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 tour of three Holocaust memorials with Ryder, Cassie and Michelle

Our student-led tour this week took us to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a large memorial in the center of Berlin. Our guides Michelle and Cassie explained the history of the site, and encouraged us to experience it for ourselves. The memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman, consists of a field of stelae meant to engender a highly personal experience for each visitor.

Our tour also included a visit to a lesser-known, though still centrally-located, memorial: the Memorial to the Roma and Sinti Murdered by the Nazis. Because of problems with the materials, it’s still unfinished. Ryder introduced us to the history of these groups, as well as some of the controversies surrounding the building of the memorial.

We also stopped to take in the memorial honoring homosexual victims of the Holocaust, and learned a little about gay history in Berlin and Germany. Together, all three of these memorials represent important gestures by the German government toward honoring the victims of the Nazis and ensuring that such a tragedy does not occur here again. We were especially lucky that our students took the time to point out the two lesser-known memorials that augment the powerful Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

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 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.

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.

Treptower Park with Anna, Mariah and Janet

The student tour this week brought us to Treptower Park, home to …

… houseboats (one of three colonies in Berlin) …

An observatory built for a world’s expo in the park around the turn of the century, and later supposedly used by Einstein …

… and an absolutely massive Soviet World War II memorial and cemetery. Since the park lies in what was formerly East Berlin, it was a natural choice for the Soviets to honor 7,000 of their men who died here. The site is now under the official protection and care of the German government, thanks to a line in the treaty signed by the Soviets in 1989.

The main attraction is a 38-foot statue of a Soviet solder saving a child, posed over a broken swastika. Though it’s a bit over the top, one can’t help but think about the staggering number of men buried here. It’s another sobering facet of Berlin’s complex, and often tragic, history.

A trip to Weimar & Dessau

This weekend we traveled to the beautiful city of Weimar, home of Goethe, Schillar, Liszt, and the birthplace of the Bauhaus! Our first stop on Friday afternoon was the Bauhaus museum – a small but unique little space with treasures from the first years of the school’s existence. Unfortunately the Bauhaus school was forced to leave Weimar after the Nazi party gained power in the state of Thüringen in 1924.

This opened a difficult chapter in Weimar’s history, and on Saturday we visited the nearby site of Buchenwald concentration camp.

The most striking thing one finds on entering the camp is the view: the camp is set in the middle of the forest (Buche means “beech” and Wald means “woods”), on a hill that allows a view across the valley. It’s difficult to believe that such horrible things could transpire amidst such natural beauty.

The original barracks are no longer extant – most are now marked with dark loose stones, but one has been rebuilt in its original form. One of the few other buildings still standing on the grounds is the crematorium, which was strangely located adjacent to a little petting zoo built for the children of the SS.

The Goethe Eiche – Goethe’s Oak – was an oak tree left standing in the camp by the SS. The prisoners named it in remembrance of Goethe’s trips to this same forest. It was damaged in an Allied bombing in 1944 and subsequently chopped down.

Buchenwald was also used as a Soviet internment camp after the war. It’s thought that about 7,ooo people died during this time in the camp’s history, and they were buried in unmarked graves in the woods surrounding the site. Because Thüringen became part of East Germany, the deaths were not acknowledged during the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall finally allowed the victims’ families to speak up and publicly remember their relatives.

The Soviets left another highly visible legacy: a huge memorial to the camp’s liberation, on a hill overlooking Weimar. Buchenwald’s many layers of tragic history gave us much to consider …

The class was free to spend the rest of the day exploring the town. Chance and I took a stroll through the park and admired the “Roman House,” the amazing landscape and the first Bauhaus demonstration house, the Haus am Horn.

Today we left Weimar and headed back to Berlin, with a stop in Dessau to visit the most famous site of the Bauhaus, their school building, designed by Walter Gropius and built in 1925-6. We got a fantastic tour from a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide, and I think our students might almost be convinced that Modernism isn’t all horrible … (those of us who study architecture are already sold).

We couldn’t have asked for a more lovely day to see this truly seminal piece of architecture. This week we dive into the study of the specter that haunts both the history of the Bauhaus and Buchenwald: the Nazis and their influence on Berlin and Germany.

Ku’damm, Zoo and KaDeWe with Robert, Dan and Niguel

Our students Robert, Dan and Niguel took us on a great tour of the Ku’Damm/Zoostation area of Berlin this Tuesday. We began just off the Ku’Damm at the Gedächtniskirche – the ruin of a church built by Kaiser Wilhelm II and bombed in 1943. The ruin has become one of the symbols of Berlin, but you can’t see it at the moment – it’s under that ugly white scaffolding you can see in the picture above. Surrounding the ruin are a chapel and belltower designed by the German modernist Egon Eiermann in the 1950s.

