Berlin

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Berlin

Postby Toby Dammit » Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:22 am

Just over a month ago I was in Berlin to see the Frida Kahlo retrospective at the Martin Gropius Bau. It was my first visit to the city and I covered a fair amount of territory, some of which I thought was “very Hidden Glasgow”, so thought I’d start a thread on it.

My accommodation was deep inside what was once East Germany, just off of Karl Marx Allee, a vast, Moscow like boulevard. I’d read about a big Soviet war memorial only a couple of stops away on the U-bahn and paid it a visit on my last full day in Berlin not knowing what to expect. On my first evening there I’d been to the more accessible and better known Soviet war memorial in the former West Berlin as it’s next to the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate in the Tiergarten, but this site, a mass grave for some 5000 Soviet troops in Treptower Park is on a different scale altogether, and shows what a schizophrenic place this city remains.
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Eastern approach

The cemetery commemorating the Soviet troops who died taking Berlin from the Nazi’s is a little piece of what will be, for years to come, part of that country that no longer exists, the USSR. Designed by Yakov Belopolsky, the Memorial consists of two huge processional walkways starting with a weeping, stone statue representing the Soviet Motherland looking toward two stylized Red flags.
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At the foot of each flag a warrior kneels armed with a PPSh-41 machine pistol, one young, one a more “fatherly” figure with a Stalin moustache.
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They overlook a sunken park where the troops lie buried under tombstones, each surmounted by bronze wreaths.
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The park is lined with 16 marble slabs telling the history of WWII from a very Soviet viewpoint (it starts with the Nazi attack in 1941 on a peaceful, innocent peasant populace, and not the USSR’s contemptible invasion of Poland in 1939, of course), featuring iron willed soldiers and citizens suffering then turning the tide, ultimately rescuing the German people from Hitler's gangsters.
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Each block is bookended with quotes from Stalin himself etched into the stones in both German and Cyrillic. It was a real shock to find these here, a set of decrees from the monster you’d be hard pressed to find an equivalent for in Moscow today. Like suddenly finding a set of Hitler’s speeches immortalised in marble.
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Much of the building material for the memorial park had been provided by Adolf, incidentally, either torn from Albert Speer’s demolished Imperial Reich Chancellory or rock origionaly bought and shipped over from Sweden (calling to mind the red blocks of Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow) by Nazi architects.

The processional walk focuses on a giant 12 meter high statue (by Yevgeny Vuchetich) of a triumphant, sword wielding Soviet soldier cradling a rescued child in his arms, a smashed swastika at his feet.
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I was there on a stunningly hot, sunny day and the strong contrasting light meant I couldn’t get a decent pic of it I’m afraid. The sculpture stands on top of a small “crypt”, or chapel really, the Orthodox saints replaced by mosaics of the peoples of the Soviet Republics (at least the ones Stalin still approved of).
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Treptower Park was the site of the last major Nazi attempt at a counter attack with Panzers organised from within Berlin, and the whole site has a quite an incredible, tragic atmosphere (even on a bright, beautiful day) and is well worth a visit.
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There were very few people around while I was there, and at one point I seemed to have the whole Plaza to myself. The only language I heard from the few other visitors was Russian, many of them no doubt relatives of the approximately 80,000 Soviet troops who perished in the Battle for Berlin.

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Re: Berlin

Postby HollowHorn » Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:34 am

Stunning, I really need to do more city tours and less beaches.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Lucky Poet » Mon Aug 30, 2010 10:18 pm

Brilliant stuff. Thanks for posting that :D
The Soviets were a bit loopy, for want of a better term, but they certainly knew how to do powerful built imagery...

