Goodbyes

It’s our last week in Berlin!

We sent the students off with two fun activities: first, a trip to the opera to see Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

Then, we wrapped everything up with dinner and dancing at Clärchens Ballhaus, a Berlin institution that’s been around since the 1920s. Niguel and Anna tore up the dance floor with some swing moves!

It’s hard to believe that the program is already over! Ten weeks is not nearly enough time to explore a city as rich and layered as Berlin … but I think we did a pretty good job! The students will be moved out and on their way to new destinations by this weekend – some home to Seattle, and some off to explore more of the world! We hope this experience stays with them …

A tour of Potsdamer Platz with Natalie & Ryna

Our final student-led walk took place this week, with a tour of Potsdamer Platz and its surroundings by Natalie and Ryna.

We started out at the former site of Hitler’s bunker – now hidden under a parking lot and GDR-era apartment buildings.

Our next stop was a huge construction site on Leipziger Platz, just half a block from Postdamer Platz. This plot was once home to Wertheim’s department store, headed by the pioneering and gifted businessman Georg Wertheim. Because he was Jewish, however, he was forced to leave the country in 1937, leaving his wife Ursula in charge of the company, which eventually folded and was re-established under different ownership after the war.

Now a new shopping center is being constructed on the site. Though it’s not owned by the Wertheim family, the idea is to refer to the strong commercial history of the area.

Also on Leipziger Platz, we viewed the brick strip that marks where the Berlin Wall once ran. It’s amazing to think that this whole area was a divided, empty wasteland just twenty years ago!

Potsdamer Platz is also strongly associated with certain technological breakthroughs – it became home to one of Europe’s very first traffic lights in 1924, and it is now also a center of the film industry in Berlin. The Sony Center (right) embodies this with its hi-tech roof design.

Moving from a booming commercial center in the twenties to bombed-out no-man’s-land during the mid-twentieth century, then back to thriving retail hub today, Potsdamer Platz is emblematic of the many recent and violent transformations of Berlin. It’s a fitting end to our student tours!

A trip to Wittenberg

This Tuesday we took a day trip to the town of Wittenberg, about an hour away by train.

Wittenberg’s most famous resident was, of course, Martin Luther, who lived here in what was an Augustinian monastery and, after the Reformation, a school and his private residence.

The building is now an excellent museum on the history of the Reformation. One of its best features is the many paintings by Lucas Cranach, who was a close friend of Luther’s. Here are Cranach’s portraits of Luther and his wife Katharina, a former nun. Their marriage has become such a legend that it is reenacted every summer by the locals in Wittenberg!

A few of the rooms are wonderfully preserved, as well. Here is one of the rooms that Luther used as an everyday living space.

(John and Eleanor paused for a quick photo under the portal to Luther’s house.)

The other important site in Wittenberg is the Schlosskirche, where Luther famously nailed his 95 theses on the door in 1517. The church has burned down and been rebuilt since then, but it’s still a pretty amazing piece of history!

One thing that has really been brought home to us – especially in these last weeks, as we discuss contemporary German identity – is just how integral Christian, and in the north, especially Protestant, history is to an understanding of what many people believe it means to be German. This is where it all started, after all! And, as the history of the Reformation shows us, changing people’s assumptions can be difficult. As Germany moves into an age where multiculturalism is increasingly a feature of the social landscape, it will be interesting to see how they make sense of the shifts in religious identity, as well.

A tour of Critical Reconstruction in Mitte with Nara

This week, I took the students on a tour focusing around the reconstruction of Mitte, the central district of Berlin. The guiding principle for this has been the concept of “Critical Reconsruction,” a set of city planning and architectural approaches that emphasize traditionalism and history.

One of the amazing things about this approach is the way that different architects have responded to the task: in Pei Cobb Freed’s Quartier 206 building, for instance, the idea of a turn-of-the-century shopping gallery has been combined with modern materials and geometries to create a rich amalgam of yesterday and today.

The same can be said for this building by Aldo Rossi. Rossi’s writing was incredibly influential on Critical Reconstruction theory, because he emphasized issues of memory – not only official, public memory, but personal and dream-like memory – in his work. As we’ve seen this quarter, Berlin is nothing if not memory-laden …

As visually appealing as much of Critical Reconstruction is, there are also problems with it. One of these is the rhetoric used by planners and architects in order to push certain projects through. Spaces such as Alexanderplatz – remodeled thoroughly in the 1960s – were dubbed “totalitarian” or “socialist,” when they actually embodied architectural types that were typical of Western architecture. This kind of language masks the real target of Critical Reconstruction: the Modernist architecture that preceded it!

As we move into an exploration of Berlin’s contemporary issues, the rifts in the various discourses about identity and space will continue to become more and more apparent.

*Special thanks to Ryna Chin for the great photos!

A tour of Mitte with Ulf Heinsohn

This Tuesday we took a walk through cold, foggy Mitte with Ulf Heinsohn, who helped us unpack some of the layers of meaning in the architecture around us. One of our first stops was the Neue Synagoge, or New Synagogue. Built in the 1860s, the building referred to both the history of Judaism and to its connections with Berlin: the style reflects one of the high points of Jewish culture (the Moorish architecture of the medieval period in Spain, where synagogues took on a look borrowed from Islamic architecture), but it uses a local traditional material (brick).

We also stopped at the Rosenstrasse memorial, which honors the wives of Jewish forced laborers who successfully protested their husbands’ deportation. The memorial was designed by the daughter of one of these couples.

