From the Holocaust Memorial to the East Side Gallery

On Tuesday, after another wonderful breakfast, we took public transit to the gigantic Hauptbahnhof (Main Railroad Station) and walked from there past the major government buildings, past the Reichstag again and over to the Holocaust Memorial. This is hard to describe. Lonely Planet’s Berlin City Guide says that it “consists of 2711 sarcophagi-like columns rising up in sombre silence from undulating ground.” Sometimes these columns are very short. Sometimes they are much taller than you are. They are laid out on a strict grid, but as you walk among them you have a sense of unease, because the ground level rolls up and down and the size of the columns gradually increases and decreases, for no perceptible reason. It is impressive and powerful, but you don’t know why.

We went on to Checkpoint Charlie, which had been one of the main points for crossing the Berlin Wall. There is still the big sign in four languages: “YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.” Above the crossing there is a large photograph, in color, of an American soldier, on the other side of which is a photograph of a Russian soldier. There are also a couple of live “American soldiers” (with German accents) below, for the tourists to have their pictures taken with.

We read the history of the Wall set out in text and photos along a wooden fence around a construction area right there, then decided not to visit the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall and people’s ingenious or deadly attempts to escape from East Germany over, under or through it.

Instead, we walked down to the Gendarmenplatz, the prettiest square in Berlin, to have a picnic lunch of the sandwiches that Mary Joy had made. We then had a coffee at an outdoor café next to the French Cathedral (built for the many French Calvinist Huguenots who had been welcomed to Berlin after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes had ended religious toleration in France).

Serendipitously, from our table, we saw a sign advertising an organ concert at that church in less than half an hour. We finished our coffees, went in and heard a short concert of some familiar baroque organ works. Mary Joy liked the organ but wasn’t impressed by the approach to the pieces. She thought it lacked planning, so the bits of each piece didn’t hang together (at least, that’s the impression that I, a non-musician, got of her critique!).

Then we went to the Nikolaiviertel, the oldest part of Berlin, where we took a quick look at the 13-century Nikolaikirche, whose spires are kind of like those of Assumption Church in downtown St. Paul, but much taller. Nearby is a museum dedicated to the turn-of-the-20th-century illustrator, caricaturist and photographer of the Berlin lower classes, Heinrich Zille. Mary Joy had heard about this from one of her German-language audio magazines, so we went in and saw some interesting pictures and part of a film about Zille's life.

Nearby there was a cute-looking cafe or tearoom, so we stopped in for coffee and soup (Mary Joy) and goodies (Marika and I).

We took the S-Bahn (aboveground)—or maybe it was the belowground U-Bahn—to the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometer (0.6-mile) piece of the Wall that had been turned into a canvas for numerous peace-and-brotherhood-related murals in 1990, restored in 2009. We walked to the end of it, then across a 19th-century medievalist bridge over the Spree to the bohemian-ethnic Kreuzberg neighborhood, where we picked up an S-Bahn train back to Marika’s neighborhood. After a nice dinner prepared by our talented hostess, we retired to our apartment, to prepare for the trip to Dresden.

Touring Berlin

The next morning (Sunday, August 7th) we got up at 6:00, had a nice but very quick buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant (included), and walked across to the airport to check in with EasyJet. Hardly anyone was in line, so we had time to kill and Mary Joy, who had brought the wrong makeup (don’t ask me!) had a consultation at the Clinique shop, which led to a very satisfactory (again, don’t ask me) purchase.

Our plane left at 8:50 and arrived early (a little after 11:30 local time) at Berlin Schoenefeld Airport. There we were met by our friend Marika, who drove us into the city, where we are staying in a guest apartment in the building where she lives. After a very nice lunch (Marika had made roast pork medallions in an onion-cream sauce) and a little rest, we went to the church where Marika played the organ for Mass, accompanied on the flute by her friend Christine. I couldn’t understand any of the homily, and even Mary Joy had trouble with it, due, apparently, to a combination of the church’s acoustic and the homily’s depth of thought. But the music was wonderful. In particular, as a postlude Marika played a “Rumba Toccata” by Planyavsky—a very unusual and delightful piece.

Afterwards, we stayed for this congregation’s version of the coffee and doughnuts after mass at St. Mary’s—except that here it was wine and pretzels. We sat at a table with Marika, Christine (a native Berliner) and Marika’s older friend Erika, who had been in Berlin since 1967, after having lived in England for three years. After several hours of pleasant conversation, we left around 9 p.m. and drove back to Marika’s apartment. We then walked across the park to a “rustic” restaurant, where we had a very light supper (I had a nice salad with thinly-sliced sausage). And so to bed.

