Our Last Day in Berlin

My Berlin trip ended about 7 months ago but I forgot where I had saved the final post that I drafted on the plane ride home.  What follows is my account of the final day of my Berlin trip back in March.

Up until Thursday, the weather in Germany had been perfect – sunny, upper 60’s, light winds.  Our final day in Berlin was more along the lines of the weather I had expected to encounter – cool, damp and rainy.  We didn’t let that stop us from seeing some more of Berlin’s highlights.

We started with a closer look at some of the things our guide had highlighted on the walking tour, specifically the Topography of Terror and the Stasi Museum.  As I had mentioned before, the Topography of Terror was built on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters and is bordered by one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall.

Berlin has done an excellent job of addressing the less stellar periods in its history with memorials that both educate the visitors and honor the victims of atrocity without being overly sensational.  They hold the perpetrators accountable for their actions and try not to present them in a way that would give those still prejudice members of our society an opportunity to celebrate them. 

The Topography of Terror was no exception.  It tied together many of the things that I learned at both Sachsenhausen and our other guided tours and gave a very complete picture of the rise and fall of the Nazis and the atrocities committed at the concentration camps throughout Europe.  I think it is particularly important for people of my generation, especially those of us living in the US, to take time to remember things like the holocaust and the communist regime.  We have so many freedoms and privileges and it is easy to take them for granted.

Just around the corner from the Topography of Terrors, in the middle of what was once no man’s land is the Stassi Museum.  This museum honors those individuals killed trying to escape East Germany. I don’t remember the exact numbers but there were less than 200 individuals killed by the Stassi versus the tens of thousands killed by the Nazis.  The museum was largely in German but one of the features I found particularly interesting was the brief biographies and personal effects that they had of some of the victims.

We took one final walk around Checkpoint Charlie before hopping on the U-bahn to the New Synagogue.  While the synagogue was not burned in the Kristallnacht, its dome was destroyed by bombings in World War II. The dome wasn’t rebuilt until the 1990’s, just showing that under communist rule, no religions were important.  

The museum at the Synagogue celebrates Jewish life in Berlin throughout the centuries and we were able to climb to the top of the dome.  This was the first place we visited where we encountered any type of security. I’ve truly been amazed by the lack of police presence around the city’s monuments. Just walking through Old City in Philadelphia, there are numerous park rangers.

Before leaving the area, we stopped at the Tacheles building that was severely damaged in World War II and subsequently condemned. Before it could be demolished, it was taken over by a collective of artists called the Kunsthaus Tacheles who now have squatters ‘rights.  Evidently, there is a push to evict the artists and develop the site into an upscale hotel.

We had heard of a chocolate shop in Gendarmenmarkt, the historic square bound by the French and German cathedrals that we had visited on our walking tour and we decided that we needed to stop in before leaving Berlin.  Fassbender & Rausch is a family owned business that has been making its own chocolate for 150 years.  They have several large chocolate models of Berlin landmarks as well as an Erupting Chocolate Volcano.

One of the reasons Robin and I had decided to spend Thursday in this area was that we wanted to attend the evening English church service at the Berliner Dom.  We had some extra time so we decided to explore some of area around Gendarmenmarkt and we stumbled upon the Mendelssohn House.  I was familiar with Felix Mendelssohn, the composer, but I was unaware that he came from a long line of bankers, philosophers and musicians residing in this area of Berlin.

Somehow, we went from having this abundance of extra time to fill, to needing to rush to get dinner so we would not be late for services.  We made it back to the cathedral just as the bells were ringing six o’clock. 

The inside of the cathedral was exquisite -- exactly what I would expect to see in the capitol city’s main cathedral.  The interior, which was designed in the Italian Renaissance style, was filled with paintings and lavish gold leaf relief sculptures.  The service was simple with readings and prayers conducted in both English and German.  One of the main reasons for attending the service was to hear the Sauer organ, one of the largest in Germany with over 7,200 pipes. 

We managed to make use of every minute of our time in Berlin securing entry into the Reichstag well after 9 pm.  We actually had to apply for entry a few days before through the government website.  The German government, the Bundestag, has met at the Reichstag since 1999. The historic building was completely renovate and now includes a glass dome, which looks down into the Great Hall where parliament meets. Inside of the dome is a spiral walk way and we were given audio guides to point out some of the highlights of Berlin that could be viewed below.  I think that I was most fascinated by the construction of the dome itself and the way that the metal and glass interacted visually with one another.  

Wittenburg and Leipzig - Religious and Cultrual Meccas

In the true spirit of a Robin and Jenn vacation, we decided that we could see both Wittenberg 1 1/4 hours southwest of Berlin and Leipzig, another hour farther southwest all in one day.

Public transportation in Germany has been phenomenal and Robin and I are getting quite good at reading the time tables, negotiating connections and buying tickets.

Wittenberg is the adopted hometown of Martin Luther and the birthplace of his protestant reformation. Since we only had two hours between train connections, we quickly found a cab to take us to the outermost part of the old town where we started our whirlwind tour at the Schlosskirche or Castle Church.

