Day 8     6/11/12

We started off the day by visiting the Berliner Dom (aka, the Berlin Cathedral), which was built in its original form in the 15^th century, but has undergone numerous remodeling since. The most recent remodel was in 1905, though it had to be restored after the allied air raids of WWII.  Aside from the lovely interior, we had the option to climb to the top of the dome for a view of the city, which I really enjoyed.

As you can see, I was really quite excited about the sky and the clouds and the view.

This picture shows a controversial plot of land in central Berlin. It is the location that the Stadtschloss, the Berlin City Palace, stood from the 15^th century to the second World War, when it was heavily damaged by bombing and pulled down by orders of the GDR. In its place, a large modernist building was constructed, the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic). This building was torn down after German reunification in 1990, and is currently a park-like area, though there is a public movement to reconstruct the Stadtschloss for historical identity reasons.

In the afternoon we went to “Museum Island”, going into the Pergamon, Neues, and Altes museums. All three museums were abundant with staggeringly famous pieces (many of which were obtained during German conquests). The Pergamon contained immense pieces, such as the top steps and alter of the ancient Greek Pergamon temple (broken down and reassembled inside the museum). I could never get a good picture. Also present were the Gates of Ishtar; again I couldn’t get a whole picture so I’ve provided the model they had on display. The Gates were constructed as the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon in 575 BC by order of King Nebuchadnezzar II. The giant, blue-stone gates have alternating bas reliefs of dragons and cattle. In the corner of the room encased by the Ishtar Gates is the giant stone upon which Hammurabi’s Code is inscribed. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, wrote and enacted the code of laws pertaining to scaled punishments for public disobedience, elaborating upon “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. The largest portion of the code pertains to family and marital matters.

The Neues collection concentrated on Egyptian and the Middle Eastern part of the world, while the Atlas museum had a greater selection of Greek and Roman history.

Day 9     6/12/12

Today we went to the German History museum, starting the morning with the temporary exhibits. The most extensive was that on the life of Fredrick the Great, King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786 and known as one of its greatest leaders. Still revered today, Fredrick was of the Hohenzollern line and was best known as a brilliant military campaigner and leader of the Prussian armies. As a young man, Frederick disdained court life and preferred the arts of music and philosophy, which lead him to unsuccessfully attempt to flee from his authoritarian father, Frederick William I, with childhood friend Hans Hermann von Katte. After being caught, he was forced to watch the execution of his friend, an incident believed by many to be Fredrick’s making as a man—others feel he would have been an ever greater ruler had he not suffered that great oppression and tragedy. Upon ascending to the Prussian throne, he began his military conquests by attacking Austria and claiming Silesia during the Silesian Wars, winning military renown for himself and Prussia. By the end of his life, Frederick had conquered Polish territories and connected most of his kingdom.  Aside from these militant pursuits, Frederick continued his interest in music and philosophy. An ardent flutist, Frederick wrote hundreds of pieces by the end of his life while still patronizing other arts and philosophers. Voltaire was a personal friend who took residence in Fredrick’s favorite palace, Sanssouci, for years.  Fredrick was called ‘the great’ starting halfway through his career for no small reason.

Moving on to the permanent exhibit, which we looked at later that day, it was immense and fabulous and documented the history of Deutchland from the very beginnings with the movements of the Celts all the way to current happenings. It had a vast collection, so I’ll just mention some highlights (or at least those that I also got good photos of). First off, we saw the horn of Rolland.

We saw this very comical and image of Martin Luther posting the 95 Theses with a pen that’s knocking off the Pope’s hat. Look closely to find the other Martin Luthers in this photo (can you find them all?)

Also… they had Napoleon’s hat. From Waterloo. The Germans stole it, and his sword, out of his carriage as he fled the battle. That. Is cool.

I really can’t say more without beginning to summarize the entirety of German history, a task I am not willing to uptake.

Day 10   6/13/12

We began the day by walking around the area right near our apartments, reading the historical placards with information about the area. Our apartments stand on the area that used to be the location of the Nazi bunkers; the bunker where Hitler shot himself was only about a block away. On a nearby street corner there is this pole in the shape of a face. It is dedicated to Georg Elser, with a base plate stating “Ich habe den Krieg verhindern wollen.”, which translates to ‘I wanted to halt the war.’  Elser was a Jewish man who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Munich on November 8^th, 1939 in order to prevent the war begun by Germany from spreading. A couple of minutes before the bomb exploded, the dictator left the assembly hall, surviving the blast. Elser was captured trying to immigrate to Switzerland and was handed over to the Gestapo; after five years in concentration camps, Elser was executed at Dachau in 1945.