The next morning (Monday, August 8th), after Marika provided us with a great breakfast (bread, pastries, ham, cheese, fruit), we took public transit downtown and walked over to the bus stop for one of the hop-on hop-off bus tours. We bought our tickets, then made a quick visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

The wrecked tower and shell of the original late 19th-century church had been left unrestored as a memorial to the victims of World War II. Currently, the tower is surrounded by an outer building shell while it is being worked on, but we visited the new, very modern church next door, also memorializing the victims of the war and of the Nazis. It is sort of a box, made of deep blue glass, so that the sanctuary is bathed in blue light, with a large crucifix-like figure of Christ hanging over the altar. Very impressive.

After this, it felt almost like an anticlimax to get onto the bus. Since we were the first on, we got the seats at the very front of the open top deck,, right by the guide (named Stephanie). When we had gotten up that morning, the sun was shining and the sky was bright blue. By the time we left Marika’s, it was clouding over. Just after we sat down on the bus, raindrops started to fall on us. Stephanie rolled the removable top back over us, just in time. We watched the streets below as people rushed around in a heavy downpour, their umbrellas being blown inside-out, while lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. But not long into the tour, the rain tapered off, then stopped altogether. By the time we got to the City Hall, the sun was out again, and Stephanie could roll back the canopy again.

She was very good, giving quick commentary on the major sights in both German and English. As I said, it was a hop-on, hop-off tour, so you could get off at one of the 16 stops, do some more intensive sight-seeing, then pick up where you’d left off with one of the other buses that came along every 15 minutes. But we were feeling lazy in the bright, pleasant sunshine, and we wouldn’t be able to get the same perfect seats on following buses. So we stayed on for the whole thing, getting off where we had gotten on. We walked to a café, “Zimt und Zucker” (“Cinnamon and Sugar”) with tables outside, across the street, overlooking the River Spree. We had coffee and various wonderful concoctions of fruit, sugar and cream, which, unfortunately, we had to share, since we were joined by first one, then several, then a dozen or so yellow jacket wasps.

We walked over to the Brandenburg Gate, as it started to sprinkle again, and then, just as suddenly, stopped. Weather in Berlin is, as they say, wechselhaft (changeable). The new American Embassy is right next to the Gate--that seems vaguely hubristic.

At 5:00, we met Marion, a day-job colleague of the flutist, Christine—they both work for the federal government. Then Christine herself showed up, and they gave us a tour of the Reichstag building.

This was originally built for the German Imperial legislature in the 1890s, and was the seat of the parliament of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 30s. After Hitler took over as Chancellor, in early 1933, one night the building caught fire, and became a burnt-out shell. The Nazis blamed the Communists, and used this as an excuse to consolidate power and completely eliminate democracy in Germany. The building suffered more damage during the war. During the Cold War, it was right next to the border with East Berlin and, after 1961, practically up against the Berlin Wall. There were various ideas for reusing the Reichstag, but it wasn’t until the reunification of Germany and the decision to make Berlin the capital again, that the British architect Lord Norman Foster was awarded the job of designing the building’s restoration for use as the seat of the federal legislature, the Bundestag.

The original building had had a small glass dome, but Foster designed a huge glass cupola, with a ramp the people could use to walk up to the top, symbolically looking down into the open chamber as their legislators carried on the nation’s business. The views over Berlin were spectacular and our guides were informative and delightful (Marion was very funny). We got to see some of the areas used by the political parties. Mary Joy even got to have her picture taken with Chancellor Angela Merkel (or a reasonable facsimile thereof)! The building is impressive not only in itself, but because of what it stands for: democratic Germany, destroyed at the beginning of 1933, reunified and renewed in the 1990s.

Afterwards, Marika, Mary Joy, Christine and I went across the river to an Italian restaurant, Cinque, where we shared good food and good conversation.

Westminster and Gatwick

Finally, Wi-Fi, at our hotel in Dresden.

On Friday, August 5th we had dinner with Mary Joy’s brother at a restaurant near our house, then he took us to the airport. An uneventful flight on Delta from MSP to Heathrow. It was at an unusual time, 9:45 p.m., and arrived ahead of schedule, around 11:40 a.m. Not until the last minute did we decide what we would do from there. One alternative was to take the bus straight to Gatwick, check into our hotel there, then visit Brighton. Instead, after picking up some pounds at an airport ATM (one pound cost $1.71), we went to the Underground station. We took the Piccadilly line to Hammersmith, where we crossed to the District line for Victoria Station (five pounds apiece). There, we left our big bags at Left Luggage (8.5 pounds apiece) and went out to see what we could see of London in a few hours.

