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central Berlin
Sunday, September 15 2024
location: room 305, Klassik Hotel, Berlin Germany
This morning I went down to the Hotel Klassik's front desk and asked for a cup of coffee, and the somewhat-bitchy youngish woman working there made me one but then asked for my room number. Wait, now I had to pay for coffee? I told her some other person with her job had made me a cup of coffee for free. She shrugged and said that she was supposed to charge for it. So I shrugged and took my coffee back to the room. Meanwhile, Gretchen said she'd slept pretty well despite another night of punchis punchis punchis. Apparently the earplugs had worked for her.
When we finally left the hotel room, we biked over to that neighborhood we'd visited the afternoon of the 13th to have lunch in an all-vegan Thai restaurant. We dined at a pleasant sidewalk table near an American woman who seemed to be having a remote business meeting on her phone. Gretchen ordered her usual favorites, which is good enough for me. It as all a bit too fresh, undercooked, and insufficiently oily for my tastes. But it was a good meal, and Gretchen thought it was so amazing that she left a 10% tip (tips in Germany are so rare that many point-of-sale machines don't have a way to add them).
The bulk of today's touristy activity would be happening in the very middle of Berlin, beyond the tall retro-futuristic radio tower. On the way there, we biked past the Chinese and Braziian embassies, passed the radio tower, and some distance later, arrived at our first destination, the grim Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. As we were about to enter its grid of tomblike blocks, we ran into Robin and her husband whatshisname, a retired couple from New York City we'd met on the boat. Robin's husband is a former software developer and probably on the spectrum, so, like me, he mostly kept quiet while Gretchen and Robin prattled on about vegan food and and a failed vegan alt attempted by a hotel (for some reason Robin loves faux eggs, and she's always talking about black salt, the substance that infuses food with the smell of farts). Gretchen always gets worked up in conversations, and at some point I thought I should tell her that her exuberant mood was not appropriate to the memorial we were about to enter.
After Robin and her husband headed off, we could experience the memorial. It's a grid of rectangular concrete blocks that suggest a cemetery, and around the periphery, they are only bench-height and not occupying every place in the grid where a block could be. But then as you enter the middle of the memorial, the blocks fill the grid completely and become taller and taller across an undulating landscape. Some even lean in a little overhead. In so doing, they take the cemetery metaphor and crank it up until it is overwhelming and imprisoning. In this way, it seems like a metaphor for how the little war crimes here and there that produced a certain small trickle of death led eventually to the industrial production of death as a major goal of the German state. As Gretchen and I explored the deepest darkest place in the grid, Gretchen was dismayed to find the remains of where some idiot has spray painted "JESUS" on one of the blocks, though this had mostly been scrubbed away. Hey, Jesus freak, read the room!
The memorial of concrete blocks is actually sitting on the roof of an entirely subterranean museum that uses various media to tell the stories of numerous individuals who experienced the horror of the Holocaust. The museum is free, and it's popular enough that people have to wait in line for a chance to get in. Otherwise it would quickly become overcrowded. We joined the line next to a nice young Argentinian woman who is a student in Berlin. She'd come with her family, and Gretchen chatted with them for several minutes in Spanish. Everyone was talking slowly enough for me to follow along. Among other things, we learned that the woman doesn't much like Argentina and is hoping to move to Berlin.
At the bottom of the stairs as one enters the Holocaust museum, one has to go through an extensive security scan, since it's not just Jesus freaks who might take issue with the place. After we'd cleared that, were released into the beginning of the exhibit. Initially it mostly consisted of black and white photographs and text in both English and German. It came to a fair amount of reading, though over time, there was a sameness to it all, as there is to any assembly line (this one being of death). People were rounded up from there homes and, in a lot of stories, packed into the backs of trucks that had been modified so that their exhaust would fill the space the people had been packed into. They would then drive to the edge of town and dump the now-dead people into a hole in the ground. Early in the Holocaust, particularly in Eastern Europe, that was the usual pattern. Later in the Holocaust, people would be brought in by train from all over Europe to be gassed and then cremated in centralized death camps.
Further into the museum, the stories of individuals were laid out in rectangles on the floor, echoing the grid in the memorial overhead. Here we got to see scraps of writing from people who had witnessed all manner of horrors and would soon be dead themselves.
Still further into the museum there were videos running in a loop and maps showing where the murdered were concentrated. Simon had visited the museum earlier and had mentioned that some of the victims even came from North Africa, and indeed that was what the map showed. The countries that suffered the least appeared to be Denmark and Sweden. (Apparently the Danish King delayed the Holocaust in Denmark long enough for its Jews to escape to Sweden, which was neutral throughout the war.)
