Berlin Stadttour war wunderbar!

Yesterday it was sunny and warm-a perfect day for my tour of Berlin. My guide was Peter and the driver was Mickey. For four hours we drove from one spectacular sight to another. Peter was a walking encyclopedia of Berlin history and had lots of wonderful insights on the nature of Berlin and its residents.

Die Brandenburger Tor is huge and I mean huge. It is 90 feet tall (taller than the GP tall building) and 213 feet wide (2/3 of a football field). It is very impressive especially since it was built between 1778 and 1791. It has five passageways but the middle one was only for royalty. I made sure to walk through the middle one.

In fact the size of the old city buildings astonished me. They didn't have the technology to build skyscrapers so they built wide and long. Some of the columns are the size of Redwood tree trunks. The width of a building might be a city block or more and the length two blocks or more. These huge edifices were to reflect the power of the ruling empire. Below is the Reichtag Building where the German legislature met from 1894 to 1933 and again since 1999.

The Holocaust Memorial also called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is very controversial due to an unusual design but I liked it. It is 4.7 acres covered with 2,711 concrete slabs one for each page of the  Talmud arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. Some slabs are short some are tall and they all slope to the middle of the site. As you walk through it and think about what it represents, you are definitely affected.

And of course we stopped at the remaining sections of the Berlin Wall. It was taller than I had imaged and very intimidating and oppressive. This section has work by various artists on the side facing west and is blank white on the side facing east because that was the way the East German government painted it so they could see the shadows of anyone trying to cross to the West.

The section below has been left the way it was after the wall fell. It is protected by fencing because people kept chipping of pieces as souvenirs.

Since the reunification of Berlin, it has been non-stop building and restoring. What a mess of construction and road repair and all that goes with rebuilding of a major metropolitan center. I would not want to be a driver in this madness. But my driver Mickey did great and I only learned a few new swear words.

Tschüss
Kris

PS Watched Sesame Strasse in Deutsch mit Krümelmonster (Cookie Monster) und Bibo (Big Bird).