I prepared for my train to Berlin in the early afternoon of September 24, regretting that I didn’t explore more of Hamburg. Boarding the train, I noticed quite a few German camo-clad soldiers boarding my train, probably returning home from base or vice versa.
I reserved a seat on this train, though surprisingly I had no seatmate. I panicked a little when we entered the outskirts of Berlin and a few people left while I was typing on my laptop keeping up with the blog, but thankfully we had only dropped off a few people on the perimeter of – duh! – one of the largest metropolises of Europe, which I verified from one of those soldiers sitting opposite of the train aisle.
Finding my way through Berlin turned out a little easier than I imagined, even with the crowds were noticeably larger with the upcoming marathon. The Berlin marathon events drew a coincidental parallel of Bill and Sam arriving during the crowded Olympics in 1936 though starkly different aesthetics, demographic, and most critically a radically different Government.
I shared my bus ride to the hostel with a team of mixed-nationality in-line skaters from a team known as Shea/Stokes Inline-Speed. Apparently, there was a championship for inline skating going on in Berlin coinciding with the Marathon. One of the teammates revealed that my hostel was on the east side of Berlin, which is due to whether trams or buses service the area, trams being most common on the east side.
The hike to the hostel in the Scheunenviertel district is very cosmopolitan, with a variety of restaurants, clubs, hotels, and apartment complexes, an ideal setting for international travelers. I didn’t take time this night to explore the main sights as I will the next day as my bruised toe from my Hamburg hostel lavatory incident still hurt and all I wanted was to relax and get to know the other hostel guests.
To my surprise and relief, there were quite a few English-speaking visitors and staff, mostly from the UK and Australia, at the Berlin hostel.
What caught me offguard when I entered the door is that the front desk staff greeted me in English, which felt like a first in my travels. I jokingly said “Good guess on my language,” which the Australian answered, “You seem the type,” with a smile, but in truth, I discovered that the vast majority of staff and guests don’t speak Deutch as a first language. The hostel could easily be called the Australian hostel as they make up the majority of the staff.
For dinner I decided to have some Latin American food near the hostel to take a break from the European cuisine for a change. The tacos I had were great, and I felt a little more comfortable ordering in Spanish instead of German. My German ordering skills haven’t been stellar and the Germans taking my orders have seemed a little impatient since I can’t say answer many basic questions in Deutch yet, but the Colombian woman I ordered the tacos in contrast smiled and seemed charmed when I said “Podrias darme tres taco, con tarjeta, por favor?”
Later that night, the younger hostel guests and staff reminded me of my college days in the lounge areas and outside patio area, passing around cigarettes, joints, and alcohol on outside couches and playing beer pong. I don’t drink, smoke anything, and I was terrible at beer pong even with my Heineken Zero, so I confess I felt like an old man surrounded by kids, but it was nice to be around a younger crowd for a change, nonetheless.
It might catch average Americans off-guard about the lax public drinking etiquette in Germany. Unlike in Scandinavia, walking around with half-drunken bottles in a park or on the street is common and legal. I did not encounter very many visible drunks surprisingly, despite this lax law. I will let the readers interpret that observation.
What I noticed immediately is the quantity of runners at the hostel, which allowed me to network with Strava or the athletic social media I and much of the world use today. Runners from the Dominican Republic to Romania, mostly selected by lottery, had come run the Berlin marathon on the upcoming Sunday, the 27th.
After witnessing the Oslo and Copenhagen marathons, I’ve discovered that these major European city metropolitan marathons are difficult to registered and take a year to plan, so I shouldn’t have been so disappointed I only competed in one 10-kilometer race in Europe in life thus far. Nevertheless, many of the guests and staff have speculated that I’m here to run the marathon until I correct them. “No,” I’d tell the marathoners, “I’m just a runner who happens to be at this place and this time.”
The next morning following my Berlin arrival, a Saturday not the Sunday of the marathon, I decided to walk towards the Reichstag and try to find the museum Bill had explored, The Pergamon, which still stands after the war. He split off from my grandfather to explore the museum, which he describes in his own words: “Huge reconstructions of the best in Hellenic art, and drifted on through Assyrian and Babylonian architecture, Hellenistic sculpture and Islamic culture. It was all stuff I studied in one way or another last year, and very well displayed. Most of the day I spent looking at pictures. It was the first chance I’ve had to look at real paintings since I pretended a superficial interest in them. There they were, all the paintings we studied in Art 9 [at Dartmouth], from the Fra Filipo Lippi down through the Dutch school. The museum’s chief boast, quite naturally, is Rubens, Hals, and Rembrandt. Without having enough knowledge to form an opinion of my own, I thought they were pretty swell. Only some day, I’m going back when there are no Olympics, when the museum are not packed with people like a side show.”
