The Long Legacy of Totalitarianism in Berlin

In some ways, today involved even more walking than yesterday.  After finishing breakfast, we headed down to Potsdamer Platz and from there walked to the Topography of Terror.  This is the former location of the headquarters of the Gestapo.  It's also right up against where the Berlin Wall used to run.  There's a preserved segment of it here, though tourists keep chipping away "souvenirs."  I told the students if they really want a piece of the wall, find any old piece of concrete lying on the ground and then pass it off as a piece of the wall; no one can tell the difference.

After watching a short film on the site, I talked for about half an hour about how Hitler took the doctrine of Social Darwinism and developed it into a governing policy.  This led to a very unusual governing structure as his underlings constantly competed for power against each other.  I actually ended up talking for about 30 minutes, which is much longer than I've done before in this museum.  Then the students moved through at their own pace. 

At first I thought we would get some food on the street, but the prices in the cafe were pretty good and at least there we would have places to sit. 

Afterwards, we went to the segment of the Berlin Wall to pose for a group shot.

Checkpoint Charlie is only a one-block walk away, so we headed off there so the students could snap shots of the actors dressed like American soldiers wearing historic uniforms. 

If the morning was about the terrors of the Nazi dictatorship, the afternoon was about the terrors of the East German dictatorship.  We headed up to Nordbahnhoff station, where we looked at the displays about what happened to the S-Bahn when Berlin was divided.  They had photos of ghost stations and the wall.  I snapped a shot the other day of a photo of the wall sealing off this very S-Bahn station.

The display on Bernauer Straße charts the history of the wall, the inner wall and the outer wall, the death strip, and the various escape attempts.  For East Germans, the closest they could come to the wall was the inner security wall:

On the other hand, the West Berliners could see the entire structure of the wall complex from their observation post:

The wall display really brings home, I think, how the damage of the Second World War simply continued in Berlin for another 45 years. 

After spending so much time today on the horrors of the past, I thought it might be nice to treat the students to a visit to the Pergamon Museum.  Even with two-thirds of it closed for renovations (including the Pergamon Altar), it still has plenty to amaze.  And who wouldn't be amazed by things like 2600 year-old dragons guarding the Ishtar Gate to the city of Babylon?

Our these lions, guarding the throne room of King Nebuchadnezzar?

Or the three-story market gate to the Hellenistic city of Miletus?

To be honest though, my favorite single piece is an amazing wood paneled room from Aleppo, Syria.  Painted in 1601 for a Christian merchant, the walls are covered in images designed to resemble Ottoman carpets and Islamic book illustrations:

But they also had a stunning exhibit of Islamic art related to depictions of gardens.  Most of the pieces came from the Mughal Empire in present-day India and Pakistan.

I was really surprised by this illustration since it depicts the Hindu festival of Holi:

Afterwards, the students all went their separate ways.  I helped a few find some things they were looking for, and then two students and I went to Cafe Einstein on Unter den Linden for some much-deserved coffee and cake.  After all, I have to maintain my daily diet of cake and beer.  Today, I tried the Apfelstrudel mit Schlagsahne and cafe au lait.

(That's a slice of Sachertorte mit Schlag on the plate of the student opposite me).

By the time we left the cafe it was nearly 7:30 pm, though the sun was still going strong.  I didn't want to entirely skip dinner, so after coming back to the hostel, I walked a few blocks and just had a piece of sausage with vegies (and a beer) for dinner.

Incredibly, even at 9:55 pm, it's still not dark here in Berlin:

That's our hostel on the right, with the golden dome of the Neue Synagogue in the near distance and the Fernseherturm at Alexanderplatz in the far distance.

Beginnings

Beginnings are always hard and yesterday was no different.  From early in the morning through late afternoon, I ran back and forth between the hostel and Berlin's various airports picking up the students as they arrived.  By the time I arrived at Tegel the second time, the students had already left the gate; I really got worried they my have left the airport, but it turned out that the suitcases of two of the students hadn't arrived.  Finally, by 5:00, the last student was off the plane.

After getting everyone checked into the hotel, thought it would be nice to treat all the students to a first dinner in Berlin.  I booked "Zum Schusterjunge," which is a very traditional, east Berlin restaurant, with a nicely priced menu (including Spargel!) and told the students I would cover all their food costs; they would only need to cover drinks.

