Judy's visit and Berlin - August 2008

Pam’s Aunt Judy came to Europe for two weeks. She came to stay with us for a week and was then traveling to France for the wedding of a friend’s daughter. She flew in Tuesday to Frankfurt via Paris and arrived with no problems. Sparing the details, we showed Judy around Heidelberg and she was very impressed and loved Heidelberg.
On Thursday we took the train to Berlin which she was interested in visiting. The weather did not look promising for the weekend, calling for rain on Friday and Saturday. We took the train from Mannheim to Berlin and arrived in Berlin after about a five hour trip. We stayed at the NH Hotel – Friedrichstraße which is very nicely located and is close to the Friedrichstraße train station.
The three of us enjoy spending time walking around getting to know a city and we did a lot of walking. Berlin is a city of about 3.5 million people and is physically the same size as the 5 burroughs of NYC without all the water to break it up. The city sits along the river Spree and also has a few canals. Before 1871, Berlin was a minor Prussian city, but after the Franco-Prussian War, Wilhem I decided to make Berlin his capital (Hauptstadt). This changed everything. After defeating the French, Germany, as part of the treaty, was awarded the provinces/states of Alsace and Lorraine as well as a boatload of money. In a very short while, Berlin morphed from a sleepy small city to the largest city in the newly united Germany.
We were in no hurry getting started Friday morning. After breakfast, Pam and Judy headed out for some tourist locations, the Brandenburg Gate, The Holocaust Memorial and Museum and then some shopping on Friedrichstraße. I was going to use Friday to do some family research at the Zentrum und Landesbibliothek Berlin (ZLB). Upon arriving there, I quickly determined that the best they could do for me was to show me the on-line address database which I had already found and used. They did though lead me to the Berlin Landes Archiv. Berlin Zentrum is in the middle of town (Mitte) while the Landes Archive is near the Tegel airport. At this point I was under a little bit of a time constraint as the archive closes at 3pm on Fridays so I took a taxi.
The taxi driver was an East German and we chatted along the way. I asked him if and what he misses about the old GDR. He responded that he misses the subsidized rents, inexpensive mass transit and other social programs. I think for many old communist countries, those are the things which people have the hardest time letting go.
The Landes Archive is huge. I was directed to a desk where I could be helped. My inquiry is not unique and I filled out a form listing the people I wanted to research and returned the completed form and was told it would be several months before I would hear something.
After returning to town I met Pam and Judy in a shopping gallery on Friedrichstraße. It was rainy and nasty so we decided to head back to the hotel before dinner. Friday night’s dinner wound up being an inexpensive dinner at a Doner Kepab place. Pam had a nice salad while Judy and I had Doners . A Doner is similar to Greek Gyro and these were particularly good Doners.
Saturday morning dawned with bright sunshine and high clouds. We were up and out early so that we could go to the Reichstag early and beat the crowds. The Reichstag was built in the 1890 by Wilhelm I to house the Budestag (Paliment). The Reichstag was burnt down in February 1933 by a young Dane who did not have enough money to make to travel to the USSR. Hitler seized upon this as a Jewish conspiracy and forced force the Enabling Act and assumed dictatorial power in Germany. After German unification in 1991, the Reichstag was completely renovated and a dome returned to the top of the building.
After leaving the Reichstag, we took the S-Bahn to a flea market in another part of town. Here we met up with Mike Cullen. Mike was a friend of Pam’s Mother from High School. Pam’s Dad has recently been in touch with him and suggested we meet him. Mike has been in Berlin since 1962 and he is the world’s leading authority on the Reichstag and on the Brandenburg gate. He worked on the renovation of both buildings and was a major advocate of returning a dome to the Reichstag (but is not a big fan of the Glass and Metal Dome).
We all piled in to his car and we headed west out of town towards Wannsee. The Wannsee is a large lake west of Berlin near Potsdam and was identified as a place where many of the Prussian Aristocracy and Military leadership resided. At the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the Nazi’s laid out the plan for the extinction of Jews from Europe, starting in the west and moving to the East. The location of the conference has been preserved as a museum.
