Dear Friends,
What a day this was!!! We were docked in Warnemunde by 7 am. We found out on the way there that there was a Tall Ships Festival going on there that weekend. Wow, how exciting!! It is called the Hanse Sail festival and takes place every year on the second weekend in August. Tall ships, traditional sailing boats and museum ships from all over the world meet in Rostock and Warnemunde for this maritime festival, attacting hundreds of thousands of visitors. This festival has been going on since 1991. However, we were scheduled to take an all day excursion in to Berlin so we did not get to participate in any of the festivities around town for the festival. We heard it was lots of fun, but there were thousands of people around for that. In the afternoon, there was a show at an outdoor stage and the local organizers asked our ship to provide some performers - so they sent a group of Indonesians and a group of Philippinos. Each group does a show on our ship so it was natural for them to send a couple acts. It was very well received we are told. When we got back to the ship, there was a live band playing at the outdoor cafe at the dock and lots of merriment and partying going on. There were many tall ships all around as well as a few cruise ships and some ferries. When it got time to leave, there were exchanges of ships horns being blown to add to the festivities.
The ship docked at 7 am and we were off by 7:30 am for our adventure to Berlin. Dick and I were last in Berlin in 1965. As you know, the Berlin Wall had just gone up in 1961 so there was East Berlin and West Berlin, a very tense situation!! There was East Germany, West Germany, the Communist Soviet Union was in full force with all of its Eastern European block of countries, and we were in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We had stood up on the platform to look over the Wall into Platzdammer Platz into East Berlin. There was a large space called NoMans Land on the other side of the Wall filled with concrete barricades and lots of barbed chicken wire and many guard towers filled with armed soldiers. And one of our days there, my Dad, Dick and I took a tour into East Berlin, therefore
going thru Checkpoint Charlie. It was a very serious and rather scarey experience. And East Berlin was a really drab, sad place. We had picked up an East Berlin guide who did all the talking. Our West Berlin guide was not allowed to talk during that time we were in East Berlin. We had been told that most of the government buildings and all the pretty parks, etc., ended up in what was East Berlin. Nothing was being taken care of and much was demolished. People didn't have much of anything and all the buildings were very drab!! Needless to say, it was going to be a very different experience this time. We have all heard so much about the German reunification and the Berlin reunification as a city, that we were really looking forward to seeing it first hand. We have two ladies at our table who are German and live in Munich so we have had very interesting conversations about the war times, separation times, and the reunification. We boarded a private, standard train for the 2 1/2 to 3 hour ride one way to Berlin. We were fortunate to have join us in our train cabin a really nice couple from Goteborg, Sweden. The six of us had a great time visiting on the two train trips.
Yesterday, the capital of Prussia and cultural center of the Golden Twenties; today, the gateway to eastern Europe, Berlin is once again making a new beginning. Berlin is not as beautiful as Paris, as large as New York, as busy as London, or as venerable as Rome, but is full of tumultuous history that will intrigue every visitor. During our short visit to Berlin, we enjoyed some of the plazas and buildings but did not get a sense of the city as a whole which appears full of contradictions - at times attractive, at times ugly, in parts cosmopolitan, in parts provincial, full of history and signs of progress. Since the fall of the Wall in 1989, Berlin has visibly flourished. The city is once again in transition and no one can say just how it will turn out.
When we arrived at the train station, we were greeted by our guide. She was very interesting since she was a little girl when the Wall (that of course had taken several years to build) was closed in 1961 and ended up on the East Berlin side. Along the way, she was able to tell us what it was like living in East Berlin and she related the joy of the night the Wall came down and they had freedom to come and go everywhere in the city. The train station we came to was in what had been East Berlin. We started our driving tour. It is now 20 years since the Wall came down. They have been rebuilding Berlin to get it back to the city it was prior to the Wall and Soviet rule. They are trying to get the center of the city back to where it was before the Wall, since the center of Berlin ended up mostly in East Berlin. We did see some of the very drab apartment buildings we had seen in 1965, but many of them have been torn down and new apartment buildings are in place. As you might imagine, there is still much building going on in Berlin and will be for a while. It took Dick and I a while to figure out the situation since we were not seeing what we had seen when visiting in 1965. About half way thru the day we finally figured out that what they were showing us was Berlin as it had been and will be (not the new, vibrant area of what had been West Berlin that we remembered). It was now one city and the center of the city was being put back to the way it had been before the Wall.