Following this, we went to the site where one of the last remaining pieces of the Berlin wall stands. This location has double significance, for it was also the location of the former SS headquarters, demolished by the soviets after the war. Today there is a museum and a timeline following Hitler’s rise to power and progression through the war.

In the evening, we climbed to the top of the Reichstag to look out across Berlin from the new dome (The old having been destroyed by a fire during the Nazi’s rise to power, an event they used as a reason for the persecution of their political opponents). The new dome is architecturally profound, with a large glass and metal frame open to the sky. Also, there was a pretty good view.

Day 11   6/14/12

Our first stop of the morning was the CDU central office. The CDU is the reigning party in the German government; during our tour, we were shown Angela Merkel’s office and chair in the conference room. Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany and Chairwoman of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). 

We visited the Nordic Embassy in Berlin, where Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland placed their individual buildings inside the same exterior shell to share a common courtyard. 

Aside from the buildings being architecturally interesting, the furnishings of said building were also modern and interesting. Something I never took note of prior to this trip was that many architects design furniture and other household objects, either to suit the house or to just have made a chair. Usually they seem to be pretty good at it, and there was some really cool furniture at the embassies. 

Speaking of cool things at the embassies, one last thing to note would be that the Norwegian embassy had a sauna in it. For use by the (few) workers and their families. Because, you know, who doesn't need a sauna at work?

Day 1     6/5/12

After arriving in Berlin and getting settled, we went on a quick tour of the city and walked along the Spree and talked briefly about some of the iconic buildings nearby. While looking at one of the government buildings (with a large, open circle in one of its external walls), Mr. Caldwell explained that structures with large, geometrical shapes cut out were examples of the rationalism architectural movement. We later went by a Fire/Police Station built in 2004. The building was designed by German architects Sauerbruch and Hutton as a modern extension of an existing 19^th century building. The façade of the new structure is composed of large colored-glass paneling that may be opened and closed to control airflow in the building; the green and red coloring represent the colors of Germany’s police and fire brigades.

Day 2     6/5/12

Today we covered primarily architecture topics. Berlin is a centre of modern architecture for various reasons, one of which being that Berlin was largely destroyed and damaged during WWII and the subsequent occupations. The reconstruction period that followed Berlin being named as the capital of the newly reunited East and West Germanies gave opportunity for pushing Berlin’s image and structure into a new modern period expressed through contemporary buildings.

Early in the morning we proceeded to Pariser Platz, the location of the famous Brandenburg gate and home to the American and French embassies. The buildings to take note of, however, would be the Academy of Art Berlin and the DZ Bank buildings. The first is interesting based on the calamity of the inside, with metal, glass, and wood thrown together in a seemingly haphazard manor to construct a building. The result is baffling.

The DZ Bank building was one of my favorites. You walk in the doors and it seems like it should be a normal office building, but walking further you are able to look through a wooden archway to see…

The sky and metal netting of the glass ceiling reflect on the bottom glass structure, providing an exceptional view as you look to the conference room-containing center structure. Quite an exceptional building for a bank.

Interesting contrasts to these two buildings were their simple facades. During reconstruction, “eaves heights had to be 22 meters, and buildings had to have a proper termination against the sky. Stone cladding was to be used as far as possible.” This was quoted form Wikipedia for phrasing, but essentially the buildings were dictated not to be too extravagant or exciting on the outside so that their presence wouldn’t take away from the glory of the Brandenburg Gate.

After this we walked along the previous path of the Berlin wall to a section of formerly East Germany where part of the wall is set up on display, next to a simple metal pole and placard marking the location where the first part of the wall was torn down.

My favorite part of the day was after lunch when we went to the Berlin Philharmonic. It was an immense structure with both a larger and smaller concert hall, designed and built in the 60’s and completed in the 80’s. Both concert halls were golden, asymmetrical, tent-like, pentagon shaped, and clearly astounding for their architectural significance. I, however, was distracted from this by the musicians practicing in the halls (doing so for the pleasure of using the building’s astounding acoustics). The first group, practicing in the small concert hall, was a string ensemble and the second, in the large hall, was an orchestra featuring an Italian singer. We snuck in to listen to a few songs of each, all of which was utterly fantastic. The philharmonic gives free lunchtime concerts every Tuesday, so hopefully we'll be able to make some of those before we leave.

Here’s a picture of the epic covering type things of the shopping center/plaza that I ate lunch in. Goulash (soup) is good.

Day 3     6/6/12

Today was history, generally sticking to 1200-1400. Essentially what we learned was that Berlin was rather isolated from Christianity and the (possibly subsequently) intellectual developments of Western Europe, meaning that many of the structure and developments were rather later in coming to Berlin. One of the sites we visited was the remains of a Franciscan Monastery. Almost 3 of its 4 walls were still standing, and the absent wall was replaced by a rather evil looking wrought-iron fence to keep out trespassers. The other odd thing about this structure was that an abundance of rather questionable modern art sculptures had been placed inside the open grounds of the former Monastery.