We had lunch at a Villa that looks on the Wannsee, it was a little windy and a little chilly, but the setting was gorgeous and we all enjoyed lunch. After lunch we continued around the lake to the location of the Potsdam Conference, the Schoß Ceciliahof. This location was chosen as it was one of the largest facilities available that was undamaged after the war. At the Potsdam conference, the US, UK and USSR divided post war Europe.
At this point the weather was getting worse and we headed back into town. On the way back we stopped at the Grunewald Bahnhof (train station). This is where the Jews of Berlin were put on trains and taken east to Camps in Poland (before 1941 they were taken to local camps in Spandau and Sachsenhausen). From the first train on April 14th 1942 with 67 people (destination Warsaw) to the last train on March 27, 1945 with 18 people (destination Theresienstadt) three weeks before the Russians entered Berlin. The siding on Track 17 is preserved and each train is represented by a steel plate on the siding indicating numbers. It is a quiet memorial that not many people know about, making it an all the more powerful. Grunewald is also home to a mountain of debris. Instead of going through the debris of the destroyed buildings and use the usable materials there, the Allies, dumped all of the material into a pile 120 meters high.
A former MRP colleague was also in Berlin this weekend (he spent two weeks in Croatia a week in Austria and then a week in Berlin). We had made tentative plans to meet Nathan for dinner. He took the U-Bahn (subway – Unter or Under) to Friedrichstraße and we met him in the lobby of the hotel. We walked over to Orienburgerstr and had a very nice dinner at an Indian restaurant. Nathan and I made tentative plans to get together Monday morning.
Sunday morning also dawned nicely and we were slow in getting started at there were no plans and no need to hit the streets quickly. During breakfast we decided on a plan, we would walk around. Judy has a friend whose family owned a building in Prenzlauerburg, not far from where my family also owned a building. After stopping by that building, we continued to walk around the neighborhood. We all agreed that we liked the area and that it has a little of the same feel as Greenwich Village – cute boutique shops, art galleries, nice little restaurants with people eating al fresco. The big difference being that the streets and sidewalks are much wider.
Sunday night we went to the Hotel Adlon for a drink. The Adlon was built in the 1880’s as a top of the line hotel for Berlin, because a major world capital needs lots of nice hotels. After opening, the hotel burnt down a month later, but was quickly rebuilt. The Adlon is on the Pariser Platz near the Brandenburg Gate and the British Embassy. The US Embassy had been around the corner but since 2001 has been moved for security reasons. The cost for three drinks was 45€. Judy also wanted to see Check Point Charlie. Check Point Charlie had been the checkpoint in the American Zone between East and West Berlin. We could not find anywhere satisfactory to eat on the way over so Judy spent time there and then we went to an Italian place around the corner.
Monday morning after breakfast, I called Nathan and we made a plan. I walked Judy to the bus stop where she would catch the bus to the Tegel Airport (the best way to get to the airport) and then I started walking around Berlin and made my way over to the Dunkin Donuts near the Sony Complex at the Potsdamer Platz. I found Nathan upstairs at the DD doing email. I wanted to go by Holsteiner Str. 6 which is shown in the address book at a piece of property my family owned. It sits near the North West corner of the Tiergarten right along the river. We took a Taxi there. What we found was a residential building that looks onto the Spree in a lovely residential neighborhood and new office building across the street.
Nathan wanted to see the Tiergarten, so we walked back through the Tiergarten and walked by the Reichstag and then up Wilhelmstr. It was getting on towards lunchtime and I was meeting Pam in the lobby of the hotel at 2pm. We found a nice Vietnamese Restaurant where to have our lunch and then we walked back to the hotel where Pam had just arrived (earlier than expected). We said our goodbyes to Nathan and made our way to the Hauptbahnhof.