I arrived, and those no-jetlag homeopathic pills were great, we were trying them out for the first time on this travel. Guess what, almost no jet lag! My artist friend Nina met me at the airport and we took a train and got off after a rather short ride - to visit Nina's daughter Julya whom i have known most of her life.
It was nice to spend some time together.in spite of lagging my suitcase up to the third floor which in fact was on the level of out level four. But the stairway curved so elegantly, and the steps were merciful, and the suitcase was of rather reasonable weight, and so i didn't mind too much. Julya paints, and works with theater, and writes plays, some were successful, and she writes poetry and novels, and here too has been success.
Then we went to Nina's home, the building is over mea v'esrim (120) of age. marble stairway with large windows , large lobby. In the apartment, the windows are tall, the walls thick, the ceilings high, paintings all over and a beautiful grand piano (her late mother's). Alas, the piano sounded awful, hadn't been tuned for a long time... The toilet is right from the old photographs, it has Panama written on the flat bottom of the interior of the throne, the lettering is beautiful, and very visible... just think of 120 years of people's feces falling onto pretty lettering... Later we walked for a couple of hours in the area where Nina lives. then I HAD to hit the sack!...
The next day we spent 3 hours in Leopold, a new (2001) art museum, a former private collection in the center, mostly Austrian Art, a lot of Schiele, nice Klimt, Kokoschka, Moser, Waldmuller... and walked in the city for a few hours. Vienna is like a fairy tale, In addition, Vienna is like a lot of wedding cakes, with pastel frosting elaborately and intricately executed. I mean the buildings.
Because of some football madness there were yelling people wrapped into whatever their country's flags were - visitors. In the past i would have been annoyed, but now I do not mind a bit, let them be passionate about football, nationalism in sports is almost harmless. Kind of funny, even with their stupid blows to nationalism with the rush to the unification as the EU, a faceless behemoth, but that is another story. Back to the football fans: so what if they are not raised right, as we say in the South... the buildings are still gorgeous, with or without yelling young people from different countries. Of course, the parks were closed and some streets were blocked by the city police in order to direct the football fans to toilets, huge screens, and other thingies that the crowd needs. At one spot an Austrian policewoman swiftly frisked each of us as we were foolishly entering the area outlined for the football fans. No kidding, it was a genuine pat-down of our clothing for weapons. Quite an experience, I must say. But had to get over those feelings in a hurry, too much to see.
And so it went: spent 3 hours in Albertina, an art museum behind the opera house. A reprospective of Klee, a large exhibit of Kokoschka - his last period, and the third one - an eclectic collection from Monet to Picasso. very nice, actually, with Chagall, Modigliani, Kandinsly, Larionov, Goncharova, Lichtenstein... Oh, canned music is played in the toilets in Albertina, Mozart to be exact...
Walked for a few hours, lovely, stopped in a bookshop near the Jewish museum, books in German, a bit of Judaica, a pesach placemat with no pictures, just Hebrew letters - displayed proudly, but upside down...
Back in Nina's apartment, talked over another and then another cup of tea and various fruit and berries that Nina's younger daughter Masha was bringing in every day. Then I looked at Nina's paintings till 1 am
My flight to Berlin was at 6:50 am, too early for trains or buses. We got up at 5, I had a cup of green tea with my granola bar - while we kept talking... Took a cab to the airport. then Nina took a train back to the city, and i proceeded to my gate.
Two weeks in Berlin
In Berlin V. met me at the airport. I liked the apartment in Charlottenburg very much. The building itself is at least from the twenties, it is renovated as is most of the city (that used to be West Berlin), with lovely details left intact or carefully restored: a lion-shaped door knob of the inposing entrance, white friezes on white walls in the lobby, old and sturdy wooden railings lit by daylight pouring through the stained glassed large windows. The pattern of the stained glass is rectangles a la Frank Lloyd Wright, severely simplified. Such pleasant stairways softened the pain of the fact that the apartment was the fourth floor walkup (here it would be the fifth, as again the first floor is on the level of our second floor) The apartment itself looks so IKEA, airy, light, comfortable, modern.
Then we walked a lot. Wide sidewalks of tree lined streets, a large park with a horseshoe-shaped lake, our Ivy covered building amongst other tall windowed Art Deco buildings, some with less of decorative moldings than others. And then it was Shabbos.
Ate some, slept a LOT, walked some. Slept so much, i surprised myself. After Shabbat rushed to a store to buy more eggs, fruit, berries, and veggies. With olive oil and spicy israeli olives, I make nice salads. Had to rush to that store (one short block away) because all is pretty much closed on Sunday, and it was a small miracle that the supermarket near us was open on Saturday till midnight, normal for Germany closing time for stores is around 6pm.
As I had been making my plans for this trip to Berlin, it somehow had never occured to me that I wasn't simply returning to the city of Berlin thirty years later... In fact I was to meet an entirely new city, East Berlin. and so on Sunday we ventured into that somewhat unexpected place.
The Wall
The first ( and continuous) thing was the memorial path where the wall that I remember was. First I saw reminders of the wall on Potsdummer Platz. It would appear again and again when we walked around the Reichstag with its new futuristic see-through Cupola in the middle, as we approached the Brandenburg Tor, or visited the very impressive memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. Even the abundance of young, clueless looking, and laud football fans, wrapped in German flags or somewhat creatively decorated in German flag colors, couldn't get the mind off that line in the pavements, two width of a brick wide, a scar of a sort, a long and insistent memory line.
