The Splendors of Potsdam

Tuesday morning we took a trip to Potsdam on the Havel River about a 40 minute train ride southwest of Berlin. Potsdam, the current capital of the state of Brandenburg started as a fishing village and then became a military fortress.  The city in its current form was largely shaped by King Friedrich II, or Friedrich the Great.

Potsdam was the summer residency for the royalty and they spared no expenses in creating a fairy tale setting.  It was the royal playground full of facades to transport the king and his court to exotic places around the world.  For example, we passed a pumping station on the river that was disguised as a mosque.  The minaret was its steam stack.

We passed the site of the former Garrison Church where Hitler took power on March 21, 1933.  The church was destroyed by allied bombing and today it is merely a construction site.

Our tour continued through the Old Quarter which was inside the original city walls of the military fortress. The king, in an effort to save money, hired an architect to draw plans for one building and then the king simply copied that plan 200 times. There is a large Dutch Quarter in this section. Because Potsdam was built on a swamp, the king brought in Dutch builders to sure up the land.

Next we passed by Sts. Peter und Paul Kirche and the French Cathedral.  Along the way I learned that Potsdam has a rich film history.  The city is the home of the first "talkie", the first color movie and the current Babelsberg studio.

I was also unaware of the role that Potsdam played in the Cold War. The city was divided in two, much like Berlin. The eastern sector was the headquarters for the Russian KGB. We drove over the Glienicker Bridge which was divided in half between the two governmental sectors. The bridge was actually painted in two different shades of green to delineate the boundaries. The dark side was for Berlin and the light side for the West. The two super powers frequently exchanged captured spies on this bridge in the middle of the night, notably Gary Powers, the American pilot shot down over Siberia.

Just to the other side of the bridge is the Glienicker Palace and park. The lion and lioness were a gift to the king and queen from the czar of Russia.

When we crossed back over the bridge, we entered the New Garden. During the Cold War this was another forbidden part of town occupied by the KGB but it more importantly is home to the Schloss Cecillenhof built in 1917 for Friedrich Wilhelm and his wife Cecilie. It was here from July 16th to August 2, 1945 that Potsdam Conference took place. I was able to stand in the very spot that Joseph Stalin occupied in the famous picture of the heads of the allied forces. We could also look through the window at Stalin's own desk.

The palace itself continued to follow the fairytale theme of Potsdam. It was constructed in an old English style country manor of Shakespearean times. The palace had several ornate chimneys as any large palace would have had for the fire places that heated its many rooms. However, when this palace was built, it had heat, running water and electricity. The chimneys are all part of the facade.

Upon leaving the New Garden, we drove to the Russian Colony Alexandrowka which was built upon the request of Frederick Wilhelm III in memory of his deceased friend Czar Alexander I and former members of a Russian soldier's choir. In order to keep the singers from getting homesick he replicated a traditional Russian village. The logs are just another facade over brick houses. By this point I was beginning to wonder if Walt Disney used Potsdam as his inspiration for Epcot.

One of the main reasons for coming to Potsdam is to visit the ornate Schloss Sanssouci, Frederick the Greats' favorite summer home designed in the rococo style. Our tour guide told us that this was a very small palace but I think that I could handle slumming it there in the summers.

Frederick was a learned and enlightened man and fancied himself as the people's king unlike his counterpart in France, Louis XIV. Frederick built the expansive park that surrounds the palace and tried to introduce new varieties of plants such as the Mulberry trees in which he was hoping to raise silk worms. Unfortunately he failed to account for the cold German winters which instantly killed his silk worms.

Frederick also receives credit for introducing the potato into the European diet at a time of famine. At first, people would not eat the potato. They said that because it came from under the ground, it must be the devil's food. Frederick launched an elaborate scheme in which he had his potato fields heavily guarded by his men. He was hoping this would make is subjects think that the potatoes were very special so that they would steal them from the fields. It worked brilliantly. Frederick is buried at Sanssouci along with his favorite dogs and people often leave potatoes at his grave site.

The tour concluded at the Neues Palais or New Palace. This was the final palace built by Freiderick the great and much larger than Sanssouci. According to our guide, Freiderick himself only used the palace once as he preferred the intimacy of Sanssouci. The servants’ quarters across from the palace are nearly as big as the palace itself and Robin and I decided that we actually liked their facade better than the facade of the palace. Neues Palais is currently undergoing extensive restoration work and the interior was closed in preparation for an installation celebrating Frederick's 300th birthday so we were unable to go inside.

When the tour concluded, we were dropped off at Sanssouci so that we could tour the interior. I was unable to take photos but I can tell you that the interior was even more ornate than the exterior. I was surprised however at how small the actual rooms were. I think that the ceilings were nearly as high as the widest dimension of most of the rooms.

After the tour, we walked through the gardens to the Brandenburg Gate, which actually predates the gate in Berlin and into to old quarter where we wandered around the shops and found a restaurant for dinner.

Before leaving Potsdam, we viewed the interior of Sts. Peter und Paul Kirche and walked down to the old Rauthaus or town hall. I also finally got to hear my first German glockenschpiel.