Like Bill, I’m not necessarily a fine art enthusiast but I nevertheless wanted to see if I could replicate and experience Berlin of the 30s in some way. I couldn’t have the same experience as my grandfather did because he split off from Bill, probably because after being on the road for so long, I can imagine they could use a break.
Disappointingly, the Pergamon was closed for renovation, so I decided to check the nearby exhibits. Before I describe the museums, I should however point out the reason this entire Island of museums like the Pergamon near the Berlin government district and Humbolt University is a world heritage site.
Unlike the Scandinavian equivalent museum districts, which are often peninsulas and islands coincidentally and try to capture more of the Scandinavian ascetic with dense forests and a mix architectural styles, this Berlin museum district is constructed to give the allure of ancient Roman/Greek antiquity and has a vastly different sense of scale. Large concrete pillars encapsulate the open setting that one can walk through like you’re in Rome or Athens, and of course wide canals. The wideness of street space and the height of these Greco-Roman columns give the illusion of the sparsity of people in this museum district. This is an experience to stop and take in, for I have never experienced such an optical illusion in an American city. Perhaps something also different from exploring museums than, say, Stockholm or Oslo is the lack of nature and instead wide streets with cobblestone roads. To better juxtapose the exploration of Musuemsinsel, I suppose I should visit the Versailles in Paris or the area near the tower of London and Buckingham palace.
There is also an intriguing flea market in this museum district near the canals that caught my eye, selling used records, lots of used books about art and architecture, cold war memorabilia – I constantly saw memorabilia of The Kiss between Walter Ulbricht and Leonid Brezhnev – and whatnot. I learned that flea markets, particularly near public parks are not an uncommon sight in Berlin in general. I’ve discovered flea markets are staples of Berlin culture, especially on Sundays since the grocers are closed. I learned this the following day from a hostel worker, one of the few local Germans working at the at the hostel.
I’m enjoying the vibe of Berlin generally, as people really take advantage of the unusually warm September weather to congregate in parks, sunbathe, and drink beer liberally while buskers play their music. It’s hard to believe that so much has changed in tempo and cadence of Berlin since the earth-shattering events that stemmed from this city nearly a century ago.
While Sweden was beautiful, Denmark was elegant, and Norway was majestic, Germany is in my opinion summed up as cool. All the latest cosmopolitan trends walk side by side east and west of the former or decayed wall, where a mixture of demographics intermix. Of course, this is not the Berlin of 1936, a place described as a “swell city” by Bill where he described more a monoculture with a cult of personality to the man with the moustache.
In 1936 Bill documented a very efficiently run but draconian Berlin where women were forbidden to hang clothes on the line, homeless were rounded up by the Hitler youth so as not to disturb the Olympics’ aesthetics, and every greet, thanks, and excuse me were substituted with “Heil Hitler”, something my grandfather instinctively replied to with “Hi.”
Segueing back to Musuemsinsel, the closest I probably got to witnessing something akin to my grandfather and Bill’s experience, I confess, the two museums I visited were chosen because of proximity, not for preference. The Bode Museum, since it was just next to the Pergamon, was mostly religious sculptures, but nothing that particularly moved me, except perhaps for the wood carvings. German woodcuts have a particular ascetic that to me blends sculpture and painting in a unique way, and I’ve seen some unique German woodcuts of non-religious settings in some relatives’ houses with German roots. What I also liked about these woodcuts is that their almost comic-book-like design of storytelling, as you can see with this depiction of events from the New Testament below.
The next museum, the Neues museum, was closer to what Bill witnessed at the Pergamon with its emphasis on archeology, particularly German Egyptology. Probably what was most coveted; hence, the minimum distance requirement to shoot photos, was the famous bust of Nefertiti uncovered by German archeologists. Several tourists were being carefully monitored so as not to venture too close to the coveted artifact when taking pictures.
Archaeology is a subject I dabbled in in my undergrad, so I appreciated spending the latter part of my museum trip in the Neues museum. I perhaps missed out on the national gallery museum across from the Neues, but I think the two I visited made up for the loss of seeing the Pergamon.