The long wait for drinks should have warned me, but I thought, after all, we're a very large group in a small restaurant, but they must have been very short staffed last night.  At least my Spargelkremsuppe was excellent:

We had quite a wait for our main course and it did not come out simultaneously for everyone, but rather in stages.  Since I kept waiting for everyone else to be served, my schnitzel and spargel with hollandaise sauce was only somewhat warm by the time I started to eat it:

I think we waited over an hour for dessert and then only those who ordered Strudel were served.  I asked about the strawberry creme brulee special that half of us had ordered and the waitress was surprised and then said "a little bit."  15-20 minutes later we were served hot creme brulee with no sugar crust.  It was terrible.

This morning everyone made it to breakfast on time and we left for the Jewish Museum.  After checking in, we had about an hour before our scheduled tour.  I took the students into the basement level and we explored Liebeskind's axes of German Jewish history.  I asked them to choose one of the axis and explore it.  Some ended up on the axis of exile, which ended in the garden of exile:

The trees are unreachable and the ground is hard, broken stones set at a slanting, disorienting angle.

The other axis is the axis of the Holocaust, which ended in the tower of the Holocaust:

This is a dark room, lit only by a thin slit in the concrete and unadorned and unheated.

We had a little extra time, so we visited an amazing art installation, designed, in part, by the director, Peter Greenaway.  It was called "Obedience" and focused on the binding of Isaac in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Created by Saskia Bodekke (a media artist) and Peter Greenaway (a fascinating British film director), the rooms explore different aspects of the story of Abraham's obedience to the God's call to sacrifice his son.  One room had a dozen books, some over 1000 years old, from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources, all open to the page of the attempted sacrifice.

One room dealt with Satan (who does appear in some midrashim of this story).  The floor consists of stones lit with a red light.  On one wall, there was a computer screen.  I realized later, the video wasn't running but at first I thought they were suggesting that Bill Gates was the devil:

Other rooms focused on the banishment of Hagar or the fate of the ram.  The concluding room asked "or are you an Abraham?"

We met our guide without any difficulty.  I had booked the tour on Jewish responses to the rise of Nazism, but I wasn't entirely sure what it would cover.  We started on the Axis of Exile, and I worried that it would duplicate our earlier look, but thankfully, he elaborated on some great material on display and I think it worked out quite well.  Afterwards, we went up into the main exhibit and looked at early responses to the Boycott (April 1, 1933), and then the effort of Jews to flee Germany following the November Pogrom (aka Kristallnacht).  The tour ended with the students clustered around a table as the guide charted the various paths Jews took to countries of refuge:

We ended up spending close to 2.5 hours in the museum, though the students only saw a very small portion of the main exhibit.  Afterwards, we walked through Kreuzberg and made our way to Mustafa's Gemüse Kebap, which has some of the best street food in Berlin:

The mostly sell chicken dönör (the Turkish version of schwarma) with lots of salad, cheese, and herbs, inside not pita, but what looked like really large hamburger buns.  It's also vegetarian friendly.  I think the students really liked it.

After that we headed back to the hotel for a short break.  To the relief of two of the students, their missing luggage had finally arrived.  Around 3:45 we started our walking tour of our neighborhood: the Scheunenviertel.  I had a couple of reasons of doing it.  First, I wanted them to get to know where we are staying and some of the stuff in the neighborhood, if they want to check it out later.   Mostly, though, what I had done was make laminated copies of an art installation done her almost 25 years ago by the artist Shimon Attie.  Right after the Wall came down, he visited Berlin and found old photos of this neighborhood, which used to be the immigrant Jewish neighborhood.  Then at night, he took a slide projector and projected the original photo on the site where it was taken.

The effect is astonishing:  ghost images from the 1920s now appearing on the post-war, post-communist ruins of east Berlin.  Attie has talked about how he walked around Berlin seeing ghosts and how this exhibit was his way of making others see all the ghosts he was  being haunted by.

We ended up by the Volksbühne in Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, where we shared out their reactions to Attie's project.  We also had a nice discussion about how Berlin has changed since the fall of the Wall and whether gentrification is a good or bad thing.  From here, I just quickly took them over to the Karl-Liebknecht Haus, former headquarters of the German Communist Party and now the center of the Left, in case they wanted to do some shopping in the book store.

