Berlin – Friday 03 – Tuesday 08 October 2024
We liked the hotel we stayed in back in June, and equally important, we also liked its location on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz so agreed that as familiarity is a good thing we should stay there again. Knowing where we going allowed a swift trip from the airport, through checking in to the hotel and getting out for a mid-afternoon walk around the neighbourhood.
We are staying in the Mitte district, which is sort of east/north east of the centre, a bit like where we live in London. There is a bit of everything nearby; shops, bars and a variety of cafes and restaurants; there is also the Babylon Cinema with its lovely neon sign. We’ve been watching Babylon Berlin on the telly and will have to go back and finish it soon.
On Saturday morning, we caught an S-Bahn (Stadtschnellbahn or city rapid railway), train to the Olympic Stadium; home of the 1936 Olympics, and over the railway line from the Courbusierhaus block from my last post. Disappointingly, the stadium grounds were fenced off and we couldn’t get in, though I think you can visit on an organised tour if you’re inclined to. We had a full day ahead so carried on.
As well as being a historic Olympic stadium, and the one where African American athlete Jesse Owens managed the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the Nazis by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics and showing the world that their Aryan superiority message was baseless, the stadium is the home ground for the Herta Berlin football club. There were stickers on every lamppost between the station and the stadium advertising the fact.
I could be 180 degrees wrong but my reading of the current situation in Germany is that the country is politically on the edge. With Angela Merkel retired, replaced with the less dynamic Olaf Scholz, the influence of Germany in Europe is on the wane and the right wing are on the march, particularly in the east of the country, where Berlin sits. In recent months the AfB, the new right wing party, has made serious political gains, winning seats and entire states. Berlin, again feels like a small liberal island in a much less liberal world. While Berlin appears to me as a tourist to not be shy in acknowledging the horrors in its past I get the feeling if we travelled not too far from the city borders we would see a much different country.
From the Olympic Stadium we jumped back on a train and continued our journey to the western suburb of Spandau. We were interested in coming here for the massive Ikea as it is an old town, with cobbled streets and a huge old fort on the side of a lake. It sounded pretty idyllic for a sunny Saturday lunch and very much the sort of thing we like to do. The theory was sound, the reality less so.
To be fair the streets were cobbled and there was a big old fort. The cobbled streets were big and wide, not the narrow cobbles I like, and it was a bit run down and a bit depressed and not in that ‘nice’ way some areas can pull off. I’m guessing it’s one of the places that doesn’t get a lot of tourists or investment and the young people aren’t hanging round hip cafes, mainly because there aren’t any. I’m not one to cast aspersions (OK, I am) but it felt like one of those places where the AfB would get a unhealthily large number of votes.
We didn’t stop for lunch but carried on to the fort, which unhelpfully had a juggling and acrobatic festival and it was looking like it was of full of family groups and people dressed in cosplay outfits. I’d hoped to walk around outside the outer wall, but the way was fenced off so we left and caught the train to Zoo Station, in the city centre.
We wandered around a bit more, ate, and visited the famous KadeWe department store and took their amazing criss-crossing escalators up to the 7th floor where we found a champagne bar and decided it would be rude to not have a glass. It was very nice.
We followed this with a visit to the magnificent spire which is all that is left of the 19 century Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, heavily damaged during the devastating allied bombing of Berlin in the dying months of the Second World War. The ceiling was magnificent, as was the blue glass interior of the modernist church built after the war.
We wanted to visit some of the city’s markets and had put Sunday aside to try and get to three of them, we also discovered a Saturday night market on the rooftop of the Gesundbrunnen Centre, a shopping mall a couple of train stops away from the hotel. We didn’t buy anything but it was fun, very busy with mostly young Berliners and tourists, there was a bar and a DJ, a nice atmosphere and a not unspectacular, but rather apocalyptic sunset. A marker laid down for the Sunday’s adventures.
We visited three markets, two were a few minutes apart and a thirty minute walk from the hotel; as I said previously there is a lot happening around us. I enjoyed the first and second markets, both had a lot of interesting stuff, vintage, junk, a few records and some decent clothes. Like the night market they both had a nice feel to them and weren’t too crowded and we also didn’t buy anything.
The third was a train ride away and was definitely more of a flea market, it was busy and I got a bit bored as there was nothing really that interested me. And yes it is all about me. It was a great morning out, doing something different in a different city is what travelling is all about for me.
The first two markets were in the old ‘East’ and close to the Berlin Wall memorial spot just off Bernauer Strasse which we visited in June, right by the station we used to get to the third market. The Wall still evokes quite strong feelings in me, it went up a year before I was born and I saw it in 1987, two years before it came down. It has a presence in my life which I can’t fully articulate. Looking at the less glamorous of photos from the 60s, both here in Berlin as well as in London and elsewhere, things really were in a bad way for so many people, especially in cities.
Here is a photo from when I was here in 1987, looking over from the west. I’m not sure where this photo was taken, but that strip of land still exists in may parts of Berlin, maybe with a pre-Wall road returned.
On Monday we went to a new photography gallery and walked around a really interesting exhibition of photos of hip-hop artists, primarily US based, but there was a section on contemporary German hip-hop of which I knew nothing about. It was challenging looking at photos of inner-city New York and how terrible conditions were in the 70s and 80s, things didn’t look a lot better than the bombed out ruins of 1960s Berlin. We have treated and continue, in some places, to treat our less well off urban areas so poorly. I suspect given recent news, and more of that at the end, that this won’t change much.
The gallery is in a very cool building, covered in layers of graffiti; apparently, it used to be full of small bars and venues, and I would loved to have visited and perhaps gone to a gig there. The bar made a very nice espresso martini pick me up as well, and the modernist loo was superb!
It was our last day in this most favourite of cities so wandered the streets a bit more, stopping for a monstrous and delicious kebab and large bottle of beer at a street vendor before burping our way back to the hotel and preparing ourselves mentally for going home in the morning.
All too soon the holiday was over and the ‘facing reality’ blues hit as we sat in Berlin airport over a pre-flight relaxer, aka a gin and tonic, and for me; Berlin’s supposed favourite food, curry wurst.
Back to reality and work tomorrow. We’re going to have to come back again and next time we will stay somewhere different and experience a different area. I loved the area we stayed in, but familiarity can breed contempt and I would hate to tarnish the good memories we’ve had in this city so far.
I’ll end this post with news that hadn’t come out three days ago when I started writing, that the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called a snap election for early in 2025. With the terrible news yesterday that the US elected the orange racist, misogynist, homo/trans-phobe as president a drift to the populist right in Germany (and the rest of the world) seems almost inevitable. The world is in a much worse place than it was when I started writing and I’m glad there is red wine.
Where is Phil now? 
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