We visited the monument to the May 10^th, 1933 book burnings.

Another interesting site we visited today was St. Hedwig's Cathedral, built in the 18th century. It is a round cathedral, patterned after the Pantheon, with a large domed roof and stairways leading down into an underground room with and alter and some other private rooms. But what really made it interesting was the organ player. You could begin to hear the 'music' right as we walked up to the door, and it took me a moment to realize that no, no it is not good. The man on the organ was playing the entire time we looked around and the noise resounded throughout the church hauntingly. I cannot begin to properly describe the vibe. The music had lots of long, melodious deep notes, typical of an organ, but was interspersed with high pitched notes played with no musically appealing order. The entire church was given an unnatural, creepy, and dark feel. I felt odd attempting to smile for pictures while listening to such haunting (and not in a good way) sounds. Bizzare place.

               From there we proceeded to another cathedral designed by Karl Freidrich Schinkel, a prominent German architect of the 19th century, which had been turned into the Schinkel museum. What made this building stand out was that they ran out of funding after designing and thus were unable to use marble or brick or any of their desired building materials, so instead they painted all the walls to look like marble and the ceiling to look like perfectly laid pink brick, with additional cross supports painted in with such detail I had to double take to realize that it was artificial. Very gothic styled, with truly beautiful stained glass windows. We then proceeded to the Grendlskfr square before disbanding (my phone/camera went MIA at this point).

Later that night, while wandering near the Brandenburg gate, I sat for a while and listened to a British guy (news caster? Historian?) film a piece on the gate. Did you know that the statue on the top of the gate represents Victory, the Roman goddess? Or that the statue was taken by Napoleon with him back to Paris after having defeated the Prussians? Prussian didn’t get it back till 1814.

Day 4     6/7/12

Today we toured the Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism and the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe (and attached museum). Words cannot describe.

We walked through the tiergarten after lunch. It’s beautiful and extensive; parks are glorious. We made our way to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (the House of the Cultures of the World), build in the late 50’s by an American architect. I cannot show you a picture, but imagine an orange and white building shaped loosely like the Startrek insignia. On the inside it quickly became my favorite place. Once making our way inside, Katie and I followed the sound of tribal music to a large box-like room sitting inside the massive foyer. We entered a hallway leading into complete darkness with the tribal music getting louder with every step. Eventually we were in complete darkness with drums so loud I could hear nothing else. We came to the end of the short hallway and began to turn into the room, and then I can not quite describe the thoughts rushing through my head (again, it was pitch black and too loud to hear): essentially, we simultaneously decided that there could be a room full of people sitting in the room that we were barging in on. We ran. Once outside, we ran into Dr. Stuckey and some of our class mates and decided to make a second venture (they were mocking us for running, which was perfectly acceptable from the outside, but I feel that if they’d been in the same situation they might have gotten uncomfortable as well). We reentered the room to find an empty, pitch-black room with blaring tribal music and a large screen. The screen then played the best video, which was essentially 5 to 10 minutes of an angler fish swimming to the drumbeat slowly panning out to a view of two men dancing. It reminded me strongly of the music video for Lonely Boys by the black keys. I cannot convey how awesome it was, so you’re going to have to trust me.

We then walked to the Victory column, first constructed in 1873 to originally commemorate the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian War, but during construction they gained a victory over the French so the column came to signify that victory as well.  The column was later moved by the Nazi’s to its present location on the edge of the teirgarten. We climbed to the top (around 300 winding steps) for an expansive, panoramic view of the city.

Also, we played on a giant jungle gym made entirely of (steel) rope. It was cool.

Day 5     6/8/12

Today we took a S-ban to Potsdam, that dreaded place I’ll be visiting next week. It was really cool. We started off the day by looking at the Einstein Tower constructed in the early 20^th century. It is still an active research base so we were unable to go inside.

From there we proceeded to the Sanssouci Park/Gardens. As we sat in the shade of a large tree next to the great fountain, Dr. Stuckey Sanssouci is the former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. The palace was build, as was popular at that time, in the style of the French Palace of Versailles surrounded by glorious gardens as far as the eye can see. A little further in the gardens was the Orangarie palace, which was also incredibly cool looking.

That’s really all for that day information wise, because it was really a look and see how cool/beautiful this place is kind of thing. Would show you a picture, but you know, no camera. Internet it. Then imagine that, but with way better weather than anything. It was seriously beautiful outside that day….

Speaking of cameras, we ended this day by arduously navigating the German train system to go and meet with the nice old couple who found my phone a few days ago and retrieved it! 

END EVERY DAY WITH FRIENDSHIP!!!!