Berlin

A Sojourn To Berlin

Many weeks, I went on a sojourn to Berlin with Rosalia and another couple. A sojourn is a high brow and fancy way of saying, “an extended weekend.” Many weeks have passed since we returned and I can honestly say that I would like to return to Berlin again in the future. Part of my motivation for returning to Berlin is that I wasn’t able to order a kebab from a Turkish vendor or a currywurst from any number of kiosks we passed over the course of four days and three nights. The other part is to drink more beer, eat more sausages, and marvel at all the sites. The beer was absolutely delicious; but, taxing on my bladder’s capacity. It hurt to pee.

To quote Karl Scheffler, “Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being.” This could not be more true. The city is at the same time old and new, divided and unified, hot and cold, and dark and light. Many Americans have a distorted view towards Germans and Germany. You can thank Hollywood’s lazy storytelling for equating Germans with Nazis and villains. Remember Klaus from Die Hard? How about Kai Wulff from The Three Amigos? Americans must be so disappointed when they realized that Germans are very kind people with warm smiles.

East and West

As we all know, Berlin was divided between East and West Berlin after WWII. Ninety percent of Berlin was leveled after WWII and needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. In East Berlin, rebuilding was fairly easy. Pre-fabricated concrete construction to meet the housing demands was the norm. In West Berlin, rebuilding was a bit more complicated. Out of the rubble emerged two schools of thought. Do we rebuild an entirely new modern city disconnected from its morbid past or do we rebuild a new Berlin that also respects and incorporates the best elements of its past heritage? In the end, they rebuilt West Berlin in direct conflict with the past and the future; making this city in to what David Bowie called, “the greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine.” Berlin came into being what it is today by total accident and the unresolved ebb and flow of merging the past with the future and its future with the past.

The Wall

What I did not know and I’m embarrassed to admit is that the Berlin Wall was not built until 1961. I figured they put this wall up on day one of a divided Germany. Almost all of the Berlin Wall has been torn down thanks to David Hasselhoff. His song Looking For Freedom helped take down that wall on November 9, 1989. To this date, a majority of Germans credit “The Hoff” for helping take down the wall. As a result, they’ve made a David Hasselhoff Museum in his honor. Oddly enough, we were meters away from it drinking coffee Berlin and did not know of its existence.

Not much is left of the wall except the murals all along the East Side Gallery and the double bricks weaving its way through what was once East and West Germany. We learned a lot from our “free” tour. The guy was great, but he definitely took a few commercial breaks to remind us that he makes his money from the satisfaction he gives on his tours that is reciprocated in kind with cold hard money.

Conclusion

I saw this draft (along with dozens other) in my Ulysses writing app that I didn’t finish and post. A lot of time has passed since I went to Berlin and the inspiration to write about it is pretty much gone. Hopefully, by getting this half baked post out, I can feel a sense of urgency next time to not let things slide for a few months. There were so many cool places and things we saw in Berlin including a rat swimming in the river where we stopped to get a beer. I kept telling everyone it was a rat. They insisted that it wasn’t. I really enjoyed going to the beer gardens, a multi-media expo, the Bundenstag was really neat, and logging over 20,000 steps a day.