Welcome to Berlin... Some of you might think this is the kind of thing you'll find in this town considering its history but...
...Berlin is for lovers, no matter what your sexual preference.
I have always wanted to visit Berlin for the sole reason that I wanted to see the Victory Column (die Siegessäule) because it was featured in my favourite film of all time, Wings of Desire. The film itself is about angels that watch the comings and goings of Berliners in the late eighties. Eventually one of them becomes human as he has fallen in love with a trapeze artist. Nick Cave is in it as is Columbo! Anyhow, the two main angels, Damiel and Cassiel, spend a lot of their time sitting on the shoulders of this statue so I've always wanted to see it.
(Saying this is my favourite film, I am in no way endorsing that you see it because it is a slow moving German film with not much plot and it is definitely an acquired taste. Last time I convinced some friends to watch it, they ALL fell asleep because they were that bored. It did end up having a terrible sequel (Far Away, So Close) AND was adapted into a terrible Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan Hollywood version called City of Angels which was so bad it makes your eyes bleed. But, Wings of Desire, I like it.)
Anyhow, Berlin is an amazingly vibrant city. Since most of it was destroyed in WW2 and because of the constant redevelopment since reunification, it has led to a lot of change and optimism in the German capital. After the war, Berlin was 75% rubble and there was talk that it was going to be abandoned as a memorial to the follies of war. But there is an old saying, whoever controls Berlin controls Europe, so none of the allies wanted to give it up. Here is the Brandenburg Gate. Very impressive!
Here's the Hotel Adlon. It is the hotel in that Michael Jackson dangled his new born baby out the window... even more impressive!
So ok, let's quickly deal with past. Nazis. Don't like 'em, never have. Berlin was actually a thorn in the side of the nazis because they were a bunch of inbred redneck hicks from the country crapping on about racial purity and all this fantasy bullshit about the master race which was MADE UP. Unfortunately for them, Berlin was a multicultural city with a long history of immigration and racial tolerance so it was one of the places most resistant to these hateful principles espoused by these idiots. Here's some nazis playing volleyball. Even when they're having fun they look like fucking arseholes.
These are a few pictures from the holocaust memorial which is made up of about 2,700 blocks of slab to represent the Jewish victims of the genocide perpetrated by the nazis. Its also supposed to rise and fall like a topography of hatred. Its pretty amazing to walk through as once you're inside, you can't actually hear anything and its quite disorientating. This memorial is specifically for the Jewish who lost their lives to the nazi regime but let's not forget the political prisoners, gypseys, homosexuals and handicapped who also died in these terrible times.
And this is where it ended. Underneath this car park is the FĂĽhrerbunker, where Hitler thoughtfully killed himself. As a soldier, he thought he should die by the bullet but he also took a poison capsule just to make sure. Good work Adolf, good riddance to bad, evil rubbish. His body was found by the Russians who didn't actually tell anyone he was dead and started rumours that he was alive in a strategic move to justify them staying in Germany after the war (a fitting prelude to the Cold War). They tried to destroy the bunker but being a bomb bunker, it didn't really work. So it still sits there today, flooded and abandoned.
The only indication that its there is this sign. I think the most poignant thing I learnt on the tour we did was that Heinrich Heine, whose books were burnt by the nazis, wrote "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too." He wrote that in 1821. So sad. Enough of the nazis. They were fucked.
Anyhow, then the allies started fighting over Berlin and the wall was constructed by the Communist GDR to stop movement between the East and West. Brilliant. One of my favourite stories I heard was that to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the GDR, the Government decided to build this monstrosity, the TV Tower, to show the world that East Germany was every bit as technically advanced as the West. Modelled after a similar tower in Mother Russia, the GDR hit problems when they couldn't actually complete the tower and had to call in the Swiss to finish it. Slightly embarrassing but it gets worse. The East German premier, a good old commie religion hater, demanded that all churches take down their crosses on their spires so nothing could compete with the grandeur of the TV Tower. Unfortunately, when the tower was unveiled it became immediately obvious that no matter where you were in the city, when light hit the tower it formed the shape of a cross on its side. The Premier was horrified and spent a lot of resources (paint, panels, architects) to rectify the problem but to no avail. He even announced that it was a "plus" sign which was just laughed at by the German public. The light effect on the tower was affectionately nicknamed the "Pope's revenge" by locals.
Anyway, the wall came down as we all know but it was a bit of a cock up really. After Gorby introduced Glasnost and Perostroika, essentially saying that the satellite communist states couldn't rely on Mother Russia to bail them out of their troubles, there was growing unrest in the GDR. People were escaping to the west through Hungary which had recently opened their borders to Austria and people started protesting for the first time against the repressive communist regime. To throw the people a bone, the party decided to open the borders to other countries thinking it would take years to negotiate. Unfortunately, they didn't tell their Minister for Information who announced the initiative was effective immediately. Thousands of people turned up at the wall and it wasn't long before they'd busted through to be met by their West German counterparts who had champagne and pineapples (hard to find in the GDR). There was much rejoicing and tears and then the East Germans did what everyone else did in 1989, they went to see Dirty Dancing. The cinemas in West Berlin played the film non-stop as the Patrick Swayze deprived East Germans went crazy for it. True story.
By the way, David Hasselhoff played East Berlin a few months before the wall came down and sung a song about democracy. When the wall came down, he claimed that he was single handedly responsible for its fall. He was quick to get there to perform on the recently destroyed wall for his adoring German fans. What a guy! What a jacket!
Enough of the history lesson. Let's talk about movie stars... next time.
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