(I really must try to visit Berlin some day.)
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Re: Berlin

Postby Toby Dammit » Tue Aug 31, 2010 10:08 pm

Teirgarten memorial
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The younger, smaller West Berlin comrade of the later Treptower Park memorial, designed by Mikhail Gorvits. Like Treptower Park, most of it is built from material stripped from the Imperial Reich Chancellery. Usually a very short, easy stroll away from the tourist trap that is the Brandenburg Gate, it’s actually slightly hard to get into at the moment. Half the Strasse des 17 Juni, the grand boulevard leading to the Gate which the memorial faces onto is currently a vast, dug up and abandoned building site, and has been so apparently for almost a year now. Indeed huge parts of Berlin are currently in this state with many streets torn open and fenced off and buildings covered in scaffolding and closed.
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T-34 tank, Brandeburg Gate and road works

The Teirgarten memorial was built in 1945 just a few months after the end of the war, and while it was in the British controlled sector of the city a regular, goose stepping, “changing of the guard” was staged through out the Cold War by the USSR at the monument.
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While I was there, early evening, it was pretty deserted, and I was approached by a middle aged fella who asked me if I was Russian. I chatted to him a bit pa Russkie, a language I hadn’t used in years, and he chatted in English mostly. He told me that being at the memorial was a very special moment for him as both his Soviet grandfathers, who he never met, had died fighting in the Battle of Berlin. He obviously needed to tell somebody this, and as I was the only person there I was his witness; he did seem quite amused to find a Scot visiting this place who could, however badly, put together a few sentences in his own tongue, and we shook hands before parting.
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Last edited by Toby Dammit on Tue Aug 31, 2010 11:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Toby Dammit » Tue Aug 31, 2010 10:53 pm

Art and The Wall
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Possibly a legacy of The Wall, but if Berliners in the western part of the city see a blank stone canvas, they will graff it up. Often this is in the form of ugly, lazy tagging, sometimes though the results are quite interesting, and you could spend months in Berlin shooting a photo project on this side of the city alone
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There are very few section of The Wall still standing today, and the parts that are are all protected, the longest section I found partly bounded The Topography Of Terror on Niederkirchnerstraße. The other chunks I found seemed to have been painted by Theirry Noir, who’s work features in the 1988 movie WINGS OF DESIRE (of which more later).
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Wall fragment, Leipziger Platz

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Wings Of Desire. Unknown location

It was after all painting which drew me to Berlin during this summer, and adverts for the Frieda Kahlo retrospective were all over the city. For better or worse the love of her life was Diego Rivera, still best known for his murals, and I found a couple of interesting murals myself, while tracking down some of the exterior locations for the previously mentioned Wim Wenders film. Wish I'd shot more of this stuff.
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Graffiti by the Graco collective

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Weißbecker Haus

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Wall fragment, Wilhelmstraße
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Re: Berlin

Postby Toby Dammit » Thu Sep 02, 2010 1:06 am

Toby Dammit wrote:The younger, smaller West Berlin comrade


Oops! Should of course be the "older", smaller West Berlin comrade...
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Re: Berlin

Postby Late to the Party » Fri Sep 03, 2010 12:55 am

Looks like a cracking trip lad. Some brilliant photos, and the history is... well, involving at the very least. The picture at the end of your first post with the folks going up the steps towards the statue gives a real sense of scale, it must be a damn impressive place to visit!
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Re: Berlin

Postby rabmania » Fri Sep 03, 2010 8:24 am

Great post TD, that's Berlin on my 'to do' list. Superb set of pics.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Toby Dammit » Tue Sep 07, 2010 4:57 pm

Thanks for reading so far!