After that somber experience, we biked towards the nearby Brandenburg Gate, stopping briefly to check out an enigmatic memorial to the gay people killed in the Holocaust. (Tt was large block with a small window in the side, giving people a view of a video loop playing on a small screen.) I remember the Brandenburg Gate being a huge symbol of Germany during the Cold War, when it was trapped in no-man's land between East and West Berlin. Now's it's back to being just another neoclassical monument in Berlin. The scene around it was crowded when we got there, since it is, for some reason, the biggest tourist destination in all of Germany. I suppose there's something compelling about a monument that was built as a symbol of a united Germany being mothballed for decades during a period of a very much divided Germany, only to once again serve its purpose in a renewed, unified Germany.
Not far from the Brandenburg Gate is the old Reichstag, a building that was famously set on fire by the Nazis as a genuine false-flag operation. Today we only saw it from the back, and I asked Gretchen where someone would place a match if they wanted it to burn down. She agreed that the question was ridiculous: the whole thing appears to be made out of stone. There's a dome on top, but it's made of equally-non-inflammable glass. (That dome is open to the public, but it is so mobbed by tourists that one has to secure a slot to visit it well in advance, something Gretchen wasn't able to do.)
As we started heading back eastward, we went along the south bank of the River Spree, starting near some very modern buildings near the Reichstag. Not far along the Spree, Gretchen was interested in taking a ride on one of the tour boats that go up and down the river while a narration of the things that one sees along the way would blare from loudspeakers. We were right there at a dock in front of a tour boat that would soon be leaving, but Gretchen shrewdly went off to see what the competition offered while I waited with the bikes. I don't know that she actually found any competition during her brief absence, and soon we were on the open-air upper deck of the tour boat. We'd tried to order food and beer from the guy at the bar down on the lower deck, but he said he'd be coming around to us. When Gretchen saw the menu, she almost lost her shit to see that there were options labeled vegan. Such a thing would be impossible to find on a tour boat in the United States, not even one leaving Burlington to do a leisurely tour of Lake Champlain. So we ordered the fries with vegan sourcream, Gretchen ordered some sort of non-alcoholic drink, and I got a big-ass schwarzbier. Our tour was only about an hour in length and took us east all the way to the first lock (near Alexanderplatz), then we turned around and went west past where we'd started, the Reichstag, and the Tiergarten, then we turned around one last time and returned to where we started. Periodically we'd go under a low bridge, but it was never quite low enough that even standing people had to worry about hitting their heads.
After we got back to our bikes, we hurried as quickly as we could back to the hotel, as the sky threatened us with rain. For some reason Gretchen was being awfully cranky about first the weather (which wasn't that bad) and then the navigation (which, it turned out, was sending us on the best possible bike route), and I was finding this all terribly irritating. It's possible we'd just been unable to get away from each other for a little too long on this unusually-long vacation. Later in the bike ride, we were briefly hit by a legitimate downpour, but it only lasted about twenty seconds.
After resetting back in Hotel Klassik, Gretchen and I went out to dinner at Dervish, an all-vegan Uzebek restaurant in the nearby neighborhood. The Uzebeks are a Turkic people from Central Asia, so it makes sense that their cuisine would end up in Turkey and that, since generations of Turks have emigrated to Germany since WWII, a certain about of Uzebek culture would travel with them. Still, one would think "vegan Uzebek" would be a very thin slice of the cultural pie in Germany. When we entered the restaurant, Gretchen initially wanted to sit Turkish-style on pillows at low tables (and I reminded her to remove her shoes first). But the range of motion on my knees has always been in the the bad part of the bell curve, and when Gretchen saw how uncomfortable I was being, she had us move to a conventional table. Dervish must be a Muslim-owned restaurant, since it does not offer alcoholic beverages. I ordered a cappuccino, and when it came out, it was the size of a bowl of soup. As for the food, some of it was decidedly Middle Eastern or even Mediterranean (hummus, olives, and some sort of not-very-good eggplant thing). But other items seemed to come from the Far East (kimchi and thick noodles). The dish that I'd never really had before that seemed like it really had come directly from Uzbekistan was a sort of lentil loaf served with a very interestly-spice tomato sauce. Overall, the food was great, and there was so much that we took a bunch of it back to our hotel room. Our service had been so good that Gretchen left an tip.
Another view from our hotel window.
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The shallow part of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
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Gretchen in the deep part of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
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Looking up at the sky from the deep part of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
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The Brandenburg Gate, viewed from the east.
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The back of the Reichstag. If you had to set fire to it, where would you put the match?
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Our tour narration claimed that this was a 19th Century parking garage.
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A view of the Berlin Cathedral from our tour boat.
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The Fernsehturm and Bode-Museum, viewed from the tour boat.
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The Fernsehturm and Berlin Cathedral, as viewed from the tour boat.
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Some cruddy-looking columns, as seen from our tour boat.
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Our fries with vegan sour cream on our tour boat.
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There isn't much headroom as we turn around under this bridge at the east end of our tourboat tour of the Spree.
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Lion-like faces on a stone façade of a building we passed on the Spree.
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Super modern buildings along the Spree.
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The Reichstag from our tour boat.
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Classic Berlin graffiti as seen from the tour boat.
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The glass Reichstag dome as seen from the tour boat.
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