This was my fourth trip to Berlin, I think, but it was easily the best. It was cold, and as we came in to land it looked like we were coming down in a very barren, sun-scortched country. It was only when we saw that the river was frozen from side to side that we realised it was snow, not dusty earth on the ground.
Fortunately we spent a lot of time being ferried around in either buses of branded taxis. We did go out walking yesterday afternoon, though, and after heading down to the Brandenburg Gate for the benefit of those in the city for the very first time, we turned left and headed down to the enormous holocaust memorial. The last time I was here, it was still a fenced-off building site, but now this enormous expanse of land is home to 2,711 blocks of concrete, each one marking the deaths of around 2000 of the 6m Jews killed under the orders of the Nazis.
It is a very impressive construction. The blocks are all tilted slightly between 0.5 and 2 degrees, and the ground on which they are set waves up and down. Sometimes they are low, down around your knees, and at others they are so tall that they tower well above your head. The whole thing is supposed to give you a sense of disorientation. Beneath, there is a museum chronicling the unfolding disaster. It’s all understated and very well done.
I have always been very impressed by the way in which Germany does not hide from its gruesome past. I went to a museum in Bonn a few years ago that dealt with the Nazi era in some depth, and unflinching detail. It’s a shame more countries (Britain included) can’t deal with the unsavoury portions of their past in quite the same way.
It put us in sombre mood, reinforced by the film we went to see last night.
It was the premiere of The Road to Guantanamo, a very hard-hitting Film Four production about how four young Britons travel to Pakistan for a friend’s wedding and, through a series of unfortunate events, end up in Guantanamo Bay. It’s based on truth, and their treatment, shown in some detail, is shocking. Although it used only two – or perhaps three – quotes from George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, it was far more effective, and had far more impact, than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
While walking in on the red carpet past the small group of press photographers had seemed quite fun, walking out again on the same plush strip felt highly decadent. We sat in a bar well into this morning talking about it all.
We had a city tour this morning. I’m not normally one for bus tours, but Berlin is a big place, and it’s very well spread out, so it’s more relevant here. Our narrator was excellent. He seemed to know everything about the city and its history, even though it’s only his part-time job (the rest of the time he’s a journalist). He told us all about how 20% of every new office building must be residential housing, despite the 150,000 empty apartments the city cannot fill, showed us the remaining parts of the wall and the tacky re-creation of Checkpoint Charlie, and talked us through the ‘politically contaminated’ buildings build by the Nazi Party but now used to house modern day ministries. He took us past the site of the famous Nazi book burnings, and the site of the long-gone palace (backed by the soon to be destroyed Socialist replacement put up while the city was partitioned by its wall) and then walked us up into the dome of the Reichstag, and into a restaurant on the roof, from which we could look out across the low-level city roofs.
Inside the Reichstag Dome
All in all, an excellent flying visit. There was some business, too, of course, but that’s not really the kind of thing you want to be recording on here. It’s certainly made me more keen to head back sooner, rather than later.
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