Sunday, 23 June 2013

Berlin

Berlin is vast and fascinating. I was staying in the Freidrichshain region, part of former East Germany.
Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the central station built in 2006. It is huge. Another station that is more like a shopping centre than a station. There are 5 floors inside with trains leaving from the top and bottom floors. Fact of the day... 1800 trains call at the station everyday and the daily number of passengers is estimated at 350000 per day.

The outside of an S-Bahn train and the inside of an U-barn train. There is no separation of carriages so you can see all the the way down the train.


The Brandenburg Gate.

Museum Island
Three famous museums - the Pergamon, the Altes and the Bode surrounded by the river Spree. Survived the war but lots of bullet holes are still visable

The Reichstag Building - the seat of the German Parliament

Berlin Cathederal

The new Humboldtforum
The Berlin City Palace - Stadtschloss was originally built in the 15th century. Due to heavy bombing in the war it had to be demolished in 1950. Following the reunification of Germany it was decided to rebuild it. Three external facades will be copied from the original and the interior will be a post modern structure.
So there is a massive building site right in the centre of Berlin.

Fernsehturm Berlin (368m tall apparently and the tallest structure in Germany) built in the 1960's by the GDR

We happened to be there for Berlin's Gay Pride and it runs right through the Central Park the Tiregarten.

The flea marker at Mauer Park

Potsdaner Platz
I found the history of this area really fascinating, In the 20s this was an vibrant area, it got destroyed in the war and then when the wall was constructed it went right though the centre of this area so it became a kind if no mans land only getting redeveloped in the 1990s.
(Also... There were pink and blue pipes running through lots of areas in the city, I think this is due to the incomplete infrastructure as a result of the east west divide.)


Alexanderplatz
The world time clock constructed in 1969 and 10m tall (clearly built in former East Berlin) - huge and ugly yet strangely likable.

Karl-Marx-Allee is the street leading off Alexanderplatz through East Berlin down which you can see the best examples of Communist era architecture


The Holocaust Memorial - Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
According to the architected Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. The monument is designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly orderly system that has lost touch with human reason.
I feel that whatever I write here will not do the subject justice but here goes.
As you wall through the blocks the ground is uneven and the height of each block is irregular. You become submerged in the monument. Underneath the monument is the Holocaust museum. I thought I knew all about the Holocaust from school. But the scale of the atrocities really becomes apparent here, interms of the numbers of people murdered and the area across Europe and number of countries effected. There museum also detail many, many individual stories, translating letters and diary entries from Jews in the ghettos or camps or being transported, and you couldn't help thinking how many millions of other individual stories there are. There was one room when someone's name was read out with a brief bio of that person, if they had done that for everyone who had died in the holocaust it would take six years to read them all.

As you get to the centre of the memorial the blocks tower above you.

Checkpoint Charlie
Interesting to see but very strange that a site where many people lost their lives trying to escape to the west is such a cheesy photo opportunity now.


Topography of Terror
This museum is built on the site of the Reich security office, you can still see the foundations of the building. There is a stretch of the wall here and a fascinating outside exhibition which details events in Germany in 1933 when the Nazi's came to power.


More walls to tare down. Funny use for some sections of the wall

East Side Gallery
A mile-long stretch of the Berlin Wall is one of the largest remaining portions of the wall. I walked all the way along here from the way from the Ostbahnhof station to the hostel. Some how my room mates who arrived an hour after me managed to walk the same route yet miss the wall. It is visually stunning, such a negative structure is used for something very positive and acknowledges the history of the area at the same time.

The Victory Column and Brandenburg Gate by night.

Dinner in Cafe Neuen in the Tiergarten