That was it for the formal program of the day.  Some students went off on their own (yay!); the rest I said I would guide back to the hostel.  We went to the bus stop and waited; our bus was supposed to come in 10 minutes.  It didn't.  20 minutes passed.  30 minutes passed.  40 minutes passed.  No bus.  Finally found out:  the president of Egypt is in Berlin and public protests have disrupted traffic.  We went back to the U-Bahn stop and took it to Alexanderplatz.  I told the students: here let me show you what the TV tower looks like from the base:

I had originally skipped going this way, since Alexanderplatz is such a large and labyrinthian station.  By the time we got back to the hostel it was 7 pm.  I went back to the anarchist Italian restaurant in Prenzl' Berg with a few of the students, and we sat outside in the increasingly windy evening enjoying the food.  On the way back, we saw some of the protests against gentrification:

We were looking for a cafe to have a nachspeise, but all there were were restaurants.  We took the tram to Hackescher Markt, and there found a nice cafe that had desserts.  I had the almond and marzipan torte, which was absolutely delicious:

It wasn't too dense and had an amazingly intense almond flavor.  Normally, I would have ordered the Milchkaffee to drink, but with the jet lag I didn't want to risk having troubles falling asleep, so I got the black current fizzy juice.

Thankfully, I got a mostly good night's sleep last night, walking up first at 5:45, but then falling back asleep until 7 am.  I think I'm going to set the alarm tomorrow; not because I need it to wake up, but because one reason I woke up early was fear that I might oversleep breakfast.  With the sun up so early, I can't tell what time it is in the morning:  6 am looks just like 8 am.

A Bright and Rainy Day

Today was both a very happy and productive day, yet also rainy and dreary.  A really interesting mix.

My main task for today was to visit the Bundesarchiv in Lichterfelde to find material on the lyricist I'm researching.  Lichterfelde turns out to be a turn-of-the-century Berlin suburb, with large houses (many of which survived the war intact).

The branch of the Bundesarchiv is located on the former American army base.  They already had the files I requested waiting for me when I arrived.  I turned in the six pages of forms that I had translated the day before, hoping I filled everything out correctly.  I get so nervous visiting archives for the first time; I tell people I'm conversational in German, but most of the time, I understand only half of what people say and I fill in the gaps with the most likely words.

Sometimes this doesn't work.  When I made the reservation for tomorrow night's dinner, the guy asked me for my "Vorname" (that is, my first name), but I heard "[tele]fon nummer."  I kept telling him I didn't have one.

As I was sitting at the table going through the file, an archivist came to see me.  I thought, "oh God, what did I do?"  Perhaps I shouldn't be using a pen?  Perhaps I hadn't filled out the forms correctly.  "Did you do research on Heinrich Graetz at Koblenz?" he asked me.  "Many years ago," I answered, very surprised.  I was there in 1998.  They had maybe three pages in the whole archive on him.  Had I violated some rule, I wondered.  No.  They had just gone through their records and figured out I was the same researcher.  I now have a researcher card that I am supposed to bring back when I return again (no matter how many more years that is).

Going through the files from the Nazi Entertainment Ministry, it was really creepy to see his proof of Aryan ancestry form (charting back three generations), but I was very excited to find a document that appears to confirm a very important part of the story that I'm researching.  The only problem is that the year is wrong (1940 vs 1941).  Every other detail matches, though, so I think it might be a typo on the original.

After I finished my work, I noticed a flyer for an exhibition on the persecution of gay men and lesbians during the Nazi period being held at Rathaus Treptow (the Treptow City Hall).  The problem was figuring out where that was.  I couldn't find it on my metro guide so I asked the archivist.  That hadn't a clue either.  They searched online and printed out the directions (50 minutes by public transportation: bus to S-bahn to S-bahn to bus). The exhibit turned out to be rather small, but it was still interesting.  About 16 panels, some on local people who were arrested and imprisoned.

By now it was raining pretty consistently, so I headed back to the center of town and grabbed a sandwich before heading to the Berlinische Galerie.  This newly reopened museum (it reopened on Friday) has a great exhibition of art by Berlin artists from 1880 to 1980.  Here are some of my favorites:

It's by Karl Hagemeister, a member of the Berlin Secession, and it's called "Birch Grove in Autumn."