The original church was destroyed in 1760 and wasn't rebuilt until the late 19th century when Germany was united for the first time. It was here on October 31, 1517 that Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door.

At the time the original church was built, the interior was only open to the common public on All Saints Day. I was wondering if this accounted for the reason the interior was more lavishly decorated than the subsequent church we visited.

 Inside we were able to see the tombs of both Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, Luther's fellow professor. There were also two larger tomb markers for the Wittenburg princes who supported the reformation. I am always fascinated by the ceilings of large cathedrals. The nave of the Schlosskirche is lined with the coats of arms of the German cities that became Protestant when they joined Luther's reformation.

Upon leaving town, we continued to walk along the cobblestone street to the town square. The street is lined with small, shallow canals that would have carried fresh water into the town and sewage out of the town during medieval times. Our walk along this rode was quite pleasant and charming but I suspect it wasn't always this way.

Our next stop was at the Stadtkirche St. Marien or the Town Church of St. Mary's. This is the oldest building in Wittenberg and Luther's home church where he preached over 2,000 times. Unfortunately, the exterior of the church was undergoing heavy renovations and much of it was covered in scaffolding.  The interior was quite plain in comparison to the Schlosskirche. However, both contained impressive pipe organs.

Our final stop in Wittenberg was the Lutherhaus, or Luther House in English. This was the monestary where Luther lived as a monk and then later, his resiedence with his family and school for his pupils.  The Lutherhaus is now a museum with many original paintings, manuscrips and other church artifacts.  I particularly enjoyed Luther’s original translations of the Bible from Latin into German.  We could see his actual notes in the margins of the hand written pages.

In comparison to Berlin and Potsdam, Wittenberg was a very small and quiet town.  The main road was closed to traffic and there was a market set up in the town square.  Many residents appeared to travel by bicycle and the cafes were quite crowded on this beautiful March day.  The Lutherhaus was only a short ten minute walk to the Hauptbanhnhof or train station and we made it back in plenty of time to catch our train to Leipzig.

Traveling through the German countryside, I was surprised at the amount of open farmland.  It appears that Germans (at least in the east) are very environmentally conscious. Groups of windmills dotted the countryside and we were told that many people don’t even own cars.

Leipzig is the home of many famous Germans, namely the writer Goethe, and musicians Bach, Mendelssohn and Wagner. The Leipzig Hauptbahnhof is one of the biggest train stations in all of Europe but it was well marked and easy to navigate.  Thankfully, I’m finding that transportation hubs all over the word, including the US, use the same symbols on their signage so finding our way through the German hauptbahnhofs has been no different than getting through Penn Station in New York.

The majority of the sights in Leipzig are located within the ring road of the medieval town.  Leipzig is more along the lines of what I expected to find of a European city -  narrow, winding streets with taller buildings not allowing sunlight to reach the road.

We started at Nikolaikirche, or St. Nicholas Church.  Built in 1165, it is Leipzig’s oldest church. In the 1980’s the church was the site of weekly prayer meetings which gradually became a forum for people to voice their anti-communist opinions.  From these prayer meetings sprung the Peaceful Revolution which eventually toppled the communist regime. I was more interested in visiting the Nikolairkirche to see the interior which consisted of ornate columns with fingers that appeared to support the ceiling.

Next we stopped at the Zeitgeschichtliches, or Contemporary History Forum.  The exhibit was on Mosaik, the comic book produced during the DDR regime. The exhibit was largely in German so it was a little difficult to understand, but I get the impression that Mosaik often mocked the DDR and the harmless children’s comic strip was really a forum for biting political commentary.

Just down the street was the Thomaskirche or St. Thomas Church. Bach spent much of his career here conducting the boys’ choir. Martin Luther introduced Leipzig to Protestantism at this church in 1539.  In front of the altar is a tomb where what historians believe to be Bach’s remains are interred.  As Robin and I learned in an e-mail from her brother AJ, Bach was not famous during his own time and he died almost a pauper.  If it were not for Mendelssohn’s efforts in preserving Bach’s legacy, he may have been largely forgotten from history.

Bach was buried in a humble graveyard and when his music was rediscovered in the 19^th century, aficionados exhumed three corpses that could have been Bach and compared them to portraits in an attempt to find the real Bach. The organ is new, from 2000.  While we were in the church we were fortunate enough to hear someone playing the organ.

Next to the church was the Bach Museum which had wonderful interactive exhibits, likely designed with children in mind, but Robin and I also found them quite entertaining.

The remainder of the evening, we wandered around the old town of Leipzig seeing the Altes Rathaus or Old Town Hall and Madler Passage where the statues enact a scene from Goethe’s Faust which was set here.  Dinner was at the Brauhaus which were becoming our favorite types of restaurant in which to eat, before heading back to the Hauptbahnhof.  On our way back to Berlin, we changed trains in Dessau, the home of the Bauhaus. I would have loved to visit the Bauhaus but I guess we can only fit so much into four days.