Berlin!

So!  The bottom line is, I love Berlin!  We were there two nights.  It was a really long bus ride both getting there and leaving, but totally worth it.  It was definitely my favorite of all the cities so far on this trip!  I had expected to like it, but not as much as I did!  So the first night we went to the Brandenburg Gate, which is probably Berlin's most famous landmark; it was built in the late 1700s and has been the site of pretty huge historical events pretty much ever since.

Napoleon marched through it; it was going to figure prominently in Hitler's planned restructuring of the whole layout of Berlin; when the Berlin Wall came down it was the center of huge demonstrations and crowds.  Anyway, it is alot more impressive in person than in pictures.  I could have just hung out by it all day.  

After seeing the Gate we went to the nearby Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was pretty much phenomenal.  It is just what it sounds like, in two parts:  the actual memorial, which is outdoors, and an underground museum attached to it.  The memorial itself is quite unusual-looking.  It is a large space of ground--I would say about the space of a city block--covered with a couple of thousand concrete, rectangle pillars.  

They vary in height and the ground they are built on is purposely constructed very hilly, so that as you walk further into the pillars the pillars grow up all around you until they loom high overhead.  I have heard different interpretations of the symbolism of the design--one that the pillars sort of represent gravestones for all the murdered Jews, another that the feel of the place--the way it pulls you in from the 'shallow' area into the middle, where the pillars are high over your head--sort of echoes the way that the German people travelled on a slow downward slope until they somehow found themselves in the middle of a terrible horror.  However you interpret it, it was quite moving.  

The museum was even more moving though.  It's not like I didn't know about the Holocaust before but this museum made it much more vividly real to me.  It was really well set-up and designed.  There was a whole room organized around the stories of 15 different Jewish families who were torn apart and in some cases completely destroyed.  I took a picture of one of the photographs that hit me the hardest.  It is of a young couple, taken very shortly before the war. 

I think that the husband survived because he was in the Russian Army (this particular family lived in Russian territory) but the girl and their baby both died in one of the camps.  There were also excerpts from personal letters and journals--all very striking.  I wish you could see it Mom, I think you really would have liked it.  So many stories of real people.

After the museum we went to the Reichstag, which is where the German parliament meets. You can take an elevator to the roof of the building, which was cool.  You will soon notice that I love to climb buildings (which is weird, cause I am fairly scared of heights) and climb them whenever I can.  For instance, cathedrals.  There will be pictures of  some of those when I get to Rome, I have no doubt.  Haha.  This is me on the ramp, with Berlin and the German flag in the background!  Kind of corny I know.  (But on a side note, it was weird, I really felt quite at home there.  Probably the whole having-the-last-name-Schmaltz didn't hurt, haha.)  

On Saturday we left the hostel early in the morning and spent the whole day walking around the city!  My feet have never been so sore, seriously.  But it was worth it.  The first thing we did was go to the Museum of German History.  I have NEVER SEEN a museum so full of amazing things to look at!  It was organized by time periods. from the time of the Celts through to the present day.  I had got to about the year 1918 when Alice found me as I was wandering and was like "We have been here for FOUR HOURS".  I was like, "WHAT.  IMPOSSIBLE."  It seriously seemed like MAYBE two hours.  There was just so much to look at.  So then it was most distressing because I had to WHIZ through the interwar years and WWII, which really were the areas I was most interested in reading about.  Oh well.  Altogether we were there for five hours and I EASILY could have spent two or three more.  What an amazing museum.  I took ALOT of pictures there, alot of them I think you will also be interested in, Joe.  For instance here are a few things:

This is a gas mask from the WWI trenches, and if you look closely on top of the crate you will see a noisemaker---these were apparently used to make noise in the trenches in order to warn the other soldiers about gas, since in theory you would have your own mask on and not be able to yell a warning to them.  Have you heard of this ever, Joe?

These, I think, were early models of metal helmets on the German front in WWI.  The one on the left is particularly interesting I think, it was labeled a 'forehead protector'; you can kind of see the part that goes down between the eyes.

This was a miniature 'field hospital' that was sold as a toy during WWI!  I thought it was awesome. 

A German helmet from WWI that suffered bullet damage.  

And this is the combustion chamber of a V-2 rocket!  I thought you might like this one in particular, Josiah.

After the museum we visited a church that had been bombed by the Allies during the war and left as it was as a sort of memorial; then we walked all the way back across town to where there were some pieces of the Berlin Wall (it is strange to think that that happened 20 years ago now, and even weirder to realize that I remember it!!  that makes me old!! ha).   This is me in front of a chunk of the Wall!  

Another spot we saw that I was especially interested in is an area of the city (again, probably roughly the size of a city block) where alot of the main Nazi offices were--for instance the SS headquarters and Himmler's office.  The thing that is most interesting is that the city has never rebuilt on that ground--the buildings from back then were either destroyed at the time or shortly afterwards, and it has remained undeveloped rubble ever since.  There is a display there now with photographs and it says specifically that that ground will never be rebuilt on, because of the terrible things that happened there.  It is just trees and grass and rocks, now.  Strange but quite moving in a way. 

So that was Berlin!  Lots of history = awesome.  :)  The hostel we were at in Berlin was really nice, too.  Very clean and quiet and the bathrooms were awesome (you get to appreciate things like that after awhile, haha).  And the pillows were huge!  They were practically body pillows. This is a picture of my bed at the hostel.  Very nice light airy room as you can see!

 Lots of love!  Becky.