This sculpture ("Constructed Torso") by Naum Gabo, was actually a cardboard model for the finished piece. Gabo was exiled from Germany during the Nazi period and he dismantled it and carried the pieces with him in a trunk from country to country It is the art of a refugee, which itself went into exile. Now it has been restored and reassembled. 

 The Berlinische Galerie has two paintings by Felix Nussbaum.  An artist with the New Objectivity movement, this 1931 painting depicts the generational conflict between the rising avant-garde, and the old avant-garde, now the establishment, led by Max Liebermann.  Liebermann is the one on the roof, his self-portrait (which also hangs a few rooms away) being handed to him by the goddess of victory, while the young artists works are abandoned in the courtyard before the Academy of Art.

What makes Felix Nussbaum so famous, though, are the paintings he created in exile and in hiding during the Holocaust.   After escaping from a French internment camp, he and his wife lived in hiding in an attic.  This 1942 painting, "Self-Portrait with Shroud," shows the artist in hiding.  At first, I thought each person in the painting was him, just from a different angle, but an Israeli woman I was chatting with (I think I've spoken more Hebrew than German here) convinced me the person on the far left is Nussbaum's wife.  Does the leaf represent hope against death?  If so, it was in vain; they were all arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where they were murdered.

 The current temporary exhibition is on post-war architecture in Berlin.  You would think that there would be stark differences between east and west, yet that wasn't always so.  Since so much of Berlin was destroyed in the war, there was a huge need for building housing, and both east and west turned to large, anonymous housing blocks.  Consider this collage of buildings from both sides of the Wall:

In the epilogue to the exhibit there were some contemporary artists' takes on the architecture of the city.  I particularly liked this one:  spray painted on cardboard. 

 
It's one of the mass produced large apartment blocks (those eyes are actually windows), but the whole thing appears to be dissolving, like some kind of architectural macular degeneration.




The third student arrived tonight, but it turns out she booked a hotel out of the city center (this came as a surprise to all of us).  It's 11:51 pm as I right this now, and I just got back 10 minutes ago.  I have to be up early tomorrow to start picking up the rest of the students, so I'll have to come back to this later.

Bear Pit and Fleas

Finally, a decent night's sleep: I went to bed at 11:15 and woke up at 8:20.  Unfortunately, I still have a huge sleep deficit to make up after losing so much on the flight and then the poor sleep the next two days.  Spent a leisurely morning catching up on work and then headed over to the DDR Museum.  This is one my favorite museums in Berlin.  I didn't go last time I was here and I missed it.  Some people accuse it of engaging in Ostalgia (nostalgia for East Germany), but I think they do a pretty good job of capturing daily life under the dictatorship.

While they have lots of displays on the Communist Party, and the Wall, and the army, and the secret police (they've expanded a lot), what I particularly like are the images of every day people.

They just tried so hard to look hip; most of the people ended up looking like used-car salesmen from Nashville in the 1970s.

And what about this living room:  the height of East German style in 1984.

They've almost doubled the size of their exhibition space, and now have displays on life in the East German army, the prisons for dissidents, and the political parties.  I wish I had time to take the students here, but I will encourage them to come on their own, just as I will encourage them to visit the Museum of Communism when we're in Prague.

One of the students asked me yesterday what my favorite city on this trip is.  While Prague is probably the prettiest (as long as it isn't humid and boiling), Vienna is the most opulent (though rather cold at the same time), and Budapest the most convivial (with its communal spas), I think Berlin remains my favorite.  The first time I toured central Europe I was struck by all the things I recognized:  the Jews who came to Israel brought their favorite parts with them.  They brought the cafés and konditoreis, the kiosks and intellectual culture, the art and music.  Wandering around Berlin, you can see what the Jews loved so much and what they tried to take with them when they left (or fled).  At the same time, I probably end up speaking almost as much Hebrew as German with all the Israelis here.    There's something about this city that continues to draw Jews.  Sure, there are Israelis who go to Paris and London, but there's no website called Olim l'Paris (literally using the verb to immigrate to Israel) while there is one called Olim l'Berlin.    More so than any other German city, Berlin remains cosmopolitan.  It's the most unGerman city in Germany.

I met up with the students in the afternoon and we went to visit Mauerpark.  Along the way we stopped off at the remnants of Berlin Wall.  Mauerpark hosts a huge flea market on Sundays, and I wanted to look for some books for my niece.  

