This was a day of, mostly, memorials. But we started at the Gemäldagalerie, a museum of paintings. It is a vast collection of paintings mostly from 1300-1800. The exhibit space is large and bright and nicely laid-out. There are 30 or 40 rooms in a connected pattern, each with a nice bench for sitting on and contemplating the dozen or 30 paintings mounted in that room.
Nicely laid out for the student or the person who can come back again and again to properly appreciate the works. We had limited time and kind of swept through saying "mm-hmmm, uh-huh, ooohh, ok."
Holocaust Memorial
From there, after a bite of lunch, we walked to the Holocaust Memorial, which is only just a block south of the Brandenburg Gate, but somehow we missed it the first morning. And it's hard to miss: a vast field of 2,711 gray blocks:
The artist is said to have been inspired by the crowded tombstones in an old Jewish cemetery. The effect is somber. The odd topography invites people to participate and walk among the stones.
Break Dancers and Bubbles
From there we walked around past the Brandenburg Gate to Pariser Platz, where tourists gather and vendors and performers gather to get change from them, giving the atmosphere of a street fair. There was a group of break-dancers, really quite good. We gave them some coins; they earned it.
A young woman was making huge bubbles which people enjoyed a lot, although they didn't seem to be putting much money in her basket.
Topology of Terror
From there we made our way past the former Luftwaffe headquarters, now the Finance Ministry, a most imposing building (the Nazis really knew how to do grandiose well), to the Topology of Terror. This is primarily a history lesson on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, sited along an old piece of The Wall.
The story is told very well, on a series of panels that make use of short text paragraphs (German and English) illustrated with original photos, newspaper clips, letters, and official documents. We knew most of this history but there were things we hadn't known, like the program to improve German society by the programmed murder of epileptics, retarded people and the incurably insane. Unlike the extermination of Jews, this program was actually called off due to public protest, but not before an estimated 70,000 patients were removed from institutions and killed.
Perhaps it's the grimmness of the tale, but the crowd making its way along the exhibit space was as quiet as if in a church.
The piece of the Berlin Wall here near Potsdamer Platz is probably what most tourists see, but it is incomplete: just the cement wall itself.
Berlin Wall Memorial
The official Wall Memorial is in another part of town and we grabbed an S-Bahn train to go see it.
Click through on this photo. The model shows how the wall was not just a wall but a whole system: a wall, an open space with a center line of lights, other obstacles, and guard towers, and an inner wall. This memorial area preserves the full width of the Todesstreiffen, the zone of death.
A number of interpretive panels tell the history of The Wall. The first version went up in 1961 after East Germany had lost 1/6th of its population to defection to the West. It was fairly easily circumvented, so they rebuilt it in the 1970s to the full width and other features.
At least 136 people died in attempts to cross the wall; many are memorialized here by having their pictures, on glass plates, embedded in an iron wall.
Laundry
Well, that was cheerful! So home for a short break, then out to do the laundry at a convenient neighborhood laundromat. An 11-hour day, about. Marian says "We certainly work hard at having fun, don't we?"
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