Day 50 - Brewer´s Tour

I did decide to go on Brewer´s Best of Berlin tour yesterday. This is why I didn´t update yesterday, as I didn´t reach the hostel until after midnight (and the internet place is an extra ten minute walk from there). The tour was pretty sweet. Let´s see if I actually retained anything. :)

• Jewish Synagogue in East Berlin (the vast majority of the city´s history is in the east). There was a plaque in front of it to the police captain who turned away a Nazi mob on the Night of Broken Glass. The synagogue is mostly restored, as opposed to many of the buildings in the east which still show sixty year old war damage. Terry made a good joke about communists having an offical two thousand man Bureau of Neglect that comes up with new and more effective ways of letting their most valuable resources lay fallow or, better yet, deteriorate. You can´t accuse Terry of being PC. He´s a brit, and rails against everything he doesn´t like. I think the main reason he still does the tour is because of how upset he is that all of this stuff isn´t effectively taught in school.
• Puzzlingly Elaborate Post Office. Apparently, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, they didn´t use all the gold to gild the victory column. (I don´t really even know if that story is true.) They put half aside as a future war reserve and gave a bunch to all the towns in Germany to build schools, roads, and elaborate post offices.
• Jewish Girl´s School where hundreds of students and teachers were pulled from the building. WARNING: This is the first of a lot of ugly bits of history. If you don´t care to read about it, just skip today. Many of the girls were sent off to brothels in Poland and subsequently killed. Many were raped on the spot by Hitler´s men. The people watching across the street reported the rape to authorities, not because it violated the bodies of the girls but because it made the men guilty of violating Hitler´s racial purity law against fraternizing with jews.
• Jewish Hospital. Same story, pretty much, except that one "lucky" woman survived because she had gone to pick up medicine for one of the doctors. I put lucky in quotes because although she survived the day, her eleven year old son did not, and he was the last family she had left.
• Cemetary. We saw the graves of Berthold Brecht, Hegel (most well known from Monty Python´s philosopher song as being a lesser drinker than David Hume), and some of the architects of Berlin´s most famous monuments (Rauch, Shinkle, Strack, and Cantien).
• History Lesson. At this point, Terry poured some water on the ground and gave us a history lesson. He showed Germany at the end of the second world war and put the question forward, much as the allies did, "These people gave us two world wars in thirty one years. What the #§ß* can we do with them?" Apparently the allies seriously floated proposals of killing or castrating every last german male. And they actually spent a few months pursuing the following policy. We´ll destroy all their industry, flood all their mines, and give every german man a bucket, a spade, and maybe some seeds if they´re lucky. That was actual policy for a number of months. Freaky. He then went on to explain how the country and Berlin were divided up by population, things went bad with the soviets, etc. etc.
• The Wall. We then went to the wall museum and environs. They´re still completing the roads that link east to west. It really is amazing how slow some of the repairs are. The first iteration of the wall was just barbed wire and completely encircled West Berlin overnight. 400 east german border guards defected in those first few days before the second iteration (a simple brick and mortar job) went up. There were all sorts of crazy circumstances that arose from the wall. In the first few days the east german border guards did not have orders to shoot, so anyone who could outrun them or sneak through the barbed wire when they weren´t looking could escape. In some cases we saw people jumping out of windows because their east german apartment buildings were right next to the wall. Those buildings were soon demolished. By 1971, the wall was a pair of walls with a death strip covered with barbed wire, floodlights, and mines. There is now a double row of cobblestones running across the city where the wall once stood.
• Museum Island. We strolled past the Pergamon and a bunch of other museums that I´m sure you´ll hear enough about later.
• Hitler´s Bunker. There is no marking for Hitler´s Bunker. The idea was that anything marking the spot would be a rallying point for neo-nazis (who consistently pull a little less than ten percent of the vote in any german election). So instead it´s the paved over parking lot for an apartment complex. I spit on it. It seemed the only proper thing to do.
• End of the Tour. We whipped by Checkpoint Charlie and a couple other buildings, but our group was pretty slow, so there were a lot of things we didn´t get to see. I almost wish I was taking the tour again today so I could hopefully see what I missed. But it´s supposed to be raining a lot today, so it´s probably just as well that I´m not. I went out with Terry and a couple other tour members for a snack. It´s sad to see this man who is so passionate about history and doesn´t know how to communicate with the younger generation to really make it matter to them. He´s not a showman. Of course, he´d been picking up shifts for another guide and was pretty worn out that day. Still, I wouldn´t mind sitting down with him and really talking about how the tour might be improved.

All right. Enough daydreaming. Let´s hit the Bauhaus, Googenheim and whatever else is open on a Monday.