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Dessau, Jena, and Berlin
Justiceiro
Registered Users Posts: 1,177 Major grins
Well, I'm mostly settled in at the new apartment in Mannheim, so I busted out the Mac, tried to install photoshop and lightroom (and was finally succesfull after a call to adobe) and uploaded some recent photos.
My wife's birthday happened to coincide with the last week we had a free rental car, so we decided to hit the road and check out Eastern Germany.
We set out from Stuttgart a little late and were hoping to find a roadside hotel near Bayreuth. Usually this isn't so hard, but this happens to be the one time in the year when the annual Wagner Ring festival is held there, so nothing was available for 150 km in any direction.
We crashed out in a gas station parking lot in Thuringia, woke up at the crack of dawn, and headed for Dessau.
There's not much to see in Dessau- it is a typical post communist town. Prefab houses, cracks in the street, you would hardly know that Eastern Germany had been reintegrated into the federal republic if Dessau was all that you saw.
Dessau, however, does host a UNESCO world heritage sight- the Bauhaus. Not the band, rather, the school of architecture and design that was essentially responsible for the birth of the modern look that we take for granted today. Founded by Walther Gropius, the Bauhaus was kicked out of Weimar by conservative architects, and opened a school in Dessau (later run by Mies van der Rohe) which trained architects until it was closed down by the Nazis in 1933. Fortunately, they did not destroy the building, which continues to function as a design and architecture school.
The Main Bauhaus Building
Awesome Balconies
I principally went to Dessau in order to photograph these buildings. Cuz I loves the Bauhaus. I really want a Corbusier couch, but am not rich, so anyone who wants to, feel free to contribute to the "get Justi some awesome bauhaus furniture fund."
After checking out Dessau we headed for Berlin- the coolest city in Europe. And yes, I do include Paris in that reckoning. Parisians bask in the reflected glory of past coolness, but Paris is no longer cool due to its, well, parisness. Berlin is cool RIGHT NOW. You should go there. Why are you not there now? Why?
I had last been in Berlin in January of 1991, so I was shocked at the transformation the city had undergone. When I was there most of the wall was gone, but large sections still remained. where there was no wall, one could clearly see which side of the street was west berlin (the nice part), and which side was east Berlin (the crappy falling down bit.) Stadtmitte (City Center) was a desert- the Reichstag a shell and the area around Brandenburger Tor a wasteland.
The thriving heart of West Berlin was, at the time, the Ku'damm. Now the Ku'damm feels like the provinces, and Unter den Linden is once again the bustling heart of the city. Only the Russian embassy feels Soviet, everything else is completely modern.
The New Germany: Free press and Sweet Automobiles
Berlin has been cleaned up, both from its wartime experience, and from the communist epoch- but marks of both are still visible. The most obvious are those such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche on the Ku'Damm- the city fathers decided to leave the church as it was post 1945 as a memorial both to the suffering endured by Berliners, and the reasons that such suffering had come to pass.
Also, when one is in the Museuminsel area (more on that later) take a look at the stonework of the old buildings. It is peppered with small and large circular pitmarks. These are bullet scars, and they are ubiquitous. It gives one pause to think of the massive amounts of lead that flew down the streets of this city in 1945.
The interior of the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche
Here and there other reminders of the war and its aftermath exist. In between two office buildings near the Potzdamer Platz, along a quie and normal city street, stands this guard tower that once held machine guns ready to gun down anyone who attempted to escape over the wall into the west. The last person so killed was shot a little over a month before the fall of communism in Germany.
close up of a remaining bit of the wall
Between Potzdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate one comes across the controversial memorial to the Jewish victims of fascism in Europe.
The memorial consists of a number of variously tall gray stone columns. They appear to be more or less level, but as one enters the memorial, the ground descends to the level where one is dwarfed by the columns.
I think this could be an effective memorial, I guess (It's a tad abstract) but I find it inconrgueous and a little insulting that, despite the signs clearly forbidding it, tourists gleefully leap from pillar to pillar, and pose for photographs with big smiles on their faces. IT should be a place of reflection, but it seems more like a holiday park. I would like to point out, howver, that none of the people behaving inappropriately were German. The holocaust is no laughing matter here, I can assure you.
