Travel Blog: A Day in Berlin

While we had sailed all day Friday through fog and showers, the skies began to clear in the evening and we sailed into Warnemunde under clear, cool skies. The port of Warnemunde is part of the former East German city of Rostock, located on the Baltic coast. It is a very large port facility and is the closest port to Berlin, which is a three hour drive away. So, after a hearty breakfast, we boarded the buses and set off promptly at 8:30 for Berlin, highlight number two of this trip.

In total there were seven tours to Berlin, ranging from the Panoramic Berlin tour we were on to special tours such as the one to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which, surprising many people, is located in the suburbs of Berlin. Each bus had an escort from the local ground operator who was responsible for keeping everyone “fed and watered” on the drive to Berlin. Ours was Lisa, a young lady from Rostock who is working on her medical degree at one of Berlin’s many universities while polishing her English language skills during the summer as a tour escort.

After a comfortable three hour run down the Autobahn, and after passing under the runways of the international airport in a v-e-r-y long tunnel, we picked up Eva, our Berlin tour guide. Eva was old enough (Larry was too polite to ask how old) to have lived through the fall of The Wall and the reunification of Germany and, as we discovered, was a virtual walking encyclopedia of Berlin’s history from the rise of Hitler to the fall of The Wall. As we drove into the centre of the city Eva told us our first stop was not on the tour, but we were making it because “it’s the first question everyone always asks”. And with that, we stopped in front of a parking lot with a sign reading “Mythologie of The Fuehrerbunker”. We were stopped over top of the place where Hitler killed himself.

Eva explained that the Russians had dynamited the bunker, along with the remains of the Reich Chancellery, in 1950 and dynamited what was left again in the 1970’s. When in the early 1980’s an excavation project hit another part of it, they filled it full of concrete, sealing it forever. Her comment was “so what these tourists are looking at is a parking lot.” With that question answered, we moved on to the rest of the tour. And the first stop was the Holocaust Memorial which, ironically, was right around the next corner!

The memorial itself was designed by a New York architect and, above ground, consists of 2711 granite blocks of varying heights and elevations. Eva said the architect never explained the significance of the number 2711, but the Torah does have exactly that many pages. Probably not a coincidence. Below ground is a museum and documentation centre, but we did not visit there.

From the Memorial we continued on our walking tour toward the historical centre of Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate. The city of Berlin has both a north/south and an east/west axis consisting of two wide boulevards. The east/west boulevard is the Unter den Linden and passes through the Brandenburg Gate. Or at least that was the original layout. In fact it stops there and then continues on the other side under a different street name. The gate itself is a monument to some long ago Prussian military victory and as you can see from the picture, is a very impressive structure. The gate survived the war, although it was heavily damaged both by Allied bombing and by the Russian invasion of the city, and the figure of Victory and her chariot was virtually destroyed. During the Cold War, the Gate stood in the middle of a “no man’s land” just behind the Russian side of The Wall, which ran across the west side of the Gate. Eva showed us aerial pictures from the 1970’s and it looks like an “island” in the middle of an empty field of rubble. Today it is, of course, a major tourist stop.

Continuing on from the Gate we proceeded a few blocks to the Reichstag, which is the seat of the German Parliament. Eva explained how in 1933 Hitler was, quite legally, made Chancellor of Germany in the Reichstag, and then a few weeks later, had it burned down, allegedly by a Dutch anarchist, as a pretext to dissolve the parliament and declare marshal law. And the rest, as they say, is history. Curiously, while it stood in the same “no man’s land” as the Gate, it was the only building in this part of Berlin associated with the Nazis that the Russians did not dynamite in 1950. Of course they also did not use it either so it stood as a scorched, heavily damaged shell until after reunification in 1992, when it was restored and rebuilt.

Re-boarding the bus, we spent the next hour or so on a slow-speed driving tour around the central part of Berlin, crossing back and forth over “The Wall”. The route of the wall is marked as a double row of cobble stones along the roads and sidewalks, so while only a few sections of it still remain standing, as monuments, it is possible to get a real understanding of how it divided the city, sometimes running right down the middle of a street or sidewalk! Here are some pictures from this part of the tour:

A memorial for people who tried to escape from East Berlin

The Siegesalle or Victory Column

A view of the River Spree as it winds through Berlin

The first part of the tour ended with lunch at the Westin Grand Hotel, located in what had been the heart of East Berlin and where we met an old friend from Crystal, Reka Nehls. Reka was the former Shorex Manager on Symphony and she was also on Serenity with us for the “Family Cruise” in 2007. Daniel, our Shorex Manager, had told us a couple of days before that Reka had left Crystal and was now working for the ground operator Crystal uses for the Warnemunde/Berlin tours “so you will probably see her”. We bumped into her in the hotel lobby, and once she got over the shock of seeing us, she ran over and wrapped us both in big hugs, much to the surprise of our guides/escorts, Eva and Lisa! “Old Home Week” Version 2.0!!!

After lunch we continued with our driving tour through much of what had been East Berlin. Along the way we passed many fine examples of 1950’s “Stalinist” and 1960’s “Communist German” architecture in the form of long rows of apartment buildings that looked remarkable only for their bland sameness. Eva explained that in the “socialist paradise” of East Germany everyone was equal and everyone got to live in equally drab and boring apartments. Much has been done to spruce up and brighten the exteriors in the last ten to fifteen years, but there is no getting around the “cookie cutter” appearance of entire neighbourhoods.

Larry at 'The Wall' art gallery

After a stop at the longest surviving section of The Wall, now turned into an art gallery, our final stop was Checkpoint Charlie, the only “legal” means of crossing from East to West Berlin during the Cold War. This was the site of the first major confrontation between Russia and the Western Powers when the Russians first physically divided the city with barbed wire fences in the late 1950’s. The post-war agreement gave the troops of all four “occupying” powers free access to all areas of the city. When the Russians denied access, the American Commander called in the tanks and an 18 hour standoff ensued, with Russian tanks lining the road on one side and American tanks lining the road on the other. The end result was that troops from each side could only cross at this checkpoint, which was essentially turned into an armed camp on each side. Nowadays, as you can see, it’s a tourist attraction. The original checkpoint buildings were moved to the American Museum in another part of Berlin and what’s left has been pretty much “Disney-fied”!! There is, however, a series of “billboard” displays across from the checkpoint detailing much of what went on there during the Cold War, some of which was pretty frightening and tough to look at. Later, we visited the American Museum, which included displays from the early days of the occupation as well as the Berlin Airlift.

Airlift Memorial at Templehof Airport

After driving through the former American Sector of Berlin, which includes the most upscale residential areas of Grunewald and Zehlendorff, we ended at the Charlottenburg Palace where we said goodbye to Eva and headed “home” to Serenity, arriving about 8:30. Our overriding impression of Berlin is of wonder. According to Eva, 80% of the city and over 90% of the buildings were heavily damaged or destroyed during the war. Large tracts of it, almost entirely in the East, were left to “rot” for almost 10 years after the war, and still more were bulldozed to make way for The Wall and the 1000 metre wide “no man’s land” around it. Today, 23 years after The Wall fell and only 17 years after Germany was reunified, many of its historical buildings have been re-built, many from the original plans, which survived the war, and it is a fully built-out modern city. All in all another very long day, but a tour we are both really glad we took.