We headed into the ground floor of the ruin first. The ceiling still displays some beautiful Byzantine-style mosaics, duly appreciated by our class …

We then headed next door to the Eiermann-designed chapel. Though the newer buildings aren’t much to look at from the exterior (Berliners have nicknamed them the “lipstick and powder box”), the chapel is pretty stunning on the interior. We caught the organist practicing, which added to the atmosphere.

Our next stop was the zoo, where our guides not only acquainted us with the incredible diversity of its inhabitants – the most in the world! – but related the heartbreaking story of Knut, the baby polar bear born in the zoo in 2006. Knut was a media favorite (with good reason – he really was incredibly adorable!), but unfortunately he died earlier this year.

The mood picked back up as we moved to our last stop, the famous Kaufhaus des Westens, or KaDeWe. It’s the biggest department store in continental Europe, with a history that spans over 100 years.

The top floor of the store is known for its incredible selection of foods, both local and imported. And what should we find as we come up the escalators but a little taste of home – Columbia Crest, on sale. It seems we’re not the only Washington imports to Berlin!

A day in Potsdam

Our day trip to Potsdam featured more of our favorite 19th-century designer, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. (You probably think we’re just obsessed with him, but believe us – he truly was great!) We began at the St. Nikolaikirche near the city center. It was begun according to plans by Schinkel, but finished by his student Ludwig Persius.

Berlin isn’t the only city that is rebuilding past monuments – here you can see that Potsdam is also busily rebuilding its royal palace (across from the Nikolaikirche), as a home for the state parliament. Meanwhile, East German buildings on the other side of the square are slated for demolition and replacement.

A trek across Potsdam and through Sanssouci park brought us to another Schinkel site, this one built for a very elite audience – the crown prince.

Schinkel built a tiny summer palace (really the size of a summer home) for the prince, who was a prolific artist and designer himself. Together, they fashioned what the prince referred to as “Siam” – a utopian space filled with rich symbolism, much of which is now lost on those of us without the proper classical education!

Schinkel also designed a house for the court gardener, which later became a billiards room, tea lounge and general garden leisure space for the prince and his friends.

We took some leisure time ourselves – to contemplate the connection between human constructive activity and that of nature, as Schinkel intended – before heading off on our own walks through the rest of Sanssouci park. Next week: Berlin around the turn of the century!

A walk through Schinkel’s Berlin with John Toews

On Wednesday John took us on a tour of Berlin’s historical district, known as Mitte. The focus of our walk was the city as it was in the 19th century, when its inhabitants included some of the leading intellectuals of the time, and the city styled itself as “Athens on the Spree.” We began at the Brandenburg Gate, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in the late 18th century as a kind of propylaea leading into Berlin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel had a hand in redesigning the staff held by the goddess of peace who crowns the monument.

We continued on to Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus (now called the Konzerthaus) on the Gendarmenmarkt, a somewhat early commission and an example of the architect’s turn toward neoclassicism.

On the Forum Fridericianum, a square built under Frederick the Great (whose monument you see on the right), there is now a memorial to the book burnings that took place there in the 1930s. The square is home to the former Royal Library, now housing Humboldt University’s law school. Interestingly, we learned that the book burnings were not carried out by Nazi officials, but rather by zealous student party members.

Next stop: the Neue Wache, a guardhouse designed by Schinkel along Unter den Linden. The building has been the site of numerous memorials over the course of the 20th century, including both East German and reunified German commemorations of World War II.

One of Schinkel’s masterpieces, not only of architecture but of urban planning, is the Altes Museum. Sitting across from the site of the royal Prussian palace (not currently extant), the building housed the first true modern museum in Europe. Schinkel designed it to integrate the viewer’s experience of art with that of the urban environment: he provided a viewing platform on the interior of the building, from which visitors could contemplate the royal gardens, palace, and the cityscape beyond.

The tour wrapped up near the site of Schinkel’s Bauakademie – his architectural and design academy. The building is also considered one of his masterworks, and was unfortunately torn down in the post-WWII period. This nylon-covered scaffolding has been here for years, but there’s no money to rebuild it. Its ghostly presence reminds us of the many memories and layers that reside amongst one another in Berlin’s cityscape.