ich bin ein berliner

Starting this past Friday, we embarked on our last mandatory school excursion to Berlin, Germany. I love Germany and I have never been to Berlin, so I was particularly excited about this trip.

It’s a five hour train ride from Prague to Berlin, which we started at about 8:30 in the morning and got to the Hauptbahnhof in central Berlin around 1:30. As a big group, of about 25-30 people, we had to navigate our way through crowds of people and on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn to our hostel. The Pegasus Hostel was probably the worst place I’ve ever stayed, but was also the only place that would hold a group as big as ours at one time. The bathrooms were disgusting and the beds felt like they were going to fall apart, as did the floors, which honestly sounded like someone was going to fall through them. Knowing that we would only be in the hostel to sleep, was comforting so we headed out explore Berlin.

Mary, Meredith, Kelly, Jeanne, Hannah, and I took the U-Bahn (the underground metro) to Alexanderplatz to see the tv tower, which has become a symbol of Berlin, and to stop and get a crepe from a nearby market.

From there we took the U-Bahn once more, further into town this time, to Friedrichstrasse which is the main thoroughfare with shopping and historical landmarks. We stopped to look into a designer department store and realized it was a building done by Jean Nouvel, called the Galleries Lafayette, that has an inverted cone in the center of the building which has actually become a garbage shoot for people in the store – I’m sure this is not what Nouvel had intended for his building’s interior.

Not far from the shopping area, you can take a left onto Unter Den Linden Strasse and follow it straight to the Brandenburg Gate where Napoleon and Hitler both marched through with their forces.

After exploring a little bit more of Berlin, we stopped for a traditional German meal near the European embassies. I had a currywurst – my favorite from my time in Germany as a kid. From dinner we headed back to the hostel to meet up with everyone else and to go out to a bar called the Red Rooster near where we were staying. We didn’t stay out too late, as everyone was pretty tired from traveling all day.

On Saturday we had to meet our professor at the Pergamon Museum around 10 in the morning. This museum has a variety of ancient architecture on display including recreations of a temple and altar, as well as columns and friezes from ancient Roman and Greek architecture. One of the exhibits that I had learned about in my architectural history class was the Ishtar gates, which was unfortunately closed. We stayed in the museum for about 2 hours exploring and sketching, and then we went outside to find a market only 2 blocks away from the museum entry. There, we bought lunch and looked through the various stands of antique goods. A lot of stands were selling old Nazi and Soviet memorabilia, which was pretty interesting.

After spending some time at the market, we met back up with the rest of the group at the foot of the stairs to the Pergamon Museum. From there we began our “architecture walk” led by our Paul, our professor. He took us to the Neuwache, which is a building that has had several different uses; at one time it was the tomb of the unknown soldier. Now, however, I can’t recall what it officially is, but it has a memorial on the inside with a hole cut into the ceiling, similar to the Pantheon in Rome, that lets natural light shine on the statue. We did some sketching here for a while, and then proceeded on our walk.

We passed the Brandenburg Gate again and the bank done by Frank Gehry next to the American Embassy. Around the corner was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman. The memorial consists of an entire block filled with rectangular prisms that change in height according to the undulating floor plane. The grid of prisms can be walked through to reach the memorial building that houses an interesting yet entirely sobering exhibit on what Jewish people went through during the Holocaust, not only in Berlin but through out the entire continent of Europe. The whole monument was quite powerful in its ability to display and articulate the unimaginable in a simple and unrestrained way. I think this was one of the best memorials I have ever been to.

From the memorial, Mary, Meredith, Hannah, Jeanne and I went to find a place for dinner. We made our way to a café near one of the opera houses and had a really great, small meal. From there we headed back to the hostel to meet up with everyone else again.

15 of us headed out to a wine place and found it to be too packed, and then to a ping pong bar that turned out to be too packed for all of us too. So we split up into two groups to make things easier. The group I was with headed to a restaurant for dessert and coffee. After a while, we headed back to the hostel and went to bed exhausted, again.

On Sunday we had to meet up with our professor once again, but this time not until 11. So before meeting him at the Jewish Museum, a few of us went to Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall, and the Topography of Terror.

Checkpoint Charlie was the last gate between the American and Soviet Sectors when Berlin was divided by the allies after WWII. It’s an interesting “landmark” with a billboard of an American soldier on one side and a Soviet soldier on the other. In front of the checkpoint were paid actors pretending to be American soldiers in old uniforms – I actually thought this was kind of disrespectful, as the “soldier” was playing around with the American flag and not taking his “role” seriously.