I found a book stall and among other things, they had a whole bunch of plays in Germany, including Lessing's Nathan der Weise.  As it happens, I've been reading Amos Elon's The Pity of it All, about the history of German Jews, and I was reading his chapter on Mendelssohn.  Since Lessing modeled the character of Nathan on Mendelssohn, I figured it was beshert (to use a Yiddish phrase) for me to buy this for her.

Afterwards, we went to Bearpit Karaoke.  Run by an expatriate American, you basically have a thousand people on a hillside watching people sing karaoke songs. 

A few sing well (there was one girl from San Diego with a squeaky voice who just rocked  the song "Rolling in the Deep").  Others make up for talent with enthusiasm.  This guy did his best to channel Celine Dion:

We watched the show for over an hour and then wandered through Prenzlauer Berg.  I wanted to make reservations for dinner for Tuesday night (for 14 people).  I was a little nervous (the guy taking the reservation told me to relax), but I did find out that I'll have to bring plenty of cash as they don't take credit cards.  It's a restaurant not that far from Eberwalderstraße and I like it a lot as it's a very traditional, German restaurant, with good and reasonably priced food.  I thought it would be a good introduction to Germany and they have a Spargel (asparagus) menu!

After that we went down to Senefelderplatz for pizza at the anarchist restaurant I like.  On the way back we saw people tangoing at a cafe on the banks of the Spree, while other sat out in beach chairs enjoying the last glimmers of twilight (at 9:30 pm).

Without Cares

My second night was only slightly more restful than my first:  I did manage to have some dreams, but they were work anxiety nightmares.  This was a new one though.  My typical work anxiety dream is that I'm a student, it's the last week of the semester, and I've just realized I was enrolled in a class that I forgot to attend.  I've had papers due for weeks, which I haven't done and I can't find the syllabus.  This dream was different.  This time I dreamt that I was a professor who had forgotten to teach a class and hadn't shown up for a week.  I woke up wondering if I had given all the finals I was supposed to (I had).

After breakfast, I met up with one of my students and we headed down to Potsdam.  I heard about her adventures the day before, wandering around the neighborhood.  At one point she got lost (well, at more than one point), and she used the mnemonic device I had told her ("Orange Burger Street") to find our hostel (Oranienburger Straße).

We took the bus to Friedrich the Great's summer home away from home:  Schloß Sans Souci (Sans Souci Palace). 

After buying timed tickets to tour the main quarters, we wandered around the gardens.  There were a few nice bits of Eighteenth-Century orientalism:

This is the Chinesisches Teehaus.  After all the drought we have suffered in Southern California, it was nice to luxuriate in a garden that has plenty of water.

While King Friedrich grew lots of fresh fruit, we didn't see any orchards, but lots of spring flowers:

There's no tour guide for the palace.  Rather, they give you a headset in the language of your choice and you go through with everyone in your time slot.  You can take photos, but only if you buy a special permit.  Guards in every room keep an eagle eye out for tourists sneaking shots.  My student took some surreptitiously, but I was too concerned about getting caught.  The palace is much, much smaller than similar places like Warsaw Castle or Wilanow Palace in Warsaw, or the grand daddy of them all:  Versailles.  Still, it was a lot of fun.  Two things were very clear from the tour:  Friedrich had major issues with his father and absolutely no affection for the wife his father made him marry.

Afterwards, I thought we might stop at the film museum in Potsdam, but our bus didn't stop there.  Instead, we headed to west Berlin so I could pick up some Neuhaus chocolate at KaDeWe.  In addition to the radically different feel west Berlin has from the east, today there was a new element:  all the crowds of Dortmund fans in Berlin for the final of the German soccer cup. 

There were a fair amount of police out, but no one was getting out of control and everyone seemed to be having a good time.  Dortmund fans were everywhere in Berlin.  For every thousand Dortmund fans, I think I saw one Wolfburg fan.  Not sure where they were hiding.  Unfortunately, though, Dortmund lost the game last night:  1:3.

It's always fun to wander around KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens - the largest department store in Europe).  In the food courts on the 6th floor, they have display cases for gourmet delicacies from various countries.  Here's one of my students in the American section.

Jif peanut butter, CoffeeMate, Marshmallow Creme, and Pop Tarts: our gastronomic gifts to the world.

We had a little bit of drizzle on the walk back from the subway to the hostel, but not bad considering it had been threatening to rain on and off all day. 