The Nazis
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Holocaust Memorial and Reichstag

For obvious reasons most traces of the Nazi regime have been erased from Berlin, yet even where all evidence has been wiped, people are still drawn to these places in an effort to understand the horrific history of the Third Reich.
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Anhalter Bunker

One of the few surviving Nazi buildings is the huge air raid bunker at Anhalter, currently completely fenced off and hard to see (and closed to the public). Sixteen thousand civilians were crammed in here without any running water or sanitation by the time Hitler’s last birthday rolled around. Those brave enough to try had to dodge through Soviet bombs, mortar and artillery shells to a water standpipe beside the Anhalter Railway station opposite to collect a few bucket’s worth, and many were killed in the attempt.
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Back of the Anhalter Bunker

The Topography of Terror is a rock strewn field of remembrance on Niederkirchnerstraße. Along it runs the second longest stretch of surviving Berlin Wall. It was on this street, then called Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, that the offices and prison of the Gestapo stood, where Reinhard Heydrich was based (and his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner) as was Adolf Eichmann’s Amt IV B4. On this street the holocaust was planned and implemented.
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Topography of Terror

All these buildings were flattened by allied bombing while ironically across the road on the corner Herman Göring’s Reichsluftfahrtministerium (designed by Albert Speer) stands largely intact (now the Ministry of Finance).

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At the rear of an utterly unremarkable block of unification era social housing, a slow, 30 second stroll away from the Holocaust Memorial, tour parties and travellers come to wander round and stare at a patch of scrubby grass and a small car park on Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße. Although all physical evidence of it has been removed it was on this spot that Joseph Goebbels and his wife killed themselves, Eva Braun’s brother in law Hermann Fegelein was executed for desertion and Hitler and Braun (by then officially Frau Hitler) were hastily cremated in a petrol filled pit and later buried (wrapped in a bundle with Blondi, Adolf’s dead Alsatian dog). This is what the Soviets called the Lair of the Fascist Beast; the site of the Führerbunker where, deep underground the Nazis lived out their final fantasies as the Red Army grew ever closer leading ultimately to a spate of subterranean mass hysteria, suicides and filicide. The only acknowledgement of what took place here above and below ground is currently a small signboard mapping the (demolished) complex under your feet.
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As Hitler’s body was burned one of the drunk SS guards called to Rochus Mirsch, the SS telephonist in the bunker, “The chief’s on fire. Do you want to come and have a look?” Quoted in Berlin. The Downfall 1945, by Anthony Beevor.

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If you are a wealthy Berliner who enjoys messing about in boats you’d love to own a home in Wannsee, a suburb made up of lakes and rivers in the south west of the city, just a 45 minute ride on the S-bahn from the centre of town. The landscape is rather flat and bland but the blue of the water surrounded by green forests, and freshness of the air gives it a certain attraction. The SS thought so and bought a lakeside Villa here at 16 Am Kleinen, to hold conferences and provide luxury accommodation for guests of the Thousand Year Reich.
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Wansee Lake

On January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the Reich main Security Office) convened a noon conference in one small room in this largish building, inviting 13 delegates (7 of whom held doctorates) to announce the commencement of the “final solution of the European Jewish question” and to flaunt his written appointment from Herman Göring (at that time second only to Hitler in the Reich’s hierarchy) as chief bureaucrat in charge of this process.
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Villa

In his capacity as Heydrich’s secretary, Adolf Eichmann made up the 15th man in the room that day, and would later go to great pains to claim “I voz only taking ze minutes!”, on that particular occasion. However he was already one of Hitler’s fanatical and tireless persecutors of the Jews, going above and beyond even the his boss Himmler (directly disobeying his superiors’ orders in October 1944) in his determination to murder as many Jewish men, women and children as his department could get its hands on.
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The Wanssee Conference was such a major step on the Nazi’s journey to the normalisation (in their own minds) of murdering millions of Jews in an unprecedented industrial process (while still trying to keep it a secret) that it’s quite stunning to discover what a tiny little room the event took place in. As the space has altered so much over the years, like almost everything to do with the Nazis in Berlin today it takes a degree of meditation and imagination to even begin to comprehend what exactly happened here.
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The conference room

Just outside the conference room but not completely detached from it is a sunny annex holding copies of Eichmann’s pre-trial testamony concerning the conference, a mini-library. It had been a longish walk in boiling weather to get here from the S-bahn station, so I gratefully took some time to sit down and read these transcripts. As I did so I could actually feel these Nazi Party functionaries wander slowly into the room behind me, hearty and grinning, glad to be in from the icy January weather, looking forward to lunch. They were Victors in Europe then, at the Gates of Moscow and had just declared war on the USA (the conference’s original date had been put back because of this). “Working towards the Führer”, they thought they could do whatever they wanted.

