A Thought Provoking City

We went to the Parliament house, as well. It has this really cool dome-sculpture thing. Basically, there is a glass dome that people can walk up that is right above the parliament room. The basic idea is transparency. The people can look down and see their MPs at work, and the MPs can look up and see the public and remember that the public comes first.

Berlin is a city with very thought-provoking (sometimes borderline controversial) public art. On one of the buildings (once the Ministry of Ministries - Orwell's 1984 anyone? - for Soviet-era East Berlin/East Germany, now the ministry of finance) there is an old Soviet mural of the idealism of communism. Everyone looks happy, there is gender equality, everyone is well-fed and not overworked. This is contrasted with a large photo from a Berlin protest (in the '70s, I think) against communism. Work quotas went up and pay went down and people were extremely unhappy. This direct contrast between idealism and realism is fantastic. 

Another one is an anti-war memorial. It is a sculpture of a woman holding her son, who has died in war. Then buried beneath the memorial is an unknown Nazi soldier and an unknown Holocaust victim - the artist said to show that war affects both sides of a conflict. While I don't really know how I feel about it, the public memorial is very interesting.

Berlin food is really good, too. I lived off of pretzels and streusal for days. And of course, we had bratwurst for dinner one night.

Overall, Berlin is a really cool city. It is interesting to learn about it's troublesome past.

Berlin's Troublesome Past and Interesting Present

Berlin is a strange city. It is geographically huge (built for 7 million people) but population size, it's pretty small (about 3.5 million) and has a really high unemployment rate. The city itself is interesting, too.

Obviously, it has had a conflicted past - it was the capital of Prussia, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, then was divided after WWII. With a past full of conflicts, Berlin has been rebuilt many times. One of the days, my friends and I did a walking tour of East Berlin (the side that was under Soviet control 1949-1989).

We saw the Jewish Memorial, which is something a little bit strange. It's this lot the size of a city block that has kind of rolling ground with rectangular structures of varying heights. The designer said specifically that there is no interpretation of it, just experience. And it's right in the middle of the city, so you can't be in the city without seeing it. Originally, the memorial was going to be a bus that people could take to see one of the concentration camps outside of Berlin, but it was decided that that would allow people who wanted to forget the past to forget it, but something large and immovable puts it out there.

We saw the largest portion of the wall that remains in Berlin, and we went to the Topography of Terror museum, which gives an in depth history and timeline of Nazi-era Berlin. It was a really well put together museum. It included quotations from historians and people involved in Nazi-era Berlin, as well as copies of documents and letters and things from the men who were in the top tiers of the Nazi party. The museum is literally cast in shadow by part of the wall, so it was like a literal reminder of some of the effects of WWII and the Nazi regime.

It was cool to see the painted sentiments that are still up on the wall. It really makes you think about the fact that families and friends were literally separated from each other, pretty much overnight.