I probably should have thought of more exciting titles for each day of our Berlin trip - but it already taxes my brain power to come up with the posts themselves so I can't spread myself too thin!
Day three of our trip to Berlin was fascinating, thought provoking, moving and COLD! We had moved past the kind of cold weather that brings snow and pretty winter pictures, to the kind of weather that requires a full snow suit and the kind of ski mask that makes you look like a bank robber. So what better day for a walking tour, eh? We thought so too!
It's impossible to go to Berlin and not try to learn as much as possible about the incredible amount of history the city contains. So, on Day Three, we took a walking tour with Berlin Insider Tours that covered the Cold War history of Berlin. It was great - the tour guide was a history major, really fascinated by the subject matter himself and gave a fantastic tour. If you go to Berlin - I highly recommend this tour company.
It would be impossible to cover everything we saw on the tour, but here are a few highlights:
We started out at the Stasi museum. The Stasi of course were the secret police in East Berlin.
The building that houses the museum is an old office building used by the Stasi during communism in East Berlin and is right in the middle of a lot of apartment buildings that were built during that time. The buildings are practical and somewhat cold - I felt that you could really tell when you were in what used to be East Berlin. Our guide did point out to us the building where Katarina Witt lived when she was training for the olympics and also told us that many former stasi agents and former employees of the government of East Berlin still live in the buildings. Weird.
The musum itself is great - but most of the information is in German. They have translations of some of the information, but I think it really helped to have a guide. The exhibitions explain the extent of spying that East Germany committed on its own citizens in order to identify anyone who might be working against the state, attempting to leave or just holding ideas and beliefs that were anti communist. I wish I could list all of the statistics that were provided to us but the most shocking I think was that when you added informers to the actual number of Stasi police there was approximately one stasi agent to every 6 East German citizens. They kept files of the most mundane information on anyone they thought was a threat, and the lamest action - such as telling a joke that derided communism or East Germany - could potentially get you thrown in prison. It's no wonder people were afraid to take action against the government - in any meeting you held there were bound to be one or two Stasi agents or their informers. The museum also demonstrated that this type of government, this communism was never something that the German people wanted. It was something forced on them in the most crushing way until the fall of the Wall in 1989.
There are a few different locations in Berlin where segments of the Wall still remain although apparently so many people were chipping pieces of the Wall for mementos following it coming down, that some segments had to be protected as remembrances of a divided Berlin. We went to an area where the wall has been fairly well preserved to see what it would have looked like at the time:
Of course there was not just one wall, but two that ran parallel to each other. If you were trying to escape and got over one wall there was an area between that wall and the second wall which would get you into West Berlin/Germany that was called the death strip. This area varied in size depending on the location but pretty much everywhere in the Death Strip you would find a completely barren area with no where to hide that was covered in sand or fine gravel that made it harder to run and easier to see footprints. The strip was set with trip wires and there were guards in towers in these areas who had orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to get over the second wall.
You can kind of see what this death strip would have looked like in this photo - it's looking from the first wall, through the death strip toward the second wall. The distance is not that far between the two walls, but with all the obstacles it would have seemed impossible:
There was so much we learned on this tour that really shocked me and moved me. I think having lived through this time in history it resonates with me more than some of the history relating to the Nazi era in Germany. But as a political science major in college when the wall came down and the cold war came to an end I remember feeling as if the world was truly changing. I watched these events happen in real time on t.v. and so to some extent it all feels fairly recent. One of the stories that the guide told us that affected me most was that of a woman in an apartment building who tried to escape through the window of her apartment the day that the wall went up in Berlin. Prior to 1961 while East Berlin was a communist sector, people could move freely between the borders - there was no wall. And understandably, while the borders were open, thousands of people left and moved to West Germany. In 1961, the wall went up overnight and part of the border between east and west berlin went right through an apartment building. People woke up to their windows being bricked up and back doors which led into West Germany being blocked. This woman, one of several ran upstairs to attempt to jump out the windows that had not yet been bricked up, into West Germany. As she climbed out the window she was grabbed by East German police who began to drag her back in. People below on the West German side pulled on her legs to try and get her out of the building. Finally she fell and in the melee no one caught her and she broke her leg. On the way to the hospital she had a heart attack and died. She was the first victim of the Berlin Wall. This museum, across from the area of the wall where we were visiting has actual footage of this woman attempting to flee from the apartment building:
So it was a pretty heavy day as far as sight seeing goes, but our guide told us that that night the museums on museum island were free after 6:00 pm, so we decided to go look at some pretty art. We grabbed lunch at a great Indian restaurant near by and then made tracks for Museum Island. I wanted to check out the Impressionist art at the Alte Nationalgalerie so we headed over there. The museum itself is huge and so beautiful and they have a great collection of Cezanne, Rodin, Monet and Manet. But I actually came away really impressed with the paintings in the German Realism section of the museum - I think it was my favorite.
After the museum we started walking back toward the hotel but found this awesome skating rink, outdoor cafe thing going on where you could sit in tents, drink Gluwein (hot mulled wine), eat bratwurst and enjoy a perfect winter evening. And that's just what we did:
I look like I've had a little too much Gluwein in this photo but I swear it was just the flash:
The walk back to the hotel was pretty and festive and the several cups of Gluwein meant we slept pretty soundly and were refreshed for our next day of adventure in Berlin. Germany rocks:
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