Tiergarten & Holocaust Memorial

On our way back from seeing the Berlin Victory Column, Rose and I walked through Tiergarten.

Tiergarten is the German word for Animal Garden and it takes up a huge part of west Berlin. The roundabout in the center of the map is the Victory Column.

It reminded me so much of Central Park in New York City. There were tall, beautiful trees all around, a river running through, and various statues throughout the park.

This is the Beethoven - Haydn - Mozart Monument, also called the Composers Memorial.

Here I am standing in front of Mozart (we go way back... and by that I mean I used to play his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Turkish March. No joke!)

I used to play this song on the piano too... but like ten times slower. This is Sonata in C major.

Rose and I then walked a short ways to the Holocaust Memorial. Wait, let me correct myself. This was actually called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Pretty blunt, don't you think?

We thought it was just a bunch of solid, gray blocks scattered around a courtyard between apartment buildings...

But the ground was actually leveled off a few feet lower than the sidewalk and the gray blocks were really, really tall. We were pretty impressed with this memorial.

This ends my Berlin experience. Berlin was pretty cool! Probably my second favorite trip besides Krakow.

Berlin Cathedral, Brandenburg Gate & Victory Column

I guess I should update my blog on Berlin. I'm sorry that I'm such a lazy, lazy, lazy busy, busy, busy girl and that I have had no time to write a blog post that is way overdue.

Procrastination should be my middle name.

Anyway, here are some sights that we saw the first full day we spent in Berlin. 

We saw a lot of the Berlin Cathedral.

And here in the background the round ball on a spire that sorta looks like the Seattle Needle is the Fernsehturm, or the Berlin Television Tower.

  We visited the Brandenburg Gate.

And made our way to the Victory Column, or Siegessäule in German.

The Berlin Wall -- Part Three

The other side of the Berlin Wall faced the street and this is what some of the paintings looked like.

The Berlin Wall -- Part Two

Our second full day in Berlin was spent walking down the River Spree to see more of the Berlin Wall! It was a gorgeous day out and the walk was great.

Rose and I wandered behind a huge abandoned apartment building and found part of the wall.

We walked further down the road and practically stumbled upon the rest of the wall. This section was huge! There were no signs and hardly any people around.
And the fervent picture-taking begins...

The Berlin Wall -- Part One

The Berlin Wall divided East and West Berlin, was built in August of 1961 and stretched for over a hundred miles.

"Just past midnight on the night of August 12-13, 1961, trucks with soldiers and construction workers rumbled through East Berlin. While most Berliners were sleeping, these crews began tearing up streets that entered into West Berlin, dug holes to put up concrete posts, and strung barbed wire all across the border between East and West Berlin.

Berliners were shocked when they woke up that morning. What had once been a very fluid border was now rigid. No longer could East Berliners cross the border for operas, plays, or soccer games. No longer could the approximately 60,000 commuters head to West Berlin for well-paying jobs. No longer could families, friends and lovers cross the border to meet their loved ones. Whichever side of the border one went to sleep on during the night of August 12, they were stuck on that side for decades."

[Taken from About.com]

This is what the wall looked like in 1961.

And in the 1970's

The wall was built three times, each time bigger and stronger. It essentially trapped people in their own country.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened on November 9, 1989.

"People were in shock. Were the borders really open? East Germans tentatively approached the border and indeed found that the border guards were letting people cross. Very quickly, the Berlin Wall was inundated with people from both sides. Some began chipping at the Berlin Wall with hammers and chisels. There was an impromptu huge celebration along the Berlin Wall, with people hugging, kissing, singing, cheering, and crying.

The Berlin Wall was eventually chipped away into smaller pieces, some the size of a coin and others in big slabs (This is true. On some of the postcards we saw in Berlin there were small parts of the wall attached)."

Only a few parts of the wall are still standing in the city and Rose and I went to the wall north of the River Spree.

This is the Commemorative Cross of the Sophien Parish. The sign by it reads "Approximately a thousand graves had to be moved when the border strip was developed. It is, however, possible that the graves of World War II bomb victims were not exhumed and that the border grounds were built over the graves. This cross commemorates them."