Berlin

There are so many cities in Europe I wish to visit, that I sometimes find it difficult deciding where to go next. So it's helpful when an Australian friend visits Europe, because it gives me the perfect excuse to meet up with them somewhere new. My dear friend Carmel visited Greece and Germany in October 2006, and we met up in Berlin.

I arrived in Berlin on a Friday night, just in time to make it to the annual HustlaBall (it's funny how things work out), an annual gay dance party at the KitKatClub. This is a modern nightclub, named in honour of the Berlin venue that figures in the Kandar/Ebb musical Cabaret. The KitKatClub (since relocated) is a warehouse in Bessemerstrasse in Schönberg that looks like it was on the wrong side of the wall (it wasn't). I'd describe the interior design as Stalin-chic, but one gets the impression that there was actually no design intention. The KitKatClub looks like someone appropriated a rotting warehouse, installed a bar, and put up some lights. Of course, the design trick is to make it look like that. In fact, everything I saw in the club that night was oh-so-carefully constructed...

Saturday was spent catching up with some London friends for coffee, and exploring the city on my own. The one must-see on my itinerary was the Filmmuseum in the new(ish) Sony Centre (slideshow) on Potsdamerplatz. This is a wonderful museum, filled with a variety of props, equipment and displays that detail Germany's rich cinematic history. In the 1920s, Berlin was a film-making capital that rivalled Hollywood. In that decade, and the first few years of the next, Berlin produced wonderful films like Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, M, The Blue Angel, and Murder. Alfred Hitchcock got his first big break in Berlin, as did Joseph von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, and Marlene Dietrich (who is the subject of a significant size of the collection). The Filmmuseum also does not shy away from exploring the industry under Nazi rule. There is a significant section on Leni Riefenstahl, and her two films for the Nazis, The Triumph of the Will, and Olympia.

I also visited Checkpoint Charlie (slideshow). The museum here offers a wealth of information for visitors. It's really interesting, and yet it is also the worst tourist experience I have endured. The explanatory text is in six languages, for most of the exhibit items, making it hard to navigate and interpret the museum. And sometimes the text is attributed to the wrong item, or staggeringly out-of-date (eg one item's annotation was grossly out-of-date, referring to the wall that still divided the city). In fairness, I believe the museum was the pet project of one man, funded by himself, and subsequently by donation. The best part of the museum is the section detailing the variety of ways that people tried to escape from East to West. Just outside the museum is the American Zone cabin, and the relevant signage welcoming or alerting travellers according to their direction of travel. If it were not for the placement of that cabin, and a few other subtle markers such as stone markers along the ground marking the East-West division, it would be easy to forget that the city was once divided.

That the city was once divided by the wall, is a source of constant fascination for me. The U-bahn underground metro railway was largely constructed prior to the war, and after the wall was erected, trains would continue to weave back and forth under the imaginary marker above, passing bricked off tunnels, and forbidden to stop at what had become the network's ghost stations. Potsdamerplatz (slideshow), where the Sony Centre and filmmuseum is located, is a sprawling complex of new glass-and-steel buildings. Twenty years ago, this site looked like a wasteland, in the heart of Berlin, and largely had not changed since the destruction of the war. Likewise, the Brandenburg Gate(slideshow) which once stood isolated in its own wasteland setting, is now hemmed in by modern buildings with the usual cornucopia of coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels in tourist spots the world over. I feel the Brandenburg Gate should have been turned into a road roundabout, as one sees with the various gates and arches in London, Paris, and Madrid. Sadly, it seems, the opportunism of greedy developers pre-determined an alternate fate for this important cultural icon.

I spent most of Sunday with Carmel and Cathy exploring Berlin on foot. Cathy and Carmel have been the closes of friends for years (I feel I'm forbidden to detail the exact number). I'd heard so much about Cathy, and yet this was the first time we'd actually met. So it was a joy watching them interact, especially as they've lived on opposite sides of the world for the last 30 years. Cathy had wonderful stories to tell of her experience of living in Germany in the 70s and 80s, especially as she used to regularly pass into the East to visit her husband's family. She used to pass through Checkpoint Charlie (Charlie, as in C, as in the third checkpoint) as that was the designated entry/exit point for foreign nationals. Amazingly, Cathy described the experience of driving on a special autobahn from West Germany, passing through East Germany to arrive at the political "island" of Berlin. A breakdown, it seems, was not an option.

With Carmel and Cathy I saw the restored Reichstag(slideshow), the Brandenburg Gate, the moving Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the construction site of the new American Embassy (right across the road from the memorial), the new British Embassy (built on the same site of the pre-war embassy), and the Hotel Adlon. This modern hotel, rebuilt in a similar style to the pre-eminent hotel of pre-War Germany, is where Michael Jackson dangled his baby a few years back!

All of my Berlin photographs can be viewed in a slideshow.