September 17, 2024

September 17, 2024

This morning we were out the door early to visit the Berlin Reichstag. We needed a timed ticket and this was the only available. The Reichstag was built in 1894 to house the Parliament of the newly united Germany. It was burned mysteriously in 1933, and heavily damaged in 1945. It sat unused for decades. Now that it is again the Parliament, it has been rebuilt from the inside and surrounded by new German government buildings.

A glass dome was built at the top for visitors. When it opens we are escorted to the roof and given an audio guide that automatically begins as we walk up the spiral ramp. It is pretty informative and relates the general history and describes the view. At the bottom are a series of storyboards giving more history. Interestingly the right to vote was only given to males over 25 that weren’t on welfare. Bismarck instituted the first modern welfare program in 1889, primarily to get socialists on welfare and off the voter roster. Sounds like a great idea to me!

From the Reichstag we walked south into the Tiergarten to visit the Soviet War Memorial. It is the final resting place of 2000 Soviet soldiers out of the 80,000 lost during the Battle of Berlin. When I visited in 1984 it was behind a fence and protected by a Soviet honor guard. The trees are also much taller. In the lean years after the war, they had all been cut down for fuel.

Throughout Berlin, we have had to navigate barriers everywhere. We saw men erecting more as we walked. As much as Berliners disliked the Iron Curtain, wall building seems to be in their DNA. We walked east under the Brandenburg Gate, past the spot where Reagan said ‘Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev’, and along Unter den Linden boulevard one last time.

Back at the hotel, we checked out and put our bags in storage. We then hopped on the subway and took it to the Prenzlauer Berg district. We walked past the oldest water tower in Berlin. Built in 1877, it has apartments around the base that housed maintenance workers. We also passed the largest synagogue in Germany. There were two police officers guarding the entrance.

Farther north we visited the Everyday Life in the DDR Museum. We gave ourselves the audio tour. It is reasonably entertaining but a little bit of a repeat from Leipzig. Most factories had an onsite day-care facility. It was probably less about social welfare and more about solving the worker shortage with women. The DDR had the highest proportion of working women in Europe. One interesting item for us was the rare entrepreneurial product. It was a camping tent that fit over the Trabi auto. It was highly coveted as a way to escape their rigid dreary life, but raw materials were hard to acquire.

We went looking for lunch but most restaurants do not open until noon. After much cajoling, Aimee agreed to a Turkish Doner inside Pita bread. It was delicious. Even Aimee had to agree.

We then took the train southeast to the Karlshorst Museum. This building is where the German Army surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. A Russian T-34 tank sits outside. During the Cold War, it contained a Russian museum dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. Since reunification it has been updated.

On the ground floor is the meeting room where the surrender document was signed. The upper floors have an extensive museum about WWII. It is unique in that it is mostly from the Russian perspective focusing on the Eastern Front where the majority of the fighting and casualties occurred. It wasn’t in the Western American/British front. The exhibits are lengthy and we are running out of time so we fly through it. Interestingly the EU has made August 23, a holiday to remember the victims of Totalitarian regimes. That is the day Germany and Russia signed their compact prior to them invading Poland and starting WWII.

From Karlshorst, we made our way back to the hotel to pick up our luggage. We then found the right trains to get us to the Berlin Airport. Our choices were fewer because of construction on some of the commuter rail lines. That has been a problem during our entire German tour.

We had a burger and salad dinner at our airport hotel.