East Germany (July 15-17)

 [David] We arrived at the apparently still unfinished Berlin-Schönefeld airport just before midnight on July 14, so we took a rather long and expensive taxi ride to our hotel downtown near the main train station (Hauptbahnhof).  We couldn’t really see much at night, but after sleeping in a bit and opening our window shades the morning of July 15, we realized our hotel room overlooked the large plaza between the train station and the river.  To our amazement, there was a huge crowd there.  We were planning to meet Moritz’s dad, Thomas Nikolai, later that afternoon (as he works at the Ministry of Defense in Berlin currently), and he had warned us that the city might be more crowded than usual because the German football (i.e., soccer!) team was being welcomed home as World Cup champions!  Heidi turned on our TV to find coverage and then realized they were showing the plaza outside our room.  The team was in an open bus with an entourage very slowly making its way through the crowds by the train station toward the Reichstag (Parliament), where the celebration would be.  So, inadvertently, we were able to witness all this firsthand, which was quite a thrill.

We found a little local place where the workers were eating and had a nice, inexpensive, lunch of currywurst and schnitzel before heading out to see some of the city.  Berlin is a huge city—especially so since German reunification—but a lot of the central area is all within walking distance.  We had to make some detours, as a lot of the roads were blocked off because of the World Cup celebration, but we were able to make our way eastward, past the Reichstag and onto the famous Unter den Linden roadway.  Having traveled to West Berlin and into East Berlin in 1988—a year before the Berlin wall came down—I hardly recognized the city now.  The location of the wall is now shown on the streets and sidewalks by different cobblestones and pavement, and it is almost unbelievable to think that just 25 years ago, this city was still divided, with the Russian sector (East Berlin) serving as the capital of the German Democratic Republic [It never ceases to amaze me that countries with “democratic” in their title rarely are…] and the American, British, and French sectors of West Berlin being isolated from the rest of West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany).  The gray, dingy buildings and drab Russian cars from that time in East Berlin are now refurbished and replaced and the heart of the city crosses back and forth across where the wall once stood.  There is construction going on everywhere you look, as the city continues its revitalization.  We saw a major war memorial, the Neue Wache—a stirring hollowed-out building, empty except for the statue of a grieving mother holding her dead son, symbolizing what war and terror bring. We walked around the buildings of Humboldt University and found two very interesting things that go almost unnoticed.  One is a sort of window in the pavement of the Bebelplatz between the law building and the opera house which looks down into a room full of empty shelves with enough space to hold the 20,000 "banned" books the Nazis burned here in 1935; it's a gripping piece of artwork installed by an Israeli artist--quite effective--and it includes a quote from Heinrich Heine: "That was only a prelude--there where they burn books, they burn people in the end."  The other interesting thing is upstairs in the law library--a stained glass window honoring Lenin, which seems very kitschy nowadays.

  

  

We met Thomas near the Brandenburg Gate, the famous monument where Ronald Reagan implored Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”  The nearby Reichstag, just a museum when I was in Berlin, has been renovated to house the German Parliament, and new office buildings have been built adjoining it.  Most distinctive is the new transparent dome, which overlooks the Parliament chamber (bringing a whole new meaning to “transparent government”—something the German government makes a point to have nowadays).  Thomas took us to the Jewish Holocaust Memorial (?), a park with undulating row upon row of vertical stone slabs—walking through it, one feels the loneliness and helplessness of the Jewish people during that dark chapter in history.  We saw where the old Checkpoint Charlie was, between the American and Russian sectors.  We saw “Museum Island,” home to several major German museums (which we unfortunately had no time to see).  We could always see the TV tower (Fernsehturm) that the East German government erected as sort of a monument to its “greatness”—it is said that the East Germans always joked that when it fell over they would at last have an elevator to the west….

  

  

  

Thomas treated us to a lovely dinner at his favorite Italian restaurant, which makes their own wood-fired pizzas, and then later to a nice café for after-dinner drinks.  We tried some famous (though not to me!) Berlin wheatbeer flavored with raspberry (red) or waldmeister (green)—Thomas said the beer was only drinkable if it was flavored!  We very much enjoyed spending a little more time with Thomas and helping him celebrate his birthday, since he couldn’t be at home with his family.

    

I hesitated to share this photo, but it was too funny, given the World Cup celebration we had witnessed:  soccer goals in the urinals.  Aim well!

On the way back to our hotel, we noticed some sort of light show that was supposed to begin soon, so we sat and waited since it was such a nice evening.  It turned out to be a multimedia presentation about German reunification—very interesting and very moving.  I remembered some of the initial events from 1989, but there was a lot more I didn’t remember.  It was good for the kids to see, as well as Heidi and me.  The crosses along the riverfront in the photo below represent just a few of the many East Germans who died trying to swim across the river to West Berlin before the wall came down.

We left Berlin the next day (July 16) for Leipzig—a town with a long history of music (and birthplace of psychology).  This was where the great J. S. Bach himself held his last post as cantor of the St. Thomas and St. Nicholas churches, running a music school at St. Thomas in addition to overseeing weekly church music. St. Thomas holds his grave, has a statue of him out front, and has a stained glass window in his memory (as well as ones for Felix Mendelssohn and Martin Luther).  The smaller "Bach Organ" on the wall was built in 2000 to specifications from Bach's time (1685-1750).

  

The Bach Museum is across the street, in a house which once belonged to a friend of the Bachs. We enjoyed exploring the museum, learning about the Bach family, and seeing some original manuscripts and a historical organ console of the type Bach would have played.

    

The St. Nicholas church (Nikolaikirche), with its pastel colors and palm-like green columns, looked very different from St. Thomas. We got lucky and were able to hear the organ here at a 5:00 organ meditation--what a treat!  In the church bookstore afterward, we found some interesting books and pictures recounting the prayer meetings and peaceful gatherings that started at this church and grew and spread all over Leipzig (and other cities, incluing Dresden) before the fall of the Iron Curtain in East Germany.  It's mind-boggling for us to think about the repression these people lived through--though it does bring to mind the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.

  

After a day in Leipzig, we moved on (July 17) to Dresden, a major city in German history, home to one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire.  We didn't get to see much of the palace or museums, though we did take some time to visit the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon.  This is an interesting collection of historic scientific instruments, including clocks, telescopes, burning mirrors (yes, to set things on fire), vacuum pumps, and various measuring and calculation devices gathered since the 15th century by the Elector of Saxony, among others, mainly during the Enlightenment.  The collection is housed in the museum buildings of the Zwinger, part of the historical Dresden royal court.

     

  

Other main attractions in Dresden were, of course, churches.  We visited the iconic Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady), still magnificent after post-war restoration, complete with a statue of Martin Luther out front.  We also saw the Kreuzkirche (Church of the Cross), another major church heavily damaged in WWII.  It had not been completely restored after the war; rather, rebuilt parts were left unadorned so it is easy to see what was original and how much was destroyed by the ravages of war.  The great organ, installed in the 1960s during communist rule, is grand and glorious; we were lucky again to be there in time for a 15-minute organ meditation.

  

  

  

All in all, we enjoyed the history--both old and modern--of eastern Germany.  There's much more of Germany we'd like to explore (if we have the time and money!).  But next on the agenda was a train ride to the Czech Republic before heading westward again....