A Few Days in Berlin

When The Spouse raised the possibility of visiting Berlin in connection with a business conference, I jumped at the chance.  After all, Berlin is currently the Hot City of Europe, famous for its lively arts and music scene and generally convivial lifestyle.  (I didn’t take into account that, conversely, Berlin in January can be a Very Cold City – but one can’t ask too many questions when the trip is being subsidized.)

Aside from knowing that Berlin was the capital of Germany before World War II, resumed that role after reunification in 1990, and is the site of the famous Brandenburg Gate, I had few preconceptions.  So, The Spouse and I set out via Swiss Air one Saturday morning – love those little chocolate bars they hand out.  We arrived at Tegel Airport, located in the former West Berlin.  It was supposed to have been superseded by now by a new airport, but its construction is way behind schedule.  Tegel is deliciously retro;  I read a while ago that its hexagonal shape was designed in the carefree pre-terrorism 1970s, with the idea of minimizing distance between automobile and airplane.  Even now each gate has its own check-in counter, but the idea of stepping out of one’s car or taxi and directly into the plane has been overridden by the need for security areas and lounges for long pre-boarding waits. 

Tegel was an appropriate introduction to our Berlin visit.  However modern it is – and there are building cranes where ever one looks in Berlin – it still seems to be in a bit of a time warp.   

For one thing, despite Tegel’s automobile-centric design, Berlin missed being made over in the service of automobile traffic.  It has an extensive and excellent public transportation system made up of trams, buses, S-Bahns and U-Bahns (mainly underground trains: S-Bahns make more frequent stops).   At Tegel we purchased 7-day passes for the entire system for 28 Euros each (we were only going to be there 5 days, but that was the cheapest rate) and climbed onto a bus to the center of the city.  Unfortunately, our progress from there was complicated by a huge construction project to rebuild an S-Bahn station that effectively cut the line in half, but eventually we made our way to our hotel in the heart of former East Berlin.

I couldn’t be sure, but our hotel – a fine, 4-star conference hotel – seemed to have originally been some kind of Communist-era apartment complex, a sturdy concrete structure forming a maze of hallways and rooms that must have faced interior courtyards.  The façade has been recently resurfaced with something expensive, but the building had the solid, stolid look of Soviet era construction.  Our room looked across Leipziger Strasse to the Bulgarian embassy. 

For our first evening in Berlin I had booked tickets to see a production of Tosca by the Deutsche Oper Berlin, so after settling into the hotel we ventured to the neighborhood of Charlottenburg, in the former West Berlin.  The Spouse and I like classical music of all kinds, but during our stay in Switzerland our experiences have been limited by busy schedules and the fact that live concerts are very expensive.  Prices in Berlin seemed much more reasonable.  Plus, this production featured the fine Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel in the role of Scarpia.

We located the nearest U-Bahn (subway) stop just around the corner from our hotel, and armed with our passes just stepped onto the appropriate train to take us west.  It’s amazing how much more smoothly things go when the system has no turnstiles and other means of restricting access.  Everyone is assumed to have a proper pass; if you are caught without one in the infrequent, random checks you pay a hefty fine.

The Deutsche Oper is one of two major opera houses in Berlin; the other, the Staatsoper, is in the cultural center in the former East Berlin, its 18^th century classical design having been preserved through numerous reconstructions.  The Deutsche Oper, on the other hand, was completely redesigned after it was destroyed in an RAF raid in 1943.  Opening in 1961, the building embodies the austere modernism of that period.  We arrived after dark but the starkness carries over into the interior.  The theater was completely unadorned, faced with a light-colored wood throughout, prompting The Spouse to comment that it reminded him of a very large high school auditorium.  Nonetheless, we had excellent seats and thoroughly enjoyed the performance, despite the fact that the demanding audience was clearly not happy with the work of the tenor playing Cavaradossi.

The schedule for Sunday had long before been set: we were going to the Pergamonmuseum, one of the world’s great museums of ancient history.  As the careful reader will have noticed, ancient history is one of our favorite topics at the moment.  To ensure that we would have all the time we wanted there, I had even reserved tickets online for the 10:00 am opening. 

Despite the bone-chilling cold we decided to walk from our hotel, enabling us to see some of the city’s grand public spaces, such as the Gendarmenmarkt and the grand avenue Unter den Linden, passing the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Staatsoper, currently closed for reconstruction.  We eventually came to the Museum Island, site of a number of major cultural institutions, comparable to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.   Nearly all boasted a similarly monumental classical design.  In fact, all the architecture we passed was traditional.  And because most of these buildings presumably were damaged in World War II, the East Germans seemed to have chosen to recreate the original buildings, while the West Germans preferred to replace theirs with modern styles. 

Now, however, Museum Island is undergoing major reconstruction in which its five major institutions will be joined by subterranean passageways.  They will eventually be united by a huge cultural centre known as the Humboldt-Forum that will have a historical façade over a modern interior.  At the moment, it is a massive construction site surrounded by wooden walls, which reinforce one’s sense of disorientation.

