How the Berlin Wall looks now!
Day 174 1.00 AUD = 0.6 EUR0
Berlin, Germany
We´ve just gotten back from dinner at a restaurant in East Berlin!!! (now of course there is no division, since 1990 when Germany was united)
Berlin, as i said, has a different feel to anywhere else.
And today we found out why.
It´s because the whole place is young, so to speak. It was pretty much bombed after the second world war and is now being rebuilt. And since Germany has become one, in 1990, it´s more united and huge change is taking place.
Everywhere you go has scaffolding and nets covering the buildings...noises of machines rebuilding and a sense of excitement about the change going on.
We decided to go on a walking tour. It lasted 3 hours and our guide was an Italian girl who had an incredible sense of clarity about what has been going on in Germany in relation to the rest of the world. We really enjoyed our time walking around Berlin with her....
And she filled in a lot of the gaps we had about Berlin. And the impact of Hitler.
I think that´s what i always associated with Berlin before. Hitler and how it was his headquarters but now i have a different impression altogether of both Berlin and Germany itself. The guilt of the German seems to be lifted..and yes, the general consensus is that they feel guilty as a whole for the atrocities that Hitler instigated.
This was evident last year apparently when the youth of Germany actually waved their flags at the World Cup. They´d been so repressed for so long by the US and Russia and were basically not allowed to wave flags (for fear of uprising and riots) so this was considered a ´new Germany´ for the citizens to be allowed to do this!
We walked to what is left of the Berlin Wall, which is not much. When the got rid of it they did a great job! The only bit left now is a section used to show the history of the Wall. Apparently there will be a museum built there so people can understand the whole story of it all.
Now it looks like a line of two strips of bricks on the road (yes its a road now). So weird seeing it, knowing there was a 43km wall going along that part.
On the East Berlin side there was (buildings being built now) a ´no man´s land´where there is a mile long flat terrain so that if anyone tried to cross, the´d be shot! The Wall on the West side was alongside the buildings.
What really surprised us was finding out the Berlin Wall, which came down in 1989, was a wall around West Berlin, built by the Russians, after 2.75 East Berliners crossed over into West Berlin for the better living conditions due to democratic society in the west.
The wall was built to prevent the East Berliners escaping to the West Berlin that was controlled by the US, British and French..and as a statement! So that was that. On August 13th 1961 a wall was built and half of the city closed off to the other.
But can you just imagine splitting a city in half and not allowing one half to enter the other. It would be like a line going down the middle of Perth and us not being able to visit Fremantle. Imagine. Not being allowed to visit your family?
I always thought the ´Berlin Wall`, built in 1961 to keep the East Germans from escaping to west Germany, surrounded the whole of Berlin..but it went around half of it! The West Side!!!!
And...West Berlin was inside East Germany. And so they completely surrounded by East Germany. No wonder they had trouble with their transportation etc. We were told for the first year that the wall went up, East Berlin had to have permission to use the trains to import or export any goods...and when Russia wanted to make it hard for them they stopped the use of the trains in and out of there.
But...West Berlin wasn´t to be fazed. For a year they used planes to drop off and bring out everything they needed until East Germany realised it was a silly thing...
There were so many stories associated with the East Berliners escapting to the West...one was a security guy who worked in a building that was close to the East side (the only building that was close to the wall on that side) who locked himself, his wife and his six year old son in a lift one night and stayed there till dark....then threw a hook and a rope over to the West side in oder to slide over like a flying fox....from one building to the other side where he had family waiting!
They did interviews with the 6 year old boy that went with them, years later, when he was a man, and he said he was scared to fly over on the rope but was bribed with getting a bike...so he got on and slid over!! Amazing!
There was another, a lecturer who lived in the West but worked in the East and wh o fell in love with a woman who lived in the East...He devised a plan to drive a hired sports car, that had a low enough hood to escape the barriers...to drive full boar ahead over through the Checkpoint Charlie with his girlfriend!
Another amazing thing about it was the fact that apparently the wall came down by accident....the East German leader of day was conducting an interview on tv after Gorbechev´s influence, and more or less said the wall could come down ´now´ so the people of the time took it as so, and headed off to the wall to leave!
And the 1200 guards that were protecting the wall, were some of the first to actually leave!
It made me realise Gorbachev was truly a frontrunner and was resposible for the breakdown of Communism, not just in Russia, but the world. I always knew he was a ´hero´ but to see the fruits of his influence here in Germany makes it very real.
It was a informative tour, and hearing ínside´ stories from the side of the guide made it more interesting, but we also went to the places and read the signs and read the pamphlets and grasped a good understanding of what went on here from others´perspectives. And what is still going on here in Germany.
Certainly gave us a great understanding of what went on...and highlighted the realisation that it wasn´t long ago that the wall came down, and that Germany became unified instead of separatist country.
No wonder the ´feeling´was different here...
Saw the Brandenburg Gate as well...
And learned more about Hitler and how it all started..which was basically by using the power gained via the Fire Rule which happened by Parliament burning down and the firelaw allowing the country to become a State of Emergency...which allowed the person in power, Hitler, to arrest anyone that opposed him..
When he won the elections in 1933..he put his stamp on the place! He instigated a burning of books of all the learned men, and authors and scientists, including Hemmingway and also Albert Einstein. (Being a jew, Einstein left Germany around this time to go to America due to Hitler´s rule and hatred for the jews)
Basically he erradicated anyone that opposed him which is how he got power. He murdered 90 members of parliament by sending them to Sachsenhausen Concentration camp as political prisoners and then exterminating them.
We saw where Hitler committed suicide too. On 30th April 1945 after he declared his Reich a failure. In his bunker..50 feet below the Chancellory buildings he built called the Fuhrerbunker.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels then brought his entire family, including six young children, to live with Hitler in the bunker.
Just before midnight, he married Eva Braun in a brief civil ceremony and 2 hours later she swallowed poisen and he shot himself.
The next day Goebbels and his wife poisened their 6 children and were shot, by request, by a SS man. Their bodies were later burned and have been shown in the media as the macabe symbol of Hitler´s Reich.
That area, now has a huge block of flats there with only a sign to say hitler died there! It´s as underplayed as possible. They say they have proof it was Hitler´s remains they found when they were building these flats because his jaw matched forensic samples.
Interesting hey..
There´s so much more..but i have to get off the computer....the cafe is closing..will finish this later!!
xxx
PS I have really learned that the more i learn, the more i realise i need to learn!!
