Peter’s Blog

I need a vacation
After finishing my work on the Pride Life project and looking at , I decided I needed a vacation NOW. Where to? I hate to admit it, but a DB ad for tickets starting at €49 for their CityNightLine train to Cologne got me thinking. So why not Berlin? I had just been sent the latest draft of Turn Left’s guide to the city, so I was sorted in the guide book category. On Friday I went down to Centraal Station and after a decent wait and some playing around with timetables, I had train tickets to Berlin. Since the night train on Easter was booked almost solid, I decided to take the 06:45 from Schipol to Berlin on Monday morning. On the way back I would take a night train leaving at 00:30 on Thursday. Consulting Turn Left, I booked Monday and Tuesday nights at Motel One Mitte, for €50 a night. So there it was: I was going to Berlin!

Impressions of a strange city
Rolling into Berlin Hauptbahnhof at 13:30 slightly worse for wear for getting up at 05:00 and cycling through falling snow to CS and not really sleeping on the train, I grabbed a WelcomeCard tourist pass and headed to my hotel (incidentally, don’t get the WelcomeCard – none of the museums I went to accepted it, so I would have been better off with a normal travel pass and the Berlin Museum Card).

I get off the U-bahn at the Moritzplatz stop and after one false start, going the wrong direction from the station, I end up at my hotel. I am really impressed with the Motel One ‘concept’: clean, simple, stylish rooms for a very reasonable price (incidentally, having read Monocle on the train ride to Berlin, that stupid word was constantly in my head. I use it here only to hopefully exorcize it). It was getting off the U-bahn at the large and empty (in all senses) station that I start to get a sense that things were missing. Berlin’s a real city with everything you’d expect, don’t get me wrong, but I constantly had the sense as I looked out across the city, “There’s something missing. There should be more here.”

The Stasi Museum actually drove home the sense of things missing: it turns out 3 million people (or around 1/6 of the total population) left East Germany before the wall went up, usually from East to West Berlin. And reunification only renewed this westward migration. So while I didn’t get a sense of the 40,000 apartments apparently empty in the city (all the buildings seemed full to me, whether with (and only with) galleries and architecture firms in Mitte, or with immigrants’ flats and punk squats in Kreuzberg), I did sense an absence: the streets were too wide and the buildings too big for the number of people that saw. Every once and a while you’d look down a very long, wide street and see some place where a building just demands to be. But it’s missing.

Walking east on Oranienstraße from my hotel to Spätzel Express (another good Turn Left recommendation, and proof that you can stuff yourself silly in Berlin for next to nothing), I came across a massive square. It is bigger, probably, any square I’ve seen recently in London, Brussels or Amsterdam and yet… it’s empty. I felt like the buildings should be closer in, the square filled with more than just some trees and grass, more people there (though granted it was 9 at night).

Museums
I tend spend a fair amount of time in museums when I first visit cities and this trip was no different. The Bode Museum was nice but I was reminded of one very important thing: I find Medieval and Renaissance art incredibly boring. And the reason is simple: they’re all the same religious themes. For instance, I swear that over the many hours I once spent in the Uffizi in Florence, I saw a total of seven themes (Announciation, Pietas, etc). All outstanding pieces by true masters. And all incredibly boring, because you’re reduced to playing spot-the-different: “Oooh, Mary’s dress is blue, not pink, in this painting!”

But my god, the Pergamon is a museum on its own unique scale. Look at that massive thing! The whole front of an entire Greek temple. The one word that kept going over and over in my mind as I went from ‘room’ (if you can consider internal spaces the size of small aircraft hangers to be rooms) to room was ‘ridiculous’. The whole thing is rediculous and I love the museum the more for it. Don’t believe me?

Needless to say, I have a much better appreciation for the wealth and engineering of ancient societies.

A fitting memorial?
But the Holocaust memorial got me thinking the most. Knowing that it’s in the area, I walked north from Potsdammer Platz and the Reichstag (Bundestag now, I guess) starts to loom ahead and I see on the right a whole city block of short grey monoliths. I realize that this must be the memorial.

But my first impression upon realizing this? “It looks like some bland public art piece, but on an unusually large scale.”

But I see some people walking through the outer rows and I figure, why not. And then I notice something: the ground is not flat but instead undulates and dips.

I keep going towards the center. Slowly but surely, the ground goes down and so the monoliths rise up. Soon they are above my head. So this is the memorial.

You get a strange sense of isolation and claustrophobia down among the monoliths. The pieces are so large and the field is so big that . But on the other hand, while the pillars are scattered across the z cooridinates, they are absolutely rigid in their adverance to a grid pattern on the x and y ones, meaning you have long open sight lines at the same time.

And then the Manaughian thoughts start flooding in. What if the monoliths weren’t arranged in straight lines but instead in deliberately confusing arrangements than reduced the visitor’s sightlines to something less than a meter or two, making the viewer’s experience, in a very mild and fleeting fashion, something akin to the persecutions the memorial is commemorating. But would that be a fitting memorial to the murdered millions? Should a memorial menace? In short, the memorial would be a maze, or rather, a more confusing one than the one it is right now. But just like any other maze, already little kids treat it like a rural attraction, running between rows and hiding behind pillars only to pop out at their unsuspecting parents.

