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    Gallery

    Best of Berlin 2010 Part 1

    / Last updated 09 Mar 2012

    Introduction

    Part 1 of 2 galleries covering the best of Berlin.
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • ©Photo: Mark Bowyer
    • We began our first afternoon in Berlin with a walk along the historic Unter Den Linden - Berlin's most prestigious boulevarde for centuries. Formerly located in East Berlin, Unter Den Linden is home to some of the city's most famous museums and architecture. It begins with the Berliner Dome Cathedral and ends at the Brandenburg Gate.
    • The New Guard House or Neue Wache is one of the oldest and most admired neo classical structures on the Unter Den Linden. After WWI it was a memorial to fallen soldiers. After WWII it became the East German monument to the victims of Fascism and Militarism.
    • Since unification, it has become a profoundly simple memorial to all victims of war. I was deeply moved when I visited this memorial in the East back in 1988.
    • Today it features this simple and deeply moving Kathe Kollwitz sculpture - Mother with her dead son.
    • The Museum Island on the Unter Den Linden is so rich in ancient artefacts that it would require more than a week to scratch the surface. This is the Alte Museum.
    • The Alte Museum looks over the "Lust Garten" where Hitler held many rallies before tens of thousands of his admirers in the 1930s.

    • Humboldt University is one of Europe's most famous counting Hegel, Marx, Engels, Max Planck, Bismarck, Einstein and other greats of science and philosophy including 29 Nobel Prize Winners among its former students.

    • Directly opposite Humboldt University is the Bebelplatz - made infamous by the Nazi book burning that took place here in 1933. That one of the greatest institutions of learning should have been the site of book burning is one of the many confounding tragedies of the Nazi era.

    • "For this was but a prelude; for when books are burnt, human beings will be burnt in the end." So wrote German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine more than a century before the Nazi book burning that preceded the Holocaust.
    • The simplicity and understatement of so many of Berlin's Nazi and Holocaust memorials gives them a special power. This plate of glass set into the stones of the Bebel Platz with rows of empty book shelves commemmorates the book burning.
    • The Hotel Adlon was Berlin's most prestigious hotel from its opening in 1907. Eva Braun lived here towards the end of the Nazi era. It was all but destroyed in WWII and has since been rebuilt. It remains the hotel of choice for presidents and this is where Michael Jackson recklessly dangled his baby son from a balcony for adoring fans to see.
    • The Brandenburg Gate - symbol of Berlin and survivor of centuries of turmoil. The gate marks the start of the Unter Den Linden and is close by other major landmarks - the Reichstag building, the monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, Potsdamer Platz and the Tiergarten.
    • The Brandenburg Gate at the end of WWII.
    • The Reichstag building - united Germany's house of parliament. The fire here in 1933 provided the Nazis with a pretext for taking over the German state by emergency decree.
    • The Reichstag building was fully restored in the 1990s with the help of British architect Sir Norman Foster who installed the spectacular dome.
    • A monument to the Soviet soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin. It wasn't until my first visit to Germany and Berlin in 1988 that I became fully aware of the scale of Soviet losses in WWII - almost 24 million - nearly a half of all casualties.
    • Historic buildings meet a memorial to a historic tragedy. The profoundly simple Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe in the foreground with the tops of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag with its Norman Foster dome in the background.
    • The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in 2005 after being embroiled in controversry with some senior Jewish leaders viewing it as unnecessary and others condemning the use of a major contractor company with a Nazi past. There are many interpretations of its meaning. Its creator prefers to leave it subjective focusing on disturbed order and confusion.
    • Nearby is the Topography of Terror - the former Gestapo headquarters. Another chillingly simple reminder of Nazi horror. The building behind it was formerly the Nazi Aviation Ministry and is one of the few pieces of Nazi architecture to survive in central Berlin. It is now the German Ministry of Finance. In the middle runs a remaining section of the Berlin Wall.
    • Propaganda on display at the Topography of Terror
    • Through the Berlin Wall to the Nazi Aviation Ministry Building from the Topography of Terrors. Memorialising in Berlin is uniquely simple, understated and powerful.
    • The Nazi Aviation Ministry building became the centre of Communist power in East Germany and these propagandists murals extolling the prosperity, goodwill and general bliss of the Communist state remain on the walls of the present day Ministry of Finance.
    • The Jewish Museum tells the story of Berlin's Jewish community. It's another powerful exhibit thouhgh it seems designed for school groups.
    • Not far further along is Checkpoint Charlie - the old checkpoint between East and West that I crossed in 1988.
    • Also close by is the location of the infamous bunker where Hitler killed himself in 1945. Nothing remains but a carpark and the marker is deliberately simple to ensure no shrine to Hitler can be created by neo Nazis.