East Berlin - beautiful
But here we were by the Brandenburg Gate which had not been accessible before the unification of Germany, it was under the Communists as was
East Berlin - ugly
The monumental Russian (former Soviet) Embassy is not exactly gracing Unter der Linden. Thankfully, those Linden trees manage to filter the building out, at least partially... Huge empty Alexander Platz features a sitting Karl Marx and standing Friedrich Engels surrounded by grass that painfully needs mowing. It also houses a Soviet style television tower that is relentlessly poking the sky above. At a distance the Soviet style foreign ministry looks sinister. Farther away Vova Lenin's profile is stuck forever to the façade of a brick building. Look, a mile-long wide Karl-Liebknecht-Straße happily runs along as does Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße. ( Note: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany.) After all that -- an evening at Martin Gropius-Bau where Man Ray's exhibit was supurb, but Rodtschenko's photographs felt like way too much --- of Soviet propaganda. Terrific shots of what i do not want to see.
Checkpoint Charlie
Enough already, time to return to reality: Welcome to Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrich Straße, the place of crossing the border between East and West. Outside, the black and white sign that reads in English, Russian, French, and German: "You Are Leaving the American Sector." Also outside is an annex where the recent history is described in photographs and text on the tall fence around an empty city block. Inside this little museum,
West Berlin - Charlottenburg
Charlottenburg Schloss complex, a half-an-hour walk from our apartment features the Palace, Park and three terrific museums.
Green West Berlin
This is how West Berlin is: parks, tree-lined streets. When the city was an island surrounded by East Germany, there wasn't such thing available to city folks as going 'to the country', to the fresh air... West Berlin sorely needed its parks. Berlin's oldest public park Tiergarten, lovely and quite sizable Charlottenburg garden, the Zoo, many smaller parks, like the one on Savigny Platz, of a rather large park with the lake where we lived, and trees along the streets --- West Berlin is very green.
West Berlin - Fasanenstrasse
Most elegant Fasanenstrasse block between Kurfürstendamm and Lietzenburger Strasse is a real treat. The Literature House is a villa (end of 19th century) with a large garden. Käthe Kollwitz lived in the Villa Griesebach on the other side of the garden. Art galleries in gorgeous buildings, hotels, boutiques...
Cross Kurfürstendamm, walk by the famous Kempinski hotel and you are in the middle of the block where Police cars are always present. This is where the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue used to be until the Kristallnacht when it was burned down in accordance with personal orders of Goebbels who watched the "red flames" from his hotel. The new building was erected in the end of the fifties. It has two remnants, a portal and a column, incorporated into its façade and houses the Jewish Community Center - Jüdisches Gemeindehaus Fasanenstraße. On the second floor, at Gabriel's, we ate a decent dinner with our Berlin hosts one night.
Water
A three-hours-plus city boat tour along Spree and canals, under dozens and dosens of bridges, some quite ornate, others simple, some so low that we had to duck... An amazing view of landmarks from the water level. And contrasts - in your face:
Potsdam
Potsdam, the former residence of the Prussian kings. Beautiful parks and palaces of Sanssouci. To get there from the subway station, we have to travel by a streetcar passing a collection of historical buildings and ugly Soviet style monsters of buildings.
Jewish sites
Weather
The weather was generally very cooperative, in the seventies, except for two hot days, one of which I spent in Potsdam. A drizzle once in a while was not annoying, a pouring rain happened here and there but lasted no more than a few minutes. So days were easily filled with a lot of walking, visiting museums, riding on the top floor of a double decker (#100 and #200 routes are great for exploring the city and for giving rest to tired legs and feet, as well as hiding from a rain.)
Was great
Appendix
60 years ago - by Jeff Jacoby
But for President Truman, retreat was unthinkable. "We stay in Berlin, period," he decreed. Overriding the doubts of senior advisers, including Secretary of State George C. Marshall and General Omar Bradley, the Army Chief of Staff, Truman ordered the Armed Forces to begin supplying Berlin by air.
Military planners initially thought that with a "very big operation," they might be able to get 700 tons of food to Berlin. Within weeks, the Air Force was flying in twice that amount every day, as well as supplies of coal.
"Pilots and crew were making heroic efforts," David McCullough recorded in his sweeping biography of Truman. "At times planes were landing as often as every four minutes -- British Yorks and Dakotas, America C-47s and the newer, much larger, four-engine C-54s . . . Ground crews worked round the clock. 'We were proud of our Air Force during the war. We're prouder of it today,' said The New York Times."
Yet the pressure to abandon Berlin persisted. The CIA argued that the airlift had worsened matters by "making Berlin a major test of US-Soviet strength" and affirming "direct US responsibility" for West Berlin. The airlift was bound to fail, the intelligence analysts warned. Truman didn't waver. "We'll stay in Berlin -- come what may," he wrote in his diary on July 19. "I don't pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make."
It would take nearly a year and more than 277,000 flights, but in the end it was the Soviets who backed down. On May 12, 1949, the blockade ended -- a triumph of American prowess and perseverance, and a momentous vindication for Truman.
