Berlin Part III: Alternative Art- The Berlin Wall and Bertolt Brecht

OK! STEP RIGHT UP! GRAB YOUR FALAFEL OR DUNYA KABOB! (I did)
Let's take a walk along the Berlin Wall, a Museum of Fine and Freakish Art painted on the skeleton of history:

Very famous

I like her face.

And then there's this guy.
Real Ad. No Joke.

We just had to stop at the theater where Bertolt Brecht, author of "Mother Courage and her Children", put on his plays- we would be letting our History of 20th Century Intellectualism course and our history degrees if we didn't.

Bertolt-Brecht-Platz

Don't know if you can read the sign in the circle on the building in the picture to the right, but it says Berliner Ensemble...

We spent most of Sunday visiting memorials in the Tiergarten... which itself had been pretty much entirely demolished to become a potato garden during the war...

The Reichstag

We saw the Reichstag, the German parliament- the field in front was the location of the very bloody battle of Berlin... Stalin had made the Reichstag a competition for his two armies, declaring eternal glory for whoever first got to the top. The Reichstag is capped by a huge glass dome which replaced the stone dome lost in the war. The repairs made to buildings in Berlin are patchwork: they put in a new glass dome but left many bullet holes in the walls. They also have weird taste. According to Michael, the German national fat chicken (it's an eagle, but its modern redesign has everyone thinking of a fat chicken now) hangs as a giant sculpture over the prime minister's head inside the Reichstag now.

The Soviet memorial is also in the Tiergarten.The memorial consists of a large inscribed wall, preceded by the imposing tombs of two unknown soldiers, and guarded by the first two tanks to enter Berlin, now converted into statues.  It seems strange to me to have a memorial to those who came in and conquered your city, but I think we can all agree WWII and the following Cold War period was a pretty weird time. There are some political issues with the memorial. The ranks of the Soviet army which followed the front line (but not the front line itself, which had seen waaay too much and therefore didn't want to cause further violence) looted and abused quite a lot of Berlin. 

We also visited the Composer's Memorial, featuring Mozart, Beethoven, and the guy who composed the German national anthem. The park was very pretty. 

And how better to finish a trip to Berlin than with some New Zealand style pie and a panicked rush through the airport because the notice said the flight was boarding when it wasn't?

But seriously- I highly recommend travel with a history buff who knows the city you're visiting. Things become so much more interesting. 

PIE