At the Marienkirche, one of the oldest churches in Berlin, we learned how the architecture reflects the changes in the church community. The windowless front of the church was built that way in order to function as a fortress in case of invasion during the late medieval period. The cross in front of the church functioned in “trials by ordeal” — if the accused could fit their fingers in all five holes, they were considered innocent!

Our walk in the cold weather definitely earned us a delicious meal. Our group enjoyed a wonderful dinner together that night at Matzbach, one of our favorite German restaurants!

A visit to the Reichstag

Our activities this week included a tour of the Reichstag (the German parliament building).

Our guide was Ulli Finkenbusch, who works for the Free Democratic Party (FDP). After an introductory discussion about some important political issues facing Germany, we took a tour of the building, beginning with the mezzanine level.

On the lower level of the main parliament building, we viewed an artwork by Christian Bolstanski (left), consisting of metal boxes with the names of all the German Parliament members since 1919. We also saw the remains of the tunnel through which the arsonist who set fire to the Reichstag in 1993 is supposed to have entered building.

We then traversed the underground walkway connecting the Reichstag with the parliament meeting rooms and offices in the Paul-Löbe-Haus.

On our way back through the Reichstag, we glimpsed graffiti left by Soviet soldiers in 1945, which has been preserved as part of the integral history of the building.

Our final stop was on the roof, where Ulli pointed out several of the city sights that are visible from there, and we enjoyed a beautiful sunset!

Dresden: Florence on the Elbe

This Friday and Saturday our class took a trip to Dresden, a beautiful baroque city on the banks of the Elbe River.

The students explored several of the historic sites in the city, including the Frauenkirche. Once a famous ruin symbolizing the firebombing of Dresden, the church has been recently reconstructed.

Since the students were all responsible for seeing the sights on their own, we don’t have images of their explorations, but you can see Annie’s, Mariah’s, Melissa’s or Robert’s blogs for their own photos.

We also learned about an interesting German holiday in Dresden: St. Martin’s Day. Families walk together around the city holding lanterns. All of the cute little kids and their homemade lanterns were quite a sight!

On Friday night, we enjoyed a delicious group dinner at a local Indian restaurant!

… and Chance and I enjoyed Dresden, too!

A tour of Nazi architecture in Mitte with Max, Klayton and Nick

Our theme for this week is the rebuilding of Berlin after the fall of the wall, and one of the things that architects, planners and politicians had to contend with was the history of totalitarianism that was still inscribed on the landscape. To deepen our understanding of this issue, our students Nick, Max and Klayton took us on a tour of sites in Mitte with Nazi history today.

The first stop on the tour was the Foreign Ministry, housed in the former Nazi Reichsbank (the browner building to the right). The first freely elected East German parliament also met here for a time in 1989-90, as they negotiated their integration with the West. In the early 1990s, a “Critical Reconstructionist” architect designed an addition (left). This is an approach, used throughout the center of the new Berlin, that seeks to integrate historical building traditions with modern design.

Next, we visited the memorial to the Nazi book burnings on Bebelplatz, right in front of the Humboldt University buildings.

The current Finance Ministry is housed in another interesting building with a layered history. Built to house the Nazi Air Ministry, it then became home to the GDR’s Council of Ministers after 1949. A socialist realist mural (right) was added at this time. The site is also known for its association with the workers’ uprising in 1953, and there is a memorial to this event on the grounds today.

Our last stop on the tour was the Topography of Terror, a site that contains the excavated remains of the Gestapo headquarters, as well as a museum dedicated to the history of Nazi-sponsored persecution. The Berlin Wall also ran along the edge of the site, as you can see above.

We’ll continue our exploration of Berlin’s responses to its own layered past next week, when we’ll be focusing on issues of memorialization.

Cheering on Hertha BSC at Olympia Stadium

This Saturday we headed out to Olympia Stadium to see Berlin’s team Hertha BSC play against Borussia Mönchengladbach. Not only was it fun to cheer on the team, but we got to experience a piece of history! Built under the Nazis, Olympia Stadium was home to the famous 1936 Olympic Games. In 2006, it also hosted the World Cup (the fancy new roof was added then).

Even though our team lost, the students really enjoyed the experience of a true European soccer game – complete with wildly cheering fans. The energy in the stadium was enough to keep us all entertained!

A trip to Leipzig, epicenter of the Wende

This Friday we took a day trip to Leipzig to learn more about the events that led to the Wende – the momentous “turn” or “change” in 1989 that eventually led to the reunification of Germany.

Our first stop was the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum, a museum that focuses on the  the resistance movement that was centered in Leipzig in the 1980s, and its eventual results in the “peaceful revolution.”

Afterwards, historians Dorothee Wierling and Bernd Lindner shared their expertise with us on the streets of Leipzig itself, taking us step-by-step along the route walked by the protesters here in 1989. The resistance movement first centered on the Nikolaikirche, a church where politically-charged “peace prayers” had already been taking place for several years. In 1989, attendance began to soar as people joined the movement to demand change.

As the number of protesters grew week by week, they dared to walk further and further along the “Ring” avenue that encircled the city center. Herr Lindner, who took part in the protests, helped us retrace their steps. (He augmented the experience with photos from a book he helped co-author – right.)

By November of 1989, 70,000 protesters were marching together peacefully through the streets of Leipzig. One of the last sites to be incorporated into their route was the Runde Ecke – the building housing the central offices of the Stasi.

As we approach the anniversary of the fall of the Wall, it’s good to remember that this revolution did not begin in Berlin, but in Leipzig. The capital is often privileged in the narrative of the Wende, but it couldn’t have happened without the courage of the protesters in this other key city.