My first Sunday morning in Berlin dawned sunny, but cold, which seems to be the theme of the past few days here, unfortunately. While the Weather Channel helpfully informs me that it is 80 degrees in East Tennessee, I am putting on pants and layering one jacket over another, reminding me once again of just how far north Germany really is in comparison with the United States. This morning also brought the realization that one week ago I was setting out from Charlotte on my trip, though it feels as though I have been in Germany for only a few days, not an entire week already. As it was Sunday morning, Berlin was somewhat sleepy as we set out to explore the Hackesche Höfe, Amy’s project, for our first stop of the day. Located just a short tram ride away from Rosenthaler Platz near the Hackescher Markt, the Hackesche Höfe are a series of eight interconnected courtyards that are lined with shops, movie theaters, and restaurants on the ground floor and apartments above. In the early twentieth century, this area was a prime shopping district for fashionable Berliners, as it was intended to showcase modernity by creating an entire shopping “experience.” However, as many of the businesses in this area had Jewish owners, as evidenced by the several Stolpersteine just outside the entrance to the Höfe, the area lost its prominence during the 1930s and 1940s; furthermore, in East Germany, the area was also neglected in favor of socialist construction projects such as Karl-Marx-Allee and the Plattenbauten. After the reunification of Germany, though, a nostalgia for the past led to the rediscovery of the Hackesche Höfe, which are once again a center of consumerism in Berlin. With this history in mind, one of the things that I found most interesting about this area is that it has been interpreted in many different ways throughout the decades, from a symbol of modernity in its early years to a symbol of nostalgia today. Indeed, the Art Nouveau architectural details in the first several Höfe have been well-preserved as an example of a decorative style that, rather than being modern and daring, is now considered relatively “traditional” as it becomes part of the past.
Beyond the architecture, one of the things that surprised me most about walking around the Hackesche Höfe was how much vegetation there was in the inner courtyards, including flowers, bushes, and trees. Before coming to the area, I had somehow created a picture in my head of an entirely urban atmosphere, with concrete or cobblestones everywhere, all in all a less-than-welcoming experience. However, this is by no means the reality of the Hackesche Höfe, as each courtyard has trees planted in the center and flowers planted throughout the area, which gave me the feeling that this was “green space,” rather than urban space. One of the most prominent emotions that I felt as I walked through the Hackesche Höfe was peace, as I did not feel that I was in the most central district of a European capital city, but rather in an oasis in the midst of the metropolis. Because of this feeling, I could see myself coming to the Hackesche Höfe to escape the noise and congestion of the city, not actually to shop and partake in the consumer experience, if I lived in Berlin. In an interesting contrast to the Hackesche Höfe, we also explored a more “scruffy” Höfe immediately adjacent to it, although the two areas do not connect to each other. In this scruffy area all of the walls were covered with graffiti street art, some of which was, in true Berlin fashion, quite provocative. This being said, despite the sharp contrast between the two Höfe, I came away from my urban exploration feeling as though neither one was truly representative of Berlin, since Berlin is neither an entirely materialist city or an entirely scruffy city, but rather somewhere in between.
After leaving the Hackesche Höfe behind, although not before I gave into my weakness for Ampelmann merchandise (more to be said about that in later posts), we caught the S-Bahn to the Ostbahnhof to begin a completely different urban exploration. We were headed toward the East Side Gallery, Chelsea’s project, which is the largest section of the Berlin wall still standing and which has been transformed into an outdoor art gallery. During East German days, this section of the wall, located along the Spree river, would have divided the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg from East Berlin’s Friedrichshain; today, the East Side Gallery is in Friedrichshain, one of Berlin’s vibrant artsy neighborhoods. Having visited the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer on a previous visit to Berlin, another preserved section of the Berlin Wall that presents how the wall, the death strip, and the guard towers would have looked, I was quite interested to see how another portion of the wall has been preserved and is presented. After walking along the entire 1.5 km gallery, I must admit that partway through I began to become distracted by the art and began to forget that I was looking at the Berlin Wall; however, I would suddenly be reminded of my surroundings by one of the East Side Gallery’s particularly political paintings, an effect that became somewhat jarring as our exploration continued. Upon reflection, I believe I will once again offer a minority opinion and say that, because the art tends to make one forget the meaning of the Berlin Wall, I do not think the East Side Gallery works well as a piece of historical remembrance or memorialization, though there is no doubt that it is overwhelmingly successful as an art exhibit. One reason why I believe this is so is due to the fact that I found the more politically- or specifically Berlin-oriented paintings to work the best, as they tied in best to the fact that this was once part of the Berlin Wall. Some of the most powerful paintings that I saw were of a Trabbi punching through the Wall, a reference to East Germans flooding west in November 1989 and a simple list of each year the Wall stood, with a reminder that the Wall was built to stop East German refugees and fell when East Germans attempted to leave en masse once again. On the other hand, I found some paintings to be quite abstract and others to be rather derivative, such as one entitled “Save Our Earth,” which took away from the gravity of the site, in my opinion.
Following our exploration of the East Side Gallery, we walked farther into the district of Friedrichshain to find lunch and explore several flea markets in the area. For my part, I never imagined that there were flea markets in Europe, as I believed they were a uniquely American phenomenon. Furthermore, no two flea markets are alike, as the first market we walked through was more “alternative” in terms of the people patronizing it and was more eclectic and unusual in terms of selection. The second market, which I explored after purchasing a sandwich from one of Friedrichshain’s many cafés, felt much more traditional to me, as vendors were selling dishes, books, and other practical household goods, and the market itself was located in a city square rather than an abandoned DDR train-repair shop. The second flea market was livened up by street performers, some of the first that I have seen on this trip to Germany, but it still did not have the Berlin feeling that I had been hoping to experience. From this flea market, we then walked to the Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn stop, where we studied the beginning of Karl-Marx-Allee, before riding the U-Bahn two stops to Strausberger Platz, where we came above ground to look at this famous street more closely. Originally named Stalinallee, Karl-Marx-Allee was East Germany’s carefully-planned grand boulevard, where they held military parades on the wide boulevard. Along much of the street, the traditional socialist architecture is mediated somewhat by a few architectural details, although this decorative style shifts over to Plattenbauten, or East German apartment blocks, as the road continues toward Alexanderplatz; this shift largely occurred because the DDR did not have the money required to build such monumental buildings. Furthermore, after Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s policy of destalinization, Stalinallee became Karl-Marx-Allee, although the original architecture remained standing and can still be observed along the boulevard today. As I looked at the buildings along Karl-Marx-Allee, as well as the size of the boulevard itself, I began to think that this road must have been intended as East Berlin’s answer to Red Square In Moscow, a place where the power of the state was on display.
Moving on from Karl-Marx-Allee, we all returned to the hostel, having finished today’s tour. I had intended to do some exploration on my own this afternoon, but I was too tired after the day’s walking and once again postponed by adventure. For dinner tonight, we ate at a very good Italian restaurant just on the opposite side of Rosenthaler Platz, where I had an enormous individual-size pizza, although I somehow managed to eat the entire thing! Tomorrow we are going up in the Bundestag’s dome in the morning and touring the old Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen in the afternoon, which should make for a very interesting day.
Making the Past Present 