First, we bought some pasties at a stand in the station and a couple of coffees from Costa Coffee, and had a sort of lunch in a nearby park. One thing that travel across time zones disrupts is one’s meal schedule. We had had a light dinner around 6:30 p.m., before going to the airport. We had another dinner on the plane around 10:30. We had a small breakfast (a sort of egg sandwich) about an hour before landing. Most of the day, my digestive system felt vaguely grumpy, and not really hungry. We walked the few blocks to Buckingham Palace, but tickets to get in, we were told, sell out early in the day, so we took some pictures of the outside and headed down to the Tate Britain. Since J.M.W. Turner is one of my favorite painters and this museum has the largest Turner collection on Earth, I was very happy. We also saw some of their Constable paintings and William Blake illustrations. The café didn’t have any soup left, so Mary Joy had some berry juice and I had a bottle of ginger beer—a special recipe brand containing lemon juice and a lot of ginger—it nearly burned my mouth out.

Then we walked up past the Houses of Parliament and around Westminster Abbey. They had just finished the 5:00 Saturday evensong there and there was no entry for tourists. Last time we were in London we had heard Anglican evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral and liked it very much. When we come back to London, we’ll try evensong at Westminster Abbey.

We continued on down Victoria Street, ending up at Westminster Cathedral. The difference between the Abbey and the Cathedral is about 800 years and one Reformation—Westminster Cathedral is the seat of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, primate of the Catholic Church in England. It was built early in the twentieth century and has an Italianate brick campanile (off of which a spy falls in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent). We arrived during their version of evensong, in the elaborately mosaiced Lady Chapel, and stayed for the beginning of 6:00 mass. A guest choir was there (the Cathedral Singers from Sidney, Australia, singing Palestrina’s Sicut Cervis at the offertory. Barely awake by now, we left after the Sanctus, interestingly Scottish-tinged, by the well-known modernist (and very Catholic—sort of kind of a Scottish Messiaen) composer James MacMillan, who had a piano concerto premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra last spring.

We walked the few blocks to Victoria Station, picked up our luggage, and instead of standing in line at the Gatwick Express ticket booth, went straight to the train and bought our tickets (17.50 pounds apiece) from the conductor. After a half-hour ride, we arrived at the airport and found our way through a maze of passageways and new construction to the Hilton. This hotel is a little worn around the edges, and pricey, and, unforgivably, charges fifteen pounds (around $26) for in-room internet access (which we declined to buy). It is a very large hotel and there was a crowd of people checking in. When we finally got up to the desk, we were checked in by a nice Spanish woman from Valencia (her mother makes great paella), who, unlike any native-born British person who would have heard us speak, assumed that we were English when she was telling us how to fill in our check-in card. After settling our luggage in room 2117, we went back to the airport and, with some misgivings went to a chain restaurant there called Giraffe, where we had a very good Moroccan-style soup. The couple at the next table was there in spite of having reserved a flight out for 3:00 that afternoon. They had left their home on the south coast an hour-and-a-half ahead of time, as usual, but when they got on the expressway M25, they discovered, too late, that there had been an accident that had damaged the highway. They went seven miles in seven hours, and had to change their flight to 6:00 the next morning at Stansted airport, which was in the far north London suburbs. After many hours with nothing to eat or drink, they finally got to Gatwick, and now were having dinner at 9:00. They now had one particular problem: they had to leave their car there, because that’s where their return flight would come in, but they had to somehow find their way up north to the Stansted area (near Cambridge), get a hotel room, and be up in time to catch their 6 a.m. flight. They would have a long and very expensive taxi ride, because it would be too late for trains or buses.

Internet Access

I am writing, but getting it out may take some time, since our Berlin friend Marika has only dial-up access and no USB port that I can find. Eventually!

Next Next

After a family visit to Phoenix, winter finally seems to be winding down. We've pretty much set up our spring and summer trips: Hilton Head in May, Berlin and Warsaw (via London) in August. We are going to Denver and/or Boulder in October. Airfares are ridiculously expensive (we jumped at $1002 from Minneapolis-St. Paul to London, which would have shocked us a few years ago), but that looks like the wave of the future.

Next

We are heading for Phoenix in March and Hilton Head in May. After that, who knows? Maybe even India.

Why Do We Live Here?

Unfortunately, we aren't headed anywhere warm in the near future. With three feet of snow in December, our backyard St. Francis statue is looking forward to the return of Brother Sun.