Breezing into Berlin

MANILA, Philippines - For as low as 2.50 euros (about P144), you can have a piece of the Berlin Wall – or at least that’s the stated claim on the refrigerator magnets with rock fragments stuck to them, which are sold in souvenir shops all over the German capital.

With millions of Germans and foreign visitors having chipped away at the 3.6-meter-tall, 1.5-meter-thick wall since it came down in 1989, obviously there can’t be much left of the genuine article. But pieces purportedly from the wall, often bearing purported certifications of authenticity, continue to be popular souvenirs in Berlin.

I confess: I bought a magnet. And a mug declaring that I’m leaving the western sector of partitioned Berlin for the east. And had my photo taken with young actors in East German military uniform standing behind me at Checkpoint Charlie – the Cold War-era junction of East and West Berlin.

Reunified Germany managed to preserve over a kilometer of the reinforced concrete wall, including the “death strip” running parallel to it on the eastern side where in 30 years about 100 defectors to the West were shot on sight by Soviet-backed East German forces.

In the most searing image, 18-year-old bricklayer Peter Fetcher was wounded in the hip and left to bleed to death on the no-man’s land.

Stories abound of the imaginative ways by which East Germans managed to escape. On Nov. 9, 1989, their own government gave them an excuse to cross into West Berlin: “private trips abroad.” That night, hordes of East Germans crossed into the West, marking the political collapse of the wall; subsequent weeks saw its physical destruction.

Today the preserved section of the wall is devoid of the colorful graffiti that covered much of the western side when the wall still served as a concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain.

Well-preserved near the wall is the Brandenburg Gate, the 18th century neoclassical city gate commissioned by Prussian King Frederick William II in what became part of East Berlin.

The landmark is one of the few structures that survived Germany’s numerous wars and violent upheavals. The 120-year-old Reichstag near the Brandenburg, where the Bundestag or parliament holds sessions, has been partly preserved, with much of its exteriors intact but with ultra-modern interiors.

From a mezzanine overlooking the session hall, visitors can see a building directly across, which was the office of Hermann Goering, Reichstag president and creator of the Nazi secret police. A tunnel was discovered connecting the office to the Reichstag, fueling suspicions that Goering himself had engineered a fire that destroyed much of the building on Feb. 27, 1933 to create a pretext to suspend civil liberties and crack down on communists and left-wing journalists.

The Soviet Army bombarded the Reichstag during the war. Portions of the interior walls showing Soviet soldiers’ graffiti have been left intact in the modern restoration.

All over Berlin these days there are construction projects that are replacing the drab industrial architecture of the Nazi era and the Cold War. But Berliners are leaving certain sections intact; Germany is a country that understands the value of preserving memories and learning from its past.

Apart from the wall and Checkpoint Charlie, the stories of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust draw visitors to Berlin.

Adolf’s bunker

In a nondescript residential area in the city, tourists mill around an open space in front of apartment buildings. An information board explains why: the space marks the air-raid shelter, called the Führerbunker, where Adolf Hitler stayed in the final months of the war. The bunker was where Hitler married Eva Braun and, it is widely believed, where they both committed suicide on April 30, 1945 as Berlin fell. The Reich chancellery above the bunker was later demolished. A car park has been built over the former exit point of the bunker.

A short walk from the bunker, the Germans built the Holocaust Memorial – a moving tribute to the six million European Jews who were annihilated by the Nazis. The memorial, designed by US architect Peter Eisenman, consists of 2,711 gray, unmarked stone slabs, all of different sizes, installed on undulating concrete flooring spread in neat rows across 19,000 square meters of space.

Berlin is replete with memorials to Jewish persecution. In Bebelplatz, the square in front of Humboldt University, one can look into a glass-covered enclosure built into the cobbled ground, filled with empty bookcases. It is a reminder of the 20,000 books confiscated from Jews and burned by the Nazis in the square on May 10, 1933. A plaque bears prescient words written in 1821 by German poet Christian Johann Heinrich Heine: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

The ultra-modern Jewish Museum features chilling artworks and architecture that convey the emptiness of death and horror of human evil. At  the German Historical Museum, a scale model of a Jewish extermination camp, similar to one on display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, includes a canister of Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used by Nazis to kill lice and gas Jews to death in extermination camps.