Other reminders of the past:
Checkpoint Charlie
The Soviet War memorial; under these stones lie 2,500 of the 81,000 Red Army Soldiers who died to capture the Capital of the Reich
Soviet Tank
Nikolai can tell us what the text says. Note the Soviet dates for the beginning of WWII
Stadtmitte (City Center)
The Brandenburger Tor
The Spree river and the Central Train Station
The Reichstag (now the site of the Bundestag)
The TV Tower and the "Red City Hall"
The Big sites around the center are the Reichstag, The Brandenburg Gate, Alexanderplatz (known simply as "Alex") The Museum Island (with the world's greatest museum of the near east, the Pergamon museum) and the TV tower. Built in the 60's by the Communists, the TV tower consistently displays a fiery cross on the side due to light reflected from the sun. This irritated the GDR authorities intensely, and was dubbed by the West Berliners as "the popes revenge."
The "Prussian Academy of Science" now the Humboldt University Library
Prussia saw itself as the Athens of Germany- the other German states thought of it more as Sparta
Bebelplatz- the site of the first Nazi book burning in 1933
Berlin was never much of a Nazi city- it was too cosmopolitan, too Jewish, too gay, too wild, and above all, too smart to really dig the rube from Austria who took Germany down the path of National suicide. Beriners specialized in subtle acts of verbal treason and subliminal resistance- typically mocking satire and lefthanded compliments. For example, early in the war the German Broadcasting Service used to carry news of German victories and close each broadcast with "For all this, we thank the Fuhrer." As the news stopped reporting the relentless drive of the Soviets to the west, and was finally forced to announce the fall and destruction of German cities, the Berliners bitterly saluted the end of each broadcast with the phrase no longer parroted by the radio, "And for all this, we thank the fuhrer." Even today Satire is considered in Berlin to be the highest form of literature, and the Caberets continue, as they did during Weimar days, to skewer the Good and the Great of the land.
Humboldt University
Kathe Kollwitz' "Mother and Dead Child" at the Prussian Guard House
Museum Island seen from the Spree
I'll add more tomorrow. I have to hang out with the wife...
My wife's birthday happened to coincide with the last week we had a free rental car, so we decided to hit the road and check out Eastern Germany.
We set out from Stuttgart a little late and were hoping to find a roadside hotel near Bayreuth. Usually this isn't so hard, but this happens to be the one time in the year when the annual Wagner Ring festival is held there, so nothing was available for 150 km in any direction.
We crashed out in a gas station parking lot in Thuringia, woke up at the crack of dawn, and headed for Dessau.
There's not much to see in Dessau- it is a typical post communist town. Prefab houses, cracks in the street, you would hardly know that Eastern Germany had been reintegrated into the federal republic if Dessau was all that you saw.
Dessau, however, does host a UNESCO world heritage sight- the Bauhaus. Not the band, rather, the school of architecture and design that was essentially responsible for the birth of the modern look that we take for granted today. Founded by Walther Gropius, the Bauhaus was kicked out of Weimar by conservative architects, and opened a school in Dessau (later run by Mies van der Rohe) which trained architects until it was closed down by the Nazis in 1933. Fortunately, they did not destroy the building, which continues to function as a design and architecture school.
The Main Bauhaus Building
Awesome Balconies
I principally went to Dessau in order to photograph these buildings. Cuz I loves the Bauhaus. I really want a Corbusier couch, but am not rich, so anyone who wants to, feel free to contribute to the "get Justi some awesome bauhaus furniture fund."
After checking out Dessau we headed for Berlin- the coolest city in Europe. And yes, I do include Paris in that reckoning. Parisians bask in the reflected glory of past coolness, but Paris is no longer cool due to its, well, parisness. Berlin is cool RIGHT NOW. You should go there. Why are you not there now? Why?
I had last been in Berlin in January of 1991, so I was shocked at the transformation the city had undergone. When I was there most of the wall was gone, but large sections still remained. where there was no wall, one could clearly see which side of the street was west berlin (the nice part), and which side was east Berlin (the crappy falling down bit.) Stadtmitte (City Center) was a desert- the Reichstag a shell and the area around Brandenburger Tor a wasteland.
The thriving heart of West Berlin was, at the time, the Ku'damm. Now the Ku'damm feels like the provinces, and Unter den Linden is once again the bustling heart of the city. Only the Russian embassy feels Soviet, everything else is completely modern.