Anyway… after Checkpoint Charlie, it was only a 5 minute walk to the longest portion of the Berlin Wall that is still standing. The Wall is falling apart, but you can still see the graffiti on the western side of it, as well as the rebar coming through the crumbling concrete. This portion of the wall backs up to an exhibition called the Topography of Terror, which talks about that particular location and how it was completely bombed to bits by the Allies. It’s pretty interesting the amount of history in just that one block of land in the middle of Berlin.

Around 11 we met up with Paul at the Jewish Museum for a 3 hour period of touring the museum. The building was designed by Daniel Liebskind, an architect whose work at the Denver Art Museum I really liked. I thought the composition of the Jewish Museum was pretty successful from the exterior but I have mixed feelings about the interior. The exhibition starts in the basement with inclining hallways that cross each other on axes that align themselves with residents of Jewish people in Berlin that were killed in the Holocaust. At the end of one hallway is the Holocaust Tower – a triangular shaped tower in plan that is not heated and has no light except for a small sliver in the ceiling that lets natural light into the 50 foot high space.

At the end of the crossing hallway there is an outdoor garden, called the Garden of Exile. Here is a garden commemorating Jewish suffrage, similarly to the way that Eisenman did in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In contrast, was Liebskind’s ability to make one feel disoriented and borderline nauseated because of the incline of the ground plan and the towering columns with olive willows. I stopped here to sketch a while and after getting up from sitting, it was amazing how fast the disorientation comes back to you – it was definitely reminiscent of what Jews felt like escaping persecution in other countries, or escaping concentration camps, or even after surviving what it felt like to assimilate back into society. This was my favorite part of the museum. The rest of the exhibits were pretty overwhelming without much direction through the building. Honestly, I spent most of my time weaving through people and around exhibits than I actually spent reading or learning in each space… that’s what was unfortunate about the entire building to me.

So… after the Jewish Museum we got lunch. My first cheeseburger in 2 months - it was awesome! And then we went on another “architecture walk” with my professor.

We stopped at 3 city blocks that were assigned to 3 distinct architects to develop in a way that they saw fit and that worked well with Berlin. The three architects were Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenmen, and Philip Johnson. I didn’t take any pictures here, mostly because I was sketching and listening to Paul talk, so I won’t try to explain how the three blocks differ and why each of them are successful.

Moving on…

After the “architecture walk” we were free for the rest of the afternoon. So, several of us decided to go to the New National Gallery, which was closed, to take pictures. From there we took the bus to the Bauhaus Archive. This was especially important to all of us as architecture students because the Bauhaus curriculum is what our architecture program at NC State is based upon. The Bauhaus was started in the 1930s by Walter Gropius originally in Weimar. It moved later to Dessau and finally to Berlin before it was closed by Nazi forces before WWII. During its run, the Bauhaus produced some of the world’s best known designers and designs. The curriculum of the Bauhaus starts with every student in a common class known as fundamentals, which is what I took my freshman year at NCSU, where the student learns the basics in color, composition, etc. The Bauhaus Archive was essentially a museum to showcase the various works done by students and by the instructors. It was particularly interesting to see projects on display by students from more than 70 years ago, that are the same as the projects I have done in the last 3 and half years.

From the Bauhaus Archive we went past the Brandenburg Gate again and to the Reichstag, the Berlin Parliament building. Unfortunately the dome of the building was closed so we decided not to spend the money on going in, but we hung out outside and took some pictures of it at night. From there we went to a restaurant and ate a dinner outside… it was cold, but the heat lamps made it completely tolerable.

On Monday we checked out of our horrible hostel and went to the Hauptbahnhof to drop off our bags. From there Mary, Meredith, and I went to the Olympic Stadium that held the 1936 Olympics. It was a pretty huge and incredible space where you could absolutely sense how terrifying it would have been to see Adolf Hitler and his Gestapo marching up the promenade to the stadium.

After the Olympic Stadium we took the U-Bahn back to Potsdamer Platz and then to the Sony Center designed by Helmut Jahn. From there we checked out the Nordic Embassies by Snohetta and the Berlin Philharmonic.

After finishing up our architecture thing, Mary, Meredith and I found a great Italian restaurant called Pasta + Passion for lunch. From there we headed back to the Hauptbahnhof for another 5 hour journey back to Prague.

Now that I’m back in Prague and I’m realizing that my weekends are slowly dwindling, I’ve been trying to plan for the rest of my stay here. This weekend is Halloween and I’m planning on just staying here in Prague and doing some touristy things in town.

The next few weeks are as follows:

Budapest, Hungary

Krakow/Auschwitz, Poland

Florence, Italy

Sicily, Italy

Flying Back to the US

Ps. Pictures coming soon, along with good internet…