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Berlin, Germany
It moves like a virus and enters our skin, the first sign divides us, the second is moving to Berlin
Berlin is one of my favorite cities anywhere. It has this incredible sense of history and energy that is hard to really find anywhere else. Of course a good amount of that history is just really, really awful, but Berlin doesn’t really hide from it, the city just moves on. Even here, in this almost unrealistic collage taken from a constructed panorama photo of Potsdamer Platz at night in the rain, you can start to see layers of new and old and (possibly) why Berlin is one of my favorite cities anywhere.
One of the more powerful experiences that you can get at a memorial is Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. a massive whole block of concrete pillars that appear somewhat nonthreatening from a distance but that experience changes once you go inside. The ground plane starts to dip and the result is that the boxes, which almost resemble low, flat gravestones at the edges, quickly rise in scale as the ground gets lower. As you walk along the narrow paths you start to feel a little anxious, and every intersection you walk through becomes totally blind and a possibility for a head on collision with a stranger. Usually when you think of an experience at a memorial you’re thinking of words like solemn or hopeful and not words like anxious or totally blind or head on collision with a stranger. And that. of course, is where the power of this memorial lies. Not in hopeful remembrance but in that feeling of unease and ultimately relief when you’ve made it all the way through, a memory of something which didn’t seem like that much from the outside but was pretty terrifying from the inside.
I can honestly say I do not know how I feel about this. On Museum Island in the center of the city, across the street from the cathedral and the Lustgarden is the reconstruction site for the Berlin Stadtschloss or City Palace. Originally built in the 1600s on (possibly) the most prominent site in the city, it generally survived the war but was then torn down by the East Germans and replaced with the very modern looking Palace of the Republic. And now that building will be torn down and replaced with a replica of the torn down City Palace and house a museum.
What I really like about Berlin is the layers of history and not, well, this. Sure, if the original City Palace was repaired or renovated after the war, I would be fine with that. But resurrecting a building in a style that is no longer practical feels a bit cheesy for an otherwise raw and authentic city. If they insisted on tearing down the East German building, why not replace it with something new instead of replacing it with something new designed to look really old. Just saying.
It was raining during most of my time in Berlin, which is fine, I’ve been there before and I’ll be there again. And if Berlin is one of my favorite cities anywhere (it is), then taking some time to revisit my favorite museum in one of my favorite cities anywhere always seems like a good idea. This is a constructed panorama inside the IM Pei designed addition to the German Historical Museum, where layers of new and old live harmoniously side by side.
After landing at night, I stayed at the airport hotel before transferring early the next morning to a downtown one
I was in Berlin a few days and (despite the rain) still got around to seeing a lot of the city, even though the damn Berlin Marathon sometimes rerouted me away from where I really wanted to go. But in the interest of symmetry, we’re finishing up this visit to Berlin and this slideshow with one last view of Potsdamer Platz up against a deep blue black sky in the rain.
