material from class, are at once putting this place into perspective for me, and confusing me even more. But that is for another discussion, along with the other tours and my impressions of those. I am all written out for now.