After 4 days in Paris, my friend Mark and I caught a flight to Berlin. Mark and I were roommates at Tulane, studied abroad together in Madrid and have spent like 4 years living together spread across New Orleans and Atlanta. We spent the next month or so traveling together and had an amazing time. We stayed in a great neighborhood, right in the heart of Berlin. The streets below our apartment were filled with good bars and restaurants and pretty much everything was within walking distance or a short train ride away. We spent our first day wandering around the city,.with several hours spent wandering around the Tiergarten, which is an enormous park right in the heart of Berlin that is filled with various gardens and statues commemorating war heros from various wars won by the Germans (these were some very old statues 😂). We also checked out the Brandenburg gate, the Berlin Cathedral, the Victory Pillar, spent some time walking around the Spree River, checked out Museum Island and the Reichstag. There was coincidentally an anti-America protest going on at the Reichstag, on September 11, which was interesting… 😳. For the record it was a very small gathering and I resisted my temptation to start unleashing U-S-A chants at full Jared volume.
The next day we walked down to a section of the Berlin that has been turned into an art gallery of sorts. There are probably like a hundred commissioned murals along this wall. There was some really cool artwork, as well as some strong symbolism of hope and peace, and others that conveyed the horrors of the war and the postwar division of Berlin with the wall. After walking through this gallery, Mark and I were a bit confused as to how the wall really kept people confined to east Berlin. Sure, it was pretty tall (probably like 10 feet), but it really didn’t seem like it would be that effective if someone really wanted to get to freedom. We got a much better understanding of this the following day, when we went to the Berlin wall museum. The wall was only one piece of the deterrent to keep people in east Berlin. It was also topped with a ton of razor wire and behind it was a minefield, more barbed wire, alarm systems, automatic machine guns, and a river that was booby trapped with mines and grates to keep people trapped in East Berlin. It was pretty insane to me that depending on the street you lived on, you woke up one day after the war living in either communist USSR or the free world. Overall craziest part of the wall to me was that it was still in place in my lifetime. Similar to my experience learning about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, things that happened that recently just hit different. Walking through the city and seeing older people, you can’t help but think about what kind of impact this had on their lives.
We spent the next morning at the Topography of Terror museum, which told the story of the Nazi ascension in Germany in the 1930s, the war and all the terrible crimes committed against the Jews, Roma and Slavic people, homosexuals, and their political enemies. This museum was awful. Not awful as in not well done. As a matter of fact, it was very well done. Awful due to the fact that ripped your heart out of your chest and stomped on it repeatedly to the point that it really made you question what the hell is wrong with humanity, how could this ever happen, and why did I just pay an entrance fee to go to a place that made me so damn sad?! I’ve been to a lot of these types of museums throughout Europe. Europe has seen a lot of trauma over the past couple centuries and I fully understand why the story needs to be told in hopes of history not repeating itself. But man, those museums are really tough to get through and I always walk out feeling horrible, almost numb and desperately needing a beer.
The museum of terror is housed in the old headquarters of the Nazi secret police, where people who spoke out against the Nazi regime were taken and interrogated, tortured and killed if they didn’t get in line. They did a good job in really telling the full story from start of Hitler’s rise to that bastard’s death. They talked through how hard things were in the 1930s in Germany, when the sanctions from WWI completely destroyed the German economy and caused hyperinflation. This provided Hitler with his opening to seize power and then he leveraged an extremely impressive propoganda machine along with a very brutal secret police force to get everyone to drink his kool-aid. If anyone resisted, they were publicly humiliated, tortured, effectively blackballed from society or disappeared, never to be seen again.
The most shocking part was when you got to the end of the museum. After learning about all these men who committed horrible atrocities, you then learned about their punishments after the war. Only 13 men were ultimately executed after the Nuremburg trials for their roles in the genocide. Most of the rest received a maximum of 18 years in jail. After the war, there was pretty much straight chaos and they had a hard time tracking down a lot of the most serious offenders. Most of them got away Scot free to South America or lived normal lives under new names for many years afterwards. Some were ultimately captured by an Israeli task force years later and punished for their crimes against humanity but overall far too many of these monsters didn’t receive any punishment at all. For the record, it is very apparent that Germany feels immense guilt for this terrible history now, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened and they will have to bear that terrible scar forever.
We also went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This memorial was interesting, as it was basically just composed of thousands of cement blocks of different sizes that you could walk through and ground was shaped like waves allowing you to basically get lost in the labyrinth. There were no words or names inscribed anywhere within it, allowing each individual to kind of make their own interpretation of the symbolism behind it. Afterwards, I tried to do some research to better understand the architect’s intent and there wasn’t a lot of information available. I think the primary goal here though was to represent the overall scale of the tragedy, given the size of the memorial and to show how people can get lost in the inertia of a movement and not fully understand the impacts. But again, they really leave that up to each person to interpret as they wish. There was also a holocaust museum below the memorial, but at that point we had seen enough sadness for one day and did not make it down to the museum.
On our last night in Berlin we did something completely differnt and went to the quarterfinals of the Euro basketball championships, which was awesome. We saw 2 quarterfinals matches, the first was France vs Italy- a matchup that include NBA stars Rudy Gobert along with several other NBA role players. The 2nd game was Slovenia vs Poland, which gave us an opportunity to see one of the best players in the NBA, Luka Doncic play. It was a great game, with Slovenia falling behind by 20+ in the first half, then come storming back only to have the run fall short when Luka fouled out of the game. It was fun seeing these Euro players facing off with rules that differ a bit from NBA basketball (for example, you can play the ball off the rim as soon as it touches, that isn’t goaltending. That was Rudy’s specialty). I also had a Dirk Nowitzki sighting at the game when I nearly ran into him while getting a beer, which was really cool.
Overall, Berlin was one of my favorite cities in Europe. It’s a beautiful city with an interesting, albeit very tragic history that has now become a very open and liberal place. The food and bar scene in Berlin was also top notch. After Berlin, it was time to jump back on the train for a long travel day to Switzerland.