The Neues museum also featured ancient Germanic artifacts naturally at this museum to highlight Bronze and Iron-age Europe. It wasn’t too unlike the Scandinavian National museums seen previously, though these museums on this island are clearly more designed to preserve the legacy than to entertain enthusiasts. I discovered a starkly different, more modern museum at the end of my travels in Berlin at a Samurai museum with a clear emphasis on entertaining as well as arguably more educational with its AI and holograms, which several travel guides interestingly recommended the most for museums not to miss. I will detail that museum later, as it was the last site I saw before leaving Berlin for the US.
Despite the marathon occurring the Sunday after, the previous Saturday I went sightseeing still had runners for the 5K race and perhaps the 10K, so the streets were filled. The Berlin marathon was much larger than Copenhagen’s, Oslo’s, and I presume Stockholm’s, which my parents and I missed by a few days. This is apparently the running season, internationally.
Berlin’s marathon has the unique feature of finishing and starting at the Brandenburg Gate or Tor if you want to sound sophisticated. During a large marathon or even the day before, several of the main highlights of Berlin’s core or central district were closed off; namely, the Tiergarten park. I would describe Tiergarten akin to New York City’s Central Park, except even more historical markers. I will go into that, including the Siegessäule or Victory Column, later.
The marathon like in Copenhagen made navigating towards historic sites like Checkpoint Charlie and the Holocaust Memorial particularly difficult. All the roads that the racer ran were paved, not the historically preserved cobblestone ones, so the Google maps directions could lead me into streets that I couldn’t cross using the subway and had to wait at ideal, split-second gap times to briefly run with the marathoners.
I decided after attempting to run towards downtown Berlin that I would concentrate on running in the eastern half of Berlin. Every time I had been recommended by the hostel to explore an event space, I decided to run towards there, which has had mixed results, since it feels awkward to hand your wallet to purchase tickets to a club while in one’s sweaty running shorts and tank top. First, I ran towards the Friedrichshain district south of a large road conveniently called Kal Marx Allee to identify that I was in East Germany. On the way I passed through an interesting park called Volkspark Friedrichshain, which happens to be Berlin’s oldest park. I entered at the Märchenbrunnen a series of fountain sculptures which depict various fairy tale characters, such as those from the Brothers Grimm.
The destination from this run ended up on Revaler St, which held several intriguing venues, including nightclubs, music recording spaces, and a climbing venue was both indoor and outdoor, Der Kagel which also shared adjacent space with a skateboard park. This was the kind of place for a weekend warrior or a future pop culture hero, as everywhere within this street block was catered to capture aesthetic zeitgeists.
Browsing the history of Revaler Street or more accurately, Revaler Straße, this counterculture haven was originally a working-class neighborhood in the late 1800s when it was under Prussian rule with the main function to repair train wagons and later building full railroad facilities, only to be bombed nearly to oblivion by the Allies during World War II. Since this is East Berlin, the Soviets rebuilt the facility as a railway center, only for the end of the cold war resulting in the decommission of the railway services in 1995. Grassroots counterculture groups renovated the defunct infrastructure into the arts and recreation space it is today. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your attitude towards social media, pictures are forbidden in several of the spaces to avoid the pitfalls of social media exposure.
Exploring spaces like this and Freetown in Copenhagen, I confess, made me feel a little lonely since I wasn’t with anyone to experience these spaces for the first time that are designed more for the experience rather than snapping photos and for scrapbooks. The lack of social media presence I think is a wise decision, and part of the reason I describe Germany as a cool country, if you accept the characterization of cool as abiding one’s settings with a Zen-like grace absent of burdens like ideology or contemporary and pop culture pressure.
Speaking of ideology in the same theme, I visited Checkpoint Charlie, albeit briefly and without going into the museum. I was fatigued of museums frankly, but I still appreciated the irony of the monument. Germany’s experience with some of the worst implications of ideology resonate with these pressures of both Western and Soviet influences.
To put this in perspective, Germans have often historically been killed over ideological strife even before the Germans successfully confederated under Prussia. The 30-years war killed a third of Germany’s population over the Catholic and Protestant arguments for example. I opine that the destruction in German’s history under the influence of ideology, from Protestantism to Communism, is perhaps why the holocaust memorial is so memorably absent of language or direct imagery, just unmarked black monolithic graves of various depths in almost labyrinth setting conveniently near a street named after Hannah Ardendt.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to conclude my memories of Germany for another time, as I’m running out of free time returning to work in Spokane after recovering from a cold I must have picked up from the hostel that was going around my dorm.
Up next will be a day trip to Potsdam, a former spy station in the hills outside Berlin, the best Doner I had, one bit of Berlin nightlife, and the aforementioned Samurai museum.
