Ahh, poor Berlin. I’m afraid you’re going to get short shrift in this particular story. Partly because, as I left for Berlin, I was already feeling pretty ill. Flying to Berlin from Stuttgart was kind of the last gasp for my body before it shut down for a day or two and I had to crash in this AirBnb apartment that I rented for Domi and I to share. I might not even have gone at all, but A) I needed to get out of my friend Matt’s hair and B) Domi needed a bit of a rescue. My friend Domi had spent the last month in a hospital and recently gotten out, but had nowhere to stay for a few days to recuperate before heading home. So away I went!
Much of my time in Berlin would end up getting spent on a couch, but I’ll focus on the few things I did get to do there. The one thing I wanted to see more than anything was the Berlin Wall. For some of you that may seem like an odd choice, but I’m old enough that the wall still stood when I was a kid, and it was a hugely important symbolic part of my childhood. I always told myself I’d go see it if I had a chance, so the second day there, still sick, I set out to find some restored pieces of it. I made it on foot to the first site, which turned out to just be an art installation with a couple of chunks of the wall. Cool, but time to move on. Right up that street turned out to be Checkpoint Charlie. This was (one of the) famous checkpoints where citizens of the West could, if they wanted, head into the communist Democratic Republic of Germany. It was staffed by rotating American, British and French soldiers on one side and Russian and East German soldiers on the other. The site itself is well preserved but there’s not much to it. The gift shop has some nice stuff but overall the whole thing was underwhelming and there’s no wall really left there.
At this point I was starting to fade physically but scooters saved the day. They have the same Lime scooters we had back home, and that worked great and soon I was zooping along the last 2 miles to the real prize, the Berlin Wall Memorial and Bernauerstrasse, where they have kept one of the last remaining chunks of the wall intact. This turned out to be exactly what I wanted and it was very moving; several blocks of the wall are still intact, and interactive displays give you a sense of what it would have felt like.
And this is what it felt like: the raw petulance of our worst impulses. A random wall, built across nowhere, serving no function except to delineate one side from another, splitting up families and creating division. The wall randomly splits two random blocks - so randomly that some apartment houses ended up with their front doors in one side and back doors in another. I went to a memorial to one such house, where they showed how people of course used the buildings to sneak from east to west, until they boarded up the back doors, at which point they climbed through windows, then climbed to higher windows, then eventually climbed to the roofs and jumped off into nets that the West Germans installed waiting for them. 131 people fled this way through one such house until the East Germans gave up and just had the whole building torn down. Tunnels were built under the road. A cemetary was located right in the no man’s land and for years people couldn’t visit their family graves, until eventually the gravesites themselves were dug up and relocated. This went on for 28 years, from 1961 to 1989.
What strikes you about the wall is that nothing strikes you about the wall. It is random and pointless. It is not located in a particular geographic feature. It is not a wall for defense so it has no need to be round, or to follow a river or a hill, or really to do anything interesting or important, and so it doesn’t, simply winding randomly around like a child’s pencil scratching on a map. It is not aesthetically pleasing. It looks temporary, like a wall you might build simply to briefly hide other construction.
After I had enough of wandering the wall - which, by the way, is now next to a very nice park where lots of folks were walking their dogs - I went to the Berlin Wall Memorial, a free museum installation that gives some context. While I didn’t learn anything groundbreaking from that, it was well put together and walked through the history of how it came to be and how it came to be torn down.
Anyway, enough about the wall: one of the other things I got to do, which was way more fun, was go to a sparty, or a spa party. This was called Liquidrom, or “liquid room”, and that’s, well, pretty much what it was. Imagine a high end wet spa, with steam saunas, dry saunas, and a large floating pool - except instead of a high end spa aesthetic, imagine blue lights, a DJ, and a hip crowd of hot young people, complete with a bar you can sit at (half naked) and drink high end cocktails and eat avocado toast. Swimsuits were weirdly mandatory for some parts and explicitly disallowed for others, so you kept disrobing and then, uh, re-robing. It was very cool, though I think it would have been way better if I was a) there with a partner, b) attractive, and c) 25 instead of 45. The floating pool, which was kind of a salt pool inside an aesthetic pleasing concrete echo chamber, was the most interesting part. Unfortunately, and for obvious reasons, you couldn’t take pictures or video inside, so you have to use your imagination, but yeah it was cool.
The food in Germany was….well, not great. You couldn’t drink the water - when I went to fill up the bath in the aribnb, it was, well, brown. So you bought bottled water. And I was sick, so I wanted American comfort food, but I couldn’t really find it. I ended up drinking orange juice and eating a lot of strawberry yoghurt.
And the poor Deutsche Bahn. I had always thought that European trains were this amazing world of bliss, but Domi set me straight. She was dreading the trip to Berlin Central Station, and she turned out to be right. Visually it was a very impressive building, but in practice it was useless. We tried to use their website and failed, and so we took an Uber there to talk to them in person, but after waiting 15 minutes in their pull-a-tag