Checkpoint Charlie

Berlin may not be the most beautiful city in the world, but it certainly is a fascinating one.

Today we took ourselves to the very touristy Checkpoint Charlie and to the Mauermuseum which is just next door.

Even though Checkpoint Charlie is a bit campy now, with fake border-guards who charge you 2 euros to take their picture, it was pretty amazing to stand there drinking coffee and snapping photos happily in a place that at one point must have been absolutely terrifying for so many people.

Even more amazing to stand on this arbitrary spot and imagine that up until 20 years ago, it wasn't possible to even wander from one side of the street to the other.

The Mauermuseum was a bit arbitrary in its design and layout, but it had a fascinating array of photos and stories of uprisings, and failed and successful escape attempts. Some of these stories of human bravery, ingenuity, and desperation were just beyond imagining. To see photos of people escaping curled up under car engines, hiding in suitcases, jumping out of buildings, running through barbed wire, or sliding between buildings in home-made harnesses was just incredible. So difficult to be in this city as it is now and imagine how it used to be.

Later in the afternoon, we went for a walk in former East Berlin along Frankfurter Allee and Karl-Marx Allee. The difference in the architecture between East and West Berlin is marked. Both sides of the city had major rebuilding to do after the war, and the west side has its share of big, and not so attractive block buildings, which must have been cheap and fast to put up.

East Berlin has buildings and streets that are on an entirely different scale. There are information placards up along Karl Marx Allee, and we learned some pretty interesting facts. The beginning of Karl Marx Allee, which was originally named for Stalin, is a very wide boulevard with massive buildings running all along it. Nowhere that we've seen in the West has streets this wide or buildings so big.

The two towered structures that you can see here were meant, according to one quotation on the placard, to be an impressive and imposing first view of the first socialist boulevard. That's not an exact quote, but it's very close.

What really struck us as we walked along was the size of the buildings, the uniformity and, for lack of a more descriptive word, the ugliness of them. Apparently, the architects and planners of these buildings we sent to "study" in The Soviet Union, and there was a great photo on another one of these placards, showing a street in Moscow which looks exactly like where we were standing in Berlin.

The more we thought about these buildings, the more it made sense. These buildings are large, imposing, and personality-less. The regime wouldn't have wanted a city full of beautiful buildings. There should be no appearance of luxury, of individuality or creativity in its people so why should there be any in its architecture? The last thing they would have wanted was people looking at a beautiful building and feeling inspired, or creative, or moved to have their own thoughts, feelings, imagination or creativity.

There is a certain grittiness to this city, and its people seem to us to be a bit gritty as well, though not in an unfriendly way. There is a difficult history here that is still very real, and it seems to me that its people live with it on a daily basis, even if they are not consciously thinking about it.

Looking forward to the next few days and exploring even more.