The New Germany: Free press and Sweet Automobiles
Berlin has been cleaned up, both from its wartime experience, and from the communist epoch- but marks of both are still visible. The most obvious are those such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche on the Ku'Damm- the city fathers decided to leave the church as it was post 1945 as a memorial both to the suffering endured by Berliners, and the reasons that such suffering had come to pass.
Also, when one is in the Museuminsel area (more on that later) take a look at the stonework of the old buildings. It is peppered with small and large circular pitmarks. These are bullet scars, and they are ubiquitous. It gives one pause to think of the massive amounts of lead that flew down the streets of this city in 1945.
The interior of the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche
Here and there other reminders of the war and its aftermath exist. In between two office buildings near the Potzdamer Platz, along a quie and normal city street, stands this guard tower that once held machine guns ready to gun down anyone who attempted to escape over the wall into the west. The last person so killed was shot a little over a month before the fall of communism in Germany.
close up of a remaining bit of the wall
Between Potzdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate one comes across the controversial memorial to the Jewish victims of fascism in Europe.
The memorial consists of a number of variously tall gray stone columns. They appear to be more or less level, but as one enters the memorial, the ground descends to the level where one is dwarfed by the columns.
I think this could be an effective memorial, I guess (It's a tad abstract) but I find it inconrgueous and a little insulting that, despite the signs clearly forbidding it, tourists gleefully leap from pillar to pillar, and pose for photographs with big smiles on their faces. IT should be a place of reflection, but it seems more like a holiday park. I would like to point out, howver, that none of the people behaving inappropriately were German. The holocaust is no laughing matter here, I can assure you.
Other reminders of the past:
Checkpoint Charlie
The Soviet War memorial; under these stones lie 2,500 of the 81,000 Red Army Soldiers who died to capture the Capital of the Reich
Soviet Tank
Nikolai can tell us what the text says. Note the Soviet dates for the beginning of WWII
Stadtmitte (City Center)
The Brandenburger Tor
The Spree river and the Central Train Station
The Reichstag (now the site of the Bundestag)
The TV Tower and the "Red City Hall"
The Big sites around the center are the Reichstag, The Brandenburg Gate, Alexanderplatz (known simply as "Alex") The Museum Island (with the world's greatest museum of the near east, the Pergamon museum) and the TV tower. Built in the 60's by the Communists, the TV tower consistently displays a fiery cross on the side due to light reflected from the sun. This irritated the GDR authorities intensely, and was dubbed by the West Berliners as "the popes revenge."
The "Prussian Academy of Science" now the Humboldt University Library
Prussia saw itself as the Athens of Germany- the other German states thought of it more as Sparta
Bebelplatz- the site of the first Nazi book burning in 1933
Berlin was never much of a Nazi city- it was too cosmopolitan, too Jewish, too gay, too wild, and above all, too smart to really dig the rube from Austria who took Germany down the path of National suicide. Beriners specialized in subtle acts of verbal treason and subliminal resistance- typically mocking satire and lefthanded compliments. For example, early in the war the German Broadcasting Service used to carry news of German victories and close each broadcast with "For all this, we thank the Fuhrer." As the news stopped reporting the relentless drive of the Soviets to the west, and was finally forced to announce the fall and destruction of German cities, the Berliners bitterly saluted the end of each broadcast with the phrase no longer parroted by the radio, "And for all this, we thank the fuhrer." Even today Satire is considered in Berlin to be the highest form of literature, and the Caberets continue, as they did during Weimar days, to skewer the Good and the Great of the land.
Humboldt University
Kathe Kollwitz' "Mother and Dead Child" at the Prussian Guard House
Museum Island seen from the Spree
I'll add more tomorrow. I have to hang out with the wife...
Cave ab homine unius libri
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Another Reichstag Shot
Berlin Olympic Stadium
The stadium built for the 1936 Olympics sil stands on the edge of town. It was here that Jesse Owens, an African American, made a mockery of Hitler's claim to racial superiority by winning 4 gold medals.
Jesse Owens recieving the gold medal for the long jump in 1936
Owens' name remains enshrined at the top of the left column
When told, for the current games, that politics and the Olympics ought to be seperate, it behooves us to remember that the two have been entwined from the very beginning.
The Stadium was enormous for its time, and still ranks amongs the largest arenas that I have been to. Very little has been modernized here, apart from the seating.
Stadium Interior
The platform that Contained the Olympic flame
Entry to the pool costs only a few euros. Athletes still train here.