Ich bin kein Berliner.
Berlin is a city without a cause. Or was that a rebel without a wall? It is not a pretty town. It must have been at one point in time, but 1945 put an end to that. Now it's a large, sprawling modern city without too many redeeming features. And that's just the western part! What used to be East Berlin is now just a continuation of the western part, but significantly shabbier. Building restoration was not a priority for them, which explains buildings that STILL have pock-marks from bullets, and some that have large holes made by tank shells.
The wall is gone, and almost forgotten. That is not a good thing, as those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it. They did set up a museum at Checkpoint Charlie. The exhibits are interesting, although somewhat monotonous. The descriptions of the displays (mostly photographs) are in four languages: German, English, French and Russian. I cannot judge the French translation, but the Russain one was grammatically flawless, whereas the English translation was obviously done by a German speaker with only marginal English skills. So there is nothing left of the wall. Nothing to remind the residents of their past, nothing for visitors to look at to see what life was like with the wall. Even the famous Checkpoint Charlie was dismatled. All that remains is a little fenced off area with a tank barricade, some barbed wire, sand, and the famous sign "Your are now leaving the American sector..."
During the night, East Berlin is for the most part dead, and West Berlin does its best impersonation of Manhattan. Lights, lights, lights and lights on top of lights. Lots of teenagers and punkers and bums; the place seemed to be brimming with anarchy. There were several nice shopping streets, where you could everything from crystal to fancy shoes to Mercedeses to hookers.
In the middle of the city there is a large park, that is mostly a forest with some small ponds in it. It's very pretty, and brimming with wildlife. All sorts of birds, rabbits, squirrels, and God knows what. I even saw a hedgehog. How often do you get THOSE in San Jose?!
I went to a few museums in Berlin. One was in the Berlin Schloss (castle/ palace). It was quite pathetic. If it had cost anything more than 1.50DM, it would have been a ripoff. Across the street, there were two museums: a Egyptian one and a Greek one. Admission was free (on Sundays), so they were a much better deal by definition. The exhibits were good, but nothing special. Nothing that didn't get displayed in the LA County Museum of Art, for example. And of course all the descriptions were in German. Sunday afternoon I went to the Museum of German history, 1900-1993. It's located in ex-East Berlin in an interesting building (one of the few that survived the war). The museum was mildly interesting, with two particularly interesting aspects. One was the absense of any mention AT ALL of World War I. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. It didn't happen, folks. The exhibits showed what life was like for people in the beginning of the century. They were divided into Birth, School, High school, Military academy, Marriage and Familiy, Retirement, and Death. The next exhibit documented the Nazi party's rise to power. Again, the exhibit was partitioned into the same categories. There was a large collection of materials about the Hitler Youth, complete with propaganda posters showing lots of stern Aryan faces. A display described the "German Mother" program. It included several passport-like certificates that showed the state's approval (and encouragement) of child bearing activities on the part of the holders.
After the Nazi display came the parallel tracks of East and West German life. You guessed it: Birth, School, etc. What was particularly striking (that second interesting aspect) was the similarity between the endocrination of the Hitler Youth and the Young Pioneers of East Germany. What's more, this similarity was not the focus of the museum; it was simply something that could not be avoided.
I spent some time wandering around East Berlin, and made it as far east as Alexanderplatz. Some of the residential areas with extremely wide, extremely empty streets punctuated by extremely ugly apartment buildings vaguely reminded me of some areas of Moscow. I guess the stuff was built in Germany as Stalin's present to the workers of the DDR.
I took the overnight train back to Darmstadt, and am in no great hurry to go back. I kept comparing the place with Paris, and the more I did so, the more Berlin paled. I think it will slowly become less and less important, and will evolve into just another large and ugly German city like Frankfurt.
April 1993.