The Pergamon is home to the famed Pergamon Altar, a large shrine built in the 2^nd century BC in the Greek city of Pergamon in present-day Turkey.  Around its sides ran a frieze depicting an epic battle between the gods and the giants – in which the victory of the gods ensured the establishment of order over chaos (assuming you were allied with the gods…).  The museum was built in 1930 to house the shrine, which had been excavated by German archaeologists.  We knew that it was A Really Big Deal, in terms of ancient history, but what we weren’t prepared for was the sheer fascination of the friezes as works of art.  The Spouse explained that they embodied the exuberance of 2^nd Century Hellenism.  It was a Who’s Who of Greek culture, with every major and minor god grappling with a varied host of grotesque giants, many with serpent tails instead of legs.  I hadn’t brought my good camera, but I tried to capture some of the many depictions of heroic goddesses.

We happily spent several hours examining the friezes and another series in a colonnaded courtyard at the top of the shrine depicting the life of the city’s mythical founder, Telephos, with episodes seemingly copied from the lives of Oedipus, Moses, and other heroes.  Eventually we moved on to other treasures contained in the museum, the ornately decorated Market Gate of Miletus, a Roman trading city in Turkey and the jaw-dropping Ishtar Gate, part of the fortifications of 6^th Century Babylonian ruler King Nebuchadnezzar II.  Eventually, though, we realized that if we were not going to drop from exhaustion we would have to stop for lunch, and because of construction we were going to have to leave the museum to get it.  Perhaps because of the many construction projects or bad planning, there simply weren’t many places to rest and eat in the area, but eventually we found a pleasant Italian restaurant off the island. 

Afterward we visited the Altes Museum, another of the Museum Island complex.  Built in the early 19^th Century as the Koenigliches Museum to house the art collection of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III, it followed classical models exactly.  In the 1950s it was reconstructed following the original designs.  Today it features excellent displays of Greek, Etruscan and Roman art and archaeological objects, though were disappointed not find the Minoan material that our guidebook promised.  After an exhaustive day on the Island, we were happy to find our way back to the hotel via a U-Bahn line.

Monday we decided to see a wider range of Berlin’s sights and especially its neighborhoods.  We started by heading to the Brandenberg Gate.  To get there, we walked west on Unter den Linden through a more commercial area.  Here there must have been more extensive war damage for all the buildings dated from the post-war period.  We were interested to see a massive blocky office building bearing a sign for its chief occupant, Aeroflot, the Russian airline.  To its west dominating the avenue was the massive Embassy of the Russian Federation, which clearly had been the home of the Soviet Union before 1989.  But then we reached the square to the east of the Brandenberg Gate.  There, facing each other across the square, were modern embassies for Britain, France and the United States, all clearly newly built since 1989.

Walking through the gate we saw the Reichstag building, now the home of the German parliament or Bundestag.   Recently restored with a modern glass dome, it seemed an excellent symbol of the nation’s efforts to balance old and new.  It is surrounded by spanking new Federal buildings – I think one’s reaction to them depends on his feelings about modern architecture…

We hopped on the U-Bahn and traveled north to an area known as the Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter), a more traditional residential and commercial area that formed the northern boundary of old East Berlin.  Emerging from a neighborhood of apartment buildings we came to an open area that seemed to be waste land until we realized that it was the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, or memorial to the Berlin Wall.   

Where the Wall has been destroyed almost everywhere else in Berlin, a large swath was preserved here, complete with guard towers, ditches and the open “death strip” that were perfected over time to maintain the control of the Communist regime.  We found it sobering and oddly moving, especially in light of the fact that its history largely coincided with our own lives.   Later, looking at aerial footage taken just after the fall of the regime, it occurred to me that I had been thinking of the Wall as something that divided East and West Berlin.  Actually, it enclosed West Berlin – but it was the East Berliners who were the prisoners, while West Berliners could enter and leave via certain check-points and travel to West Germany on designated highways.  Just another example of the paradoxical nature of the time.

Afterward we found our way to the commercial heart of the neighborhood, full of stylish boutiques, art-house cinemas, restaurants and nightclubs.  The Hackesche Höfe is a beautifully restored early 20th century building complex with fascinating Jugenstil courtyards.  We happened on a terrific old-World style café. The Oxymoron Restaurant, where we had such a great lunch that we returned the following evening for dinner.  Later we hopped back on the U-Bahn to explore Kreuzberg, another happening neighborhood where artsy hipsters live in the midst of longtime Muslim immigrant communities.  A few days later we returned to the neighborhood for an excellent dinner at Defne, a Turkish restaurant that exuded comfort and authenticity – and reminded us of how much we had loved eating out in Istanbul.

The conference that was our ostensible reason for the visit began on Tuesday, putting an end to The Spouse’s touring, but I still had several more days to explore.  I traveled west via bus to Potsdamer Platz, an area that was center of Weimar Republic nightlife, then leveled by the war and cut in half by the Wall.  Since the ‘90s it has been rebuilt as a vast business and commercial center with lots of gleaming

skyscrapers and indoor shopping malls – that largely left me cold.  It is also home to the new concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, not a favorite either, although I gather that the acoustics are fantastic.  But the Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) is a stunning collection and I happily spent 8 hours working my way through masterpieces of Western art from the 13^th through the 18^th centuries.

My last day, when I had hoped to take more photographs, was cold (again) and rainy, so I contented myself with using my pass to visit other areas of the city by bus.  I look forward to a return visit this summer, when I will be taking an intensive two-week course in German, and when I hope the weather will be more comfortable.