First we stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, which is the border crossing where spies and everyone crossed between the American and Soviet sectors during the Cold War. You will see photos of it now - the building they have there is a small model of what was there. The large Checkpoint Charlie building that we went thru is in a museum somewhere. Where the Wall had been, there is now a double row of stone blocks and a plaque saying Berliner Mauer 1961-1989 (Berlin Wall 1961-1989). It does wind around a bit too. And of course, there are memorials along the way where people tried to escape during those times.
Remember, Berlin had been the capital of Germany prior to Soviet occupation. After the split of Germany, the capital was moved to Bonn. After the Wall came down and Germany was reunited, the capital was moved back to Berlin.
We were driven thru lots of parts of Berlin and saw a great deal of construction!!! Pottsdammer Platz which had been totally demolished during the war and was no mans land during the split is now a beautiful new modern area of the city. In central Berlin, we boarded a private riverboat on the Spree River for a cruise on this charming waterway past the parliament buildings and many of the museums. We saw the new Berlin main trains station which had just opened. There is a photo of the new Chancellery which is where the prime minister lives and works from. The Reichstag building was not operable during the division, but is now the head of German government again. After the cruise, we stopped at a pub for a German lunch. We went to the Brandenburg Gate which is a gateway symbol of Berlin, but was standing alone in No Mans Land during the Wall era. When we were in Berlin in 1965, we could not get close to the Gate. On both sides, there was nothing around the Gate and you could just stop and look at it from the distance. Now we were standing right next to it in what had been East Berlin. The US Embassy is right next to it. The luxurious Adlon Hotel stands just back from the Gate and is the place where dignitaries and famous people stay. That hotel had been there before but badly damaged during the war and not operable during the occupation, so what is there now is the new Adlon Hotel. We actually walked thru the central arch of the Brandenburg Gate to what had been the western side, and walked down the street to the Reichstag parliament building where we went out on the roof and went up into the glass dome. Beautiful views of the city from there!!! Nearby that is the concert hall named by the Germans as Pregnant Oyster (see photo). This is where Kennedy gave a speech from. After that we finally got to drive thru the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin's version of the Champs Elysees, which is what had been built and developed as the center of West Berlin. We had been in this area in 1965. This is also where the only saved ruin from WWII is - the tower of the church, called the "compact and lipstick" as a nickname. There is a new baptistry and tower built around it now. We finally saw what we had remembered most about Berlin from our visit there in 1965. Even though there is a great deal of building in the center city now to get it back to being their beautiful hub, it has a long way to go. When we finally drove thru the Kurfurstendamm area we could see this since this is where the beautiful modern buildings were with shopping malls, fancy stores, etc. We did enjoy our visit to Berlin again. There is still a long way to go. And as we were told, and as our table mates confirmed, the East German people were so very oppressed living under the Communist system, that they are kind of lost when it comes to dealing with a free enterprise system where you have to make it on your own, work hard, take care of yourself, have lots of choices of goods, etc., etc. Of course, the West Germans and West Berliners are paying heavily still to get the country reunited as it once was. But it was very thrilling when the Wall went down and families could freely visit each other once again, and then when the Soviet Union dissolved and the two Germany's were reunited. It definitely is an ongoing project.
We arrived back at Warnemunde about 10:15 pm and re-boarded our "home". The ship sailed at 11:00 pm. Like I said, it was a very festive departure with lots of partying going on by the restaurant at the dock and all along the way out!!!
Enjoy!!!
Jan and Dick
PS: Hope you don't mind so many photos - I did cut several times but just had to send these.
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