But then I found the stairs.

Why does an outdoor monument need emergency exits? Why do they go down? Despite being significant features, they’re almost impossible to find even when explicitly looking for them, as only thin grey railings are above ground and the stairs go along, rather than again, the long sides of the monoliths. More than once I saw a stairway in the distance only to doubt myself as I got closer – Why don’t I see it yet? Where did the railings go? Shouldn’t it be at this row? Oh, there it is!

The paranoid quickly has suggestions: maybe they’re in case of a terrorist attack. Maybe there’s a whole, giant secret safe haven buried beneath people’s noses. Maybe, like how in the Middle Ages people used to flee to churches for sanctuary, someone persecuted would run to the memorial, loose their pursuers among the monoliths and then descend one of these ephemeral staircases to safety.

But no, the truth is simpler: the ‘information center’ (they never use ‘museum’) is beneath and memorial and, accordingly, has emergency exits that lead up.

The museum is interesting. It’s quite well done and, despite not being huge, succinctly documents the horrors of the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it’s an incredibly bleak tale. The most hopeful sign I found in the entire museum was that only around 150 Jews from Denmark were killed, the lowest number for any country listed.

And it attracts all types:

But the tourist shops right across the street seem like a bit much:

A foreign land
Has Amsterdam made such an impression on me? Perhaps. In Amsterdam I’ve gotten in the habit of expecting to cross a canal every 50-100 meters. Any cafe in Amsterdam has its kitchen stuck down in some tiny basement, while in Berlin I saw more than one modest place with large kitchens right at street level. So have I perhaps lost some of that American sense of wide open space? Maybe. As I had dinner last night I realized that Germany is actually quite similar to the US. I was in a brew-pub. This could have been in the US. Sure there are restaurants attached to breweries all over Europe, and for a very long time, but this place right off Potsdamer Platz in the Sony Centre was no different than an American place. The chairs, the brass railing, the service, the napkins and utensils given in clay mugs, it all rang true. And that is when I got the sense: if the UK is the closest to the US in the big picture (and politically and socio-economically, it definitely is), Germany may be the closest in the little things. The love for cars. The steel and glass business districts (Potsdammer Platz is basically a small, ersatz version of Chicago’s Loop). A similar approach to food. Dunkin Donuts and Subways all over the place. Hell, Germans even looks like Americans (not surprising, since it’s supposed to be the most common origin for Americans). And, the icing on the cake, Wrestlemania XXIV was advertised on the movie screen during the previews before I saw Juno last night.

The Night Train
After a wait in the cold at the Hauptbahnhof, the train pulled up about 15 minutes late. The train was HUGE, easily the longest passenger train I’ve seen. I had been waiting at the section of the platform, section G, and discovered that my car was all the way in the front. I ran along about half the length of the train, many of the cars apparently coming from the Moscow-Prague line, and then got on the nearest car. The Russian cars I saw looked like shit and the ones I then proceeded to walk through didn’t look a whole lot better. Basically they were pretty spartan rooms – in fact, they looked like the 6 person sitting rooms in smaller regional trains that had just been converted to hold simple fold out beds.

But finally I came to my car, 171. I had booked a ‘CityNightLine’ ticket, so I had been a little confused when the boards in the Berlin station mentioned the EuroNight train. However, I did notice as the train pulled in that there were a few DB CityNightLine cars. My car was one of them. I opened the door and entered a MUCH nicer car, with golden wood accents and nice lighting. The car attendant was a friendly Czech man from JLV and who led me to my room. Wow, a whole lot nicer than the earlier cars I had walked through. The room could sleep three but only my bed was set (I had reserved a single, for €120). A bottle of water was waiting at my bedside. After the attendant asked me would I like coffee or tea – tea – black, green, or fruit – green; I went to bed.

But there was the one drawback. However nice the room is, I still was in a narrow, foam, single bed as we rattled along. While the lighting in the room was very well done (plenty of different, focused options and normal, night, and reading buttons are at head hight for each bed), I found that the illuminated button for the nightlight was shining right into my eyes. After shifting places and putting my head by the window, and as we entered a much smoother spell of track, I fell asleep.

In the morning I got up, with the help of the wake up call by the attendant, and visited the bathroom. There’s actually a rather nice shower there, but, while towels were hanging in my commode, I figured that I’d rather wait the two hours to shower at home. When I got back from the bathroom he had folded away my bed and pulled out the bench of seats. Breakfast was some unremarkable bread and spreads (and the tea) that even airlines have topped, but it did give me a chance to practice my Czech, reading the packaging.

So here I am, writing this missive. My laptop is charging, thanks to the provided laptop power outlet, it’s 9 am on Thursday, and we just passed Arnhem.All in all, quite civilized! While the times aren’t always the most convenient (e.g. the Amsterdam-Berlin night train gets into Berlin at 04:40), the night train is a lot of fun for train fans like me and a reasonably good deal. When you consider that my train from Amsterdam to Berlin cost €70 and my hotel cost €50 a night, the night train was the same price and let me spend the same amount of time in Berlin yet not lose Thursday traveling.

Tags: Berlin, Germany, museums, night train, train, Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.