Berlin

Arriving in Berlin after spending the best part if a week in Poland gave me mixed feelings. We saw and read about some atrocious things that happened throughout ww2 and I don't think I wanted to hear of any more.

As the guide from our walking tour said, Berlin is the centre of the most scrutinized 12 years of history. Thankfully this tour we took part in gave us a brief introduction to Berlin, it's history and some of its sights. In turn this gave us direction for what we wanted to see.

We bought the Berlin Museum Card, definitely a recommended purchase! We managed to recoup our money after 1 day and it was valid for 3. Overall I think we saw 8 museums, all of them 'free' thanks to the card. We were able to get to grips with the effect the war had on Germany, followed by the East/West divide and the Wall. 

It's amazing to think all this history happened so recently. Yet to look at the city itself you would be none the wiser. It has bounced back with gusto; attracting young artistic types who have in turn added more youth to the city. Don't for a minute think that this means Berlin has ignored the past. On the contrary I've never been in a city with so many memorials for so many reasons.

The newest memorial is colloquially called the 'Holocaust Memorial', it was designed by an American who didn't want to give a description of why he made what he did. This gives the structure an ambiguous nature that is left open to personal interpretation. On the outside you can see many concrete blocks, over 1000 in total, probably 1x3 metres in width and length, but all different heights. As you walk into the stucture the floor starts to slope downwards revealing the different heights until they are towering above you.

Martyn and I had different interpretations from our experience.

He saw the blocks as graves, with the small ones representing children and the larger ones representing adults. 

I saw the blocks as the Nazis. Initially looking across the memorial it doesn't look all that big but then as you walk in they soon tower over you and you lose all sense of scale as the blocks next to you are all you can see. I thought that was similar to how the Nazi party came about. Initially there were small problems, not all of them known until their presence became so huge it was impossible to know what to do.

Conversely, Hitler's bunker and the place of his death has no memorial or marker of any kind. It's a car park just down the road. It was only when Berlin held the world cup and people started ringing doorbells to see if it was round there that the council decided to put up a sign, saying yes this is the bunker but we don't want a memorial. (it's the post by the grass...)

I'm not going to run through all the museums. That will bore you to tears. Some of the things we read felt a bit repetitive as they covered some of the same subjects but it was interesting to see different view points. The Jewish Museum was particularly interesting. The subject matter wasn't really new information but the building was constructed in such a way that it was specifically designed to confuse and disorientate. Well it did that!

After all the upsetting things we'd seen and read about we decided to treat ourselves to some new jeans! It feels so nice to wear clothes that aren't baggy! :)

Berlin was an interesting city, but I think at heart I am a country/small town girl so the sheer size of the city overwhelmed me. I think we saw a great deal of things but it was still only the tip of the iceberg.