Transparent dome

The Germans are not afraid of facing inconvenient truths about their past. All the morbid historical details are out in the open for remembering and the world’s scrutiny, along with the abuses and suffering during partition.

Transparency in Germany is seen not only in its preservation of history but also in governance. A glass dome, offering panoramic views of the Berlin skyline, has been built over the Reichstag to symbolize this transparency. A path circles the multi-story dome, where a guide, speaking through an earphone, explains its history and the city’s landmarks. The dome is one of the top tourist destinations in Berlin.

From the dome, visitors can look down into the Bundestag session hall, with its seats upholstered in a color specially created for it, called Reichstag blue. special blue looks so much like our ubeice cream that any Filipino would suspect the one who came up with the color might have encountered the Pinoy purple yam.

Creative Berlin

Amid all the stories of war, horrific death and destruction, the positive aspects of the new Berlin are attracting an ever-increasing number of visitors.

Berlin is drawing avant-garde artists from around the world. German government support for the creative industries is ensuring that the trend will continue.

The city now has a vibrant club scene, pulsating with the latest American and European pop music. Youthful entrepreneurs are putting up concept cafés, restaurants and shops, telling people that money isn’t everything.

Along a riverbank an entertainment complex that looks like a 1960s hippie commune is rising from the ruins of the city’s former timber market. The Holzmarkt is attracting big-name companies wanting to invest or become partners.

Germany is home to beer lovers. As in the rest of the country, Berlin is dotted with pubs offering their own specialty house brews – the perfect settings for Oktoberfest.

Some old-timers are starting to grouse that the anything-goes environment is disrupting their lives. Gawking tourists block bicycle lanes and keep taking photos of local folk – a felony in Germany if the subject of the photo is not asked for permission.

But for the most part the city is benefiting from tourism, with enterprises sprouting to cater to visitors. The drab Soviet-era industrial architecture, with five-story buildings whose exterior walls are painted with artwork paying homage to the working class, are still visible in many areas including Karl-Marx-Allee, renamed from Stalin-Allee. But they are rapidly being replaced by new development, with several featuring cutting-edge architectural design.

For Filipino travelers, the city offers a particularly interesting site: just two blocks away from Checkpoint Charlie is 71 Jagerstraße, where a marker commemorates Dr. Jose Rizal and the place where he completed his novel Noli Me Tangere.

Sausage, sausage everywhere

Apart from beer, Germany is famous for its sausages. I enjoyed all types of sausages during my stay, although I skipped the blood sausage, vinegary like our dinuguanand looking like the Spanish morcilla.

Locals say Berlin is the birthplace of my favorite German comfort food, currywurst – a pork sausage slathered with mustard and ketchup and sprinkled with spicy curry. There’s bad, good, and excellent currywurst. The latter I tasted in a restaurant that also gave me another one of my favorite German dishes: stewed pork knuckles served with sauerkraut, mashed potatoes and pureed peas.

It’s an entire pork leg, German size, that can feed an entire starving family in Ethiopia. Health-conscious Germans are embarrassed by the amount of artery-clogging items in their cuisine, and stewed pork knuckles must be at the top of the list.

But hey, I’m a carnivore from the land of lechon and fat-laden longganiza; on my list, that scrumptious stewed pork knuckle deserved a Michelin star.

Berliners (there’s a sausage named after them) also claim that their city is the real birthplace of the Turkish dish of layers of thinly sliced meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie, called doner kebab. We know this better as the Arab shawarma. Doner stalls can be found alongside currywurst kiosks in Berlin.

For truly decadent indulgence, head over to the three-story Chocolate Restaurant and emporium of Fassbender & Rausch – touted as the largest of its kind in the world. Every item on the menu has chocolate in it, from the soup to the appetizers and entrée, and of course the delectable desserts and coffee.

After that sinful meal, you can relax while taking in the sights of Berlin on a hop-on, hop-off tourist bus, or walk off the extra pounds until midnight, when the action starts in the clubs. At the end of a long day, you’ll understand why Berlin has become an irresistible magnet for visitors.