Dresden to Berlin

Friday, October 12, 2012

Leaving our great apartment and lovely Dresden, we headed north to Berlin this morning, arriving before noon.  We checked in to our apartment on the broad and locally well-known Karl Marx Allee (formerly Stalin Allee!)  This boulevard, running east of the busy Alexanderplatz (with its landmark television tower) was heavily developed as a residential area during the Soviet area.  Large apartment blocks line the wide road, and we’re staying in one of them.  There’s a small, pleasant park behind the building, a subway stop right in the apartment block, shops below, and it’s easy to feel that our temporary digs were once somebody’s home.

We spent the afternoon walking through the city, very conscious that we were walking through history.  The busy Alexanderplatz, with its towering, needle-like tower, shares a square with the Marien Church, established in 1270!

 We stopped in the Radisson Hotel, which is home to a shopping center and the Sealife Aquarium.  Above the center of the lobby, there is a huge aquarium, which an elevator passes right through!  A stroll through the Museum Island, with the lovely Lustgarten fronting the Cathedral, brought us to Unter den Linden, one of old Europe’s grand boulevards.  It’s lined with cultural institutions, including Humboldt University and the solemn national memorial to all victims of war and tyranny, housed in the Neue Wache, the emperor’s New Guardhouse.

As we walked along Friedrichestrasse (formerly in East Berlin), lined with high-end shops and car dealerships featuring Bugattis and Bentleys, Tom could not recognize anything from his visit here in 1967, when all the shops and offices were empty.  The Gendarmenmarkt is a lovely square, with twin churches (French and German) at either end, and Symphony Hall between them. 

From there, it was right to the Cold War.  The area around Checkpoint Charlie is full of exhibits, museums, timelines, photo displays and signs recalling the period 1961 – 1989, when the Wall divided this city, and the super powers confronted each other daily.   A few blocks from the Checkpoint’s tourist hub, we saw one of the few remaining stretches of the Wall, adjacent to the Territory of Terror, a museum devoted to the rise of the Third Reich, the organs of state control, and the Nazi atrocities here and in other countries.  It’s obvious that Germany does not deny its historic demons; rather, there seems to be a determined effort to own up to its past, and to educate the young about its horrors.

We covered a lot of ground this afternoon, and we look forward to seeing much more of this big and interesting city during the next two days.

From Tom-As Mary Ellen mentioned, I was here in 1967 when the area we are in now was Communist territory. This is one of the reasons I wanted to see this city. And to me the change is stunning. I recognize nothing. When my friends and I were here, there was nothing in the store windows on the main streets and there were very few people on the streets. Now the streets are filled with people, all the stores are packed with goods and there is construction everywhere. The pictures below which I took in 1967 and today of the Memorial I remembered and almost the only thing I recognized illustrate the change.It was then a “memorial to the victims of Fascism” and now a memorial to the victims of War.