I’d visited Auschwitz and Birkenau just nine months previously and as I walked away from the Villa, surrounded by property telly, dream mansions on such a beautiful day, with the sounds of happy German families enjoying the holiday weather and barbecue aromas drifting over high hedges, the hair on my head suddenly stood on end in utter frozen horror.
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"After the conference, as I recall, Heydrich, Müller and your humble servant sat cozily around the fireplace. I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, but he had a cognac. Normally he touched nothing alcoholic... We all had drinks then. We sang songs." Adolf Eichmann. Life Magazine, November 28, 1960

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Last edited by Toby Dammit on Wed Sep 08, 2010 12:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Vinegar Tom » Tue Sep 07, 2010 9:59 pm

Thanks for that. Interesting and thoughtful ( and thought provoking ) post.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Josef » Tue Sep 07, 2010 10:22 pm

Toby Dammit wrote:Image
Anhalter Bunker

One of the few surviving Nazi buildings is the huge air raid bunker at Anhalter, currently completely fenced off and hard to see (and closed to the public). Sixteen thousand civilians were crammed in here without any running water or sanitation by the time Hitler’s last birthday rolled around. Those brave enough to try had to dodge through Soviet bombs, mortar and artillery shells to a water standpipe beside the Anhalter Railway station opposite to collect a few bucket’s worth, and many were killed in the attempt.



Is that the one that's home to a bat colony now, Toby? In which case, I'm fairly sure it's open for a limited period in the year.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Toby Dammit » Wed Sep 08, 2010 12:14 am

Josef wrote:Is that the one that's home to a bat colony now, Toby? In which case, I'm fairly sure it's open for a limited period in the year.


The Anhalter Bunker is currently surrounded by well kept play areas for children but entierly fenced off (I had to nip up a wall, scamble through thorn bushes and climb over railings to get the second shot I posted of it). Clearly the kid's play areas are open some times, but I've not found any up to date information about when. The guidebook I took and lots of out of date web sites will tell you about the Bunker being a museum featuring a daft "House of Horrors" waxworks type show, as well as a more sobering exhibition deeper in the building telling the story of the place during the war. At the moment though like many major landmarks in Berlin it's closed, though at least not covered in scaffolding. I was dissapointed by this as it features in a scene in WINGS OF DESIRE, and I was hoping to do a "past/present" replication of a frame grab from the movie. Haven't found any up to date info about bats roosting there.

Mind you I was there more than a month ago now and in a place like Berlin everything could have changed by now.

They might have put up scaffolding.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Lucky Poet » Mon Jul 04, 2011 4:20 pm

Having been there in late May I can confirm that Berlin is rather bloody neat. Should I feel a bit guilty for wishing I'd seen the Berlin Wall in operation? Maybe. There's a preserved slice of it to the north of the city centre, on Bernauer Strasse, as an official memorial complete with viewing tower/museum display. Quite touristy, but you get a glimpse of the reality of the thing:

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And its wee tower:

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Some preserved fragments nearby:

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Aww:

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Elsewhere, this is how you do a railway station, being the Berlin Hauptbanhof:

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Why can't we do things like that?
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Re: Berlin

Postby banjo » Tue Jul 05, 2011 10:12 am

ma hoose is going to be full of berliners this weekend as my son is marrying one.better tell them not to leave the same calling card as the last time they were in clydebank.
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Re: Berlin

Postby Boxer6 » Tue Jul 05, 2011 4:47 pm

banjo wrote:......better tell them not to leave the same calling card as the last time they were in clydebank.


Aye, that'll go down well right enough! 8O
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