Unlike west Berlin, there's tons of art on the walls of buildings in the east.  For example, there was a famous squatter art studio just up the street from the hostel called Kunsthaus Tacheles.  Opened a few months after the fall of the wall, it flourished until 2012, when it was shut down so the space could be developed.  Fenced off, it still remains vacant, though some of the wall murals remain:

It may be hard to make out, but that's a giant cockroach emerging from the wall, right of the face.  Beneath it is a green sign (by the Green Party) that says:  "Before the Wall, after the Wall, the state harasses the bugs."

After walking around to find the nearest ATM machine and laundromat (for the students), I made my way to Prenzlauer Berg to have dinner in one of my favorite restaurants:  Gugelhof.   This restaurant specializes in Alsatian food, and I decided to start off my meal with something I ordered two years ago:  the duck liver paté prepared like crème brûlée, with onion marmalade:

I went somewhat lighter for the main course.  I ordered the Beelitz asparagus (a white asparagus, particularly loved in Germany), with hollandaise sauce and roasted potatoes.  Most people order it with either ham or schnitzel, but I had had schnitzel for lunch and wanted to go lighter.

I had a glass of Weißburgunder (known elsewhere as pinot blanc) to wash it down.  Smooth, fruity, with no trace of oak, it was perfect.

By the time I got back to the U-bahn it was 8:40 pm but the sun was still out.  It doesn't set here until after 9.

Back at the hostel, I watched the last 30 minutes of the soccer match.  There was a family watching nearby, and the little boy (perhaps 6) was wearing a yellow Dortmund jersey.  Every time the Wolfburg goalie blocked a shot, he stomped around and kicked the sofa in frustration.  Unfortunately, Dortmund lost.

Back to the Archives

Yesterday afternoon I had a pleasant conversation with two Israelis staying in the hostel; they're part of the large ex-pat Israeli community in Berlin.  Neither wants to live here permanently, but perhaps just for a little while.  We talked for about an hour, all in Hebrew, so I've probably spoken more Hebrew than German so far.

I kind of lost track of time, so I raced out around 6:15 pm to pick up the first student, who arrived at Schönefeld, the old Soviet airport in the south of Berlin.  What a schlep!  The drizzle stopped and I did get a wonderful shot of this rainbow over Berlin:

I'm glad I gave myself a little extra time as they train to the airport seemed not to be running.  I changed to a direct bus and got there as the student's plane was landing.   What a decrepit airport!  Very sad and depressed.  Tegel may be a little old and run down, but it's far friendlier.  Terminal C at Tegel is very, very similar in layout to Schönefeld, but Tegel has nice cafes and stores; Schönefeld just feels like a mostly empty warehouse, with a food stall (singular).  The decor looks like it was last updated in 1982.

Found the student with no difficulty and guided her back to the hostel.  After checking her in, we went for dinner in the neighborhood.  When I'm in central Europe, I go on a beer and torte diet.  Here's the first beer of the trip:

After dinner I was ready to crash.  I returned to the hostel, typed up yesterday's entry and went right to bed.  I figured I would sleep right through to morning, but that was not the case.  As a result of the jet lag, I slept quite fitfully.  When I woke up at 4:45, I took half an Ambien and slept 'til 8:45.

Today and Friday are work days.  Today was the Landesarchiv Berlin, the archive for the state (province) of Berlin.  Like the newspaper collection of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Landesarchiv is in what appears to be a renovated factory from the 19th century:

No problem finding the archive or getting in.  They had a microfilm machine ready for me with the microfilm I requested.  I eventually found the document I was looking for:  a copy of the verdict against the lyricist I'm studying, laying out the crimes he was convicted of.  It's rather chilling and even embarrassing to read his dating habits reduced to criminal terminology. One hour and 14 Bundesarchiv (the government archives) in southern Berlin.  Not sure exactly what they have; they only replied to my email yesterday morning and I had to print out the forms I am to bring this afternoon.

Since I had some free time, I went to the Hauptbahnhof to buy the metro passes for the students (when you're buying 14 week-long metro passes at 29 Euros each, it's probably better to do the transaction with a live person).  It was almost sunny, so I decided to go for a walk.  When the weather gets warm, Berliners create their own "beach" along the Spree River.

The boat tours go up and down the Spree from opposite Museuminsel.  If you look above the beach chairs, but below the federal government buildings, you make out a line of segways, who appeared to be on a group segway tour of the center of Berlin.

From there I walked to the Brandenburg Gate, where they are setting up a big podium and platform for some event next week.  All day long, I've been seeing people dressed in yellow and black t-shirts and sweatshirts around the center of Berlin.  They're here for the finals of the German soccer season:  Dortmund vs Wolfsburg tomorrow afternoon.  Almost everyone I saw was supporting Dortmund.

After all that walking, I decided to get back to work:  by going to Café Einstein on Unter den Linden.  This has a rather different feel from the original location near Nollendorfplatz.  A lot more diplomats and high-priced executives come here.

I had brought a copy of a poem written by Bruno Balz in 1927 for the 8th anniversary of the founding of the Bund für Menschenrecht, a very early gay rights organization.  In February 1934, the Schweizerisches Freundschafts-Banner reprinted it on its cover, on the one-year anniversary of the Nazis coming to power.  Called "Wir Wachen" (We Awake), it is (literally) a call to arms to defend freedom.  My goal for the afternoon was to translate the poem (and have a café au lait and a slice of Käsekuchen):

That's Balz's photo on the cover along with his poem.  It took no small amount of courage for someone so prominent to take so public a position.  Here's how the poem opens:
 

We struggle and fight year after year

For freedom and for understanding.

We struggle – and see year after year

That sorrow passes.

Still, the cry of despair rings out:

“We cannot bear it any longer!”

Yet while we are still not free,

Neither are we beaten!

 This was published just three months after one of Balz's most famous successes: the original 1933 Viktor und Viktoria (more famously remade in 1982 by Blake Edwards with Julie Andrews). Balz wrote the lyrics and some of the sung dialogue within the film.

Tonight I went back to Tegel Airport to meet the second student.  I waited in the main hall 'til the board showed his plane had landed.

Although delayed, his plane finally landed and his baggage came through.  A much less eventful bus ride back to town.  His hostel and my hostel are just two buildings apart, so we ended up eating dinner between them.  First schnitzel of the trip:

Tomorrow I'm going to try to get to Potsdam.  I haven't seen the Sans Souci Palace since 2007.

My New Favorite Airlines

Lufthansa is now my new favorite airlines.

I flew from Los Angeles to Frankfurt on an Airbus 380-800, which has to be one of the largest passenger planes being used now.  They loaded the planes with four rows simultaneously.  Just take Door #1, my line was told (as opposed to the three other gang planks.  They loaded that ship faster than a Carnival Cruise.

Unlike so many domestic carriers, who charge even just to listen to music, Lufthansa had dozens of recent motion pictures to pick from, including Ex Machina, which is still in theaters.  The real surprise came with the cocktail cart:  cocktails, wine, and beer, all complimentary.  In Economy Class!  Then a refill of wine with dinner.  But when they came around afterwards to offer me either cognac or Bailey's over ice that my jaw figuratively hit the ground.

When I saw the one-year old a few rows ahead of me when I boarded I groaned to myself:  no, not screaming baby airlines again. Thankfully, though, the kid was very well behaved (or drugged) and never cried out until the very end of the flight.  Still, I only got 2.5 hours of sleep.  I am so tired right now.

The change of planes in Frankfurt was smooth and efficient.  In Berlin, there was no question of where to find the baggage claim:  each pair of gates has its own.  Within 15 minutes of landing our luggage was popping up.  From there it was a straight shot through customs.  Why can't our country be the same.  I would compare it to a third world country, if that wasn't an insult to third world countries.

A little bit of excitement on the bus ride from Tegel airport.  The driver was trying to shut the doors when a guy ran and forced his way on.  The driver yelled at him; he yelled at the driver.  We sat there for 10 minutes with nothing happening.   Then, the police arrived.  Eventually, the passenger was forced from the bus, and the bus driver drove off (though not before the ejected passenger slapped the side of the bus with his palm.

I'm staying again at the Generator Hostel in Mitte.  It's just down the block from the Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße.  I went out for a walk after checking in, but it started to drizzle.  I ended up getting a cafe latte and chatting with a couple of Israelis staying here.

My room is a lot like the one I had last time:  two twin beds, lots of plain pine furnishings, clean and sparse.   I'd write more, but I really need to get some sleep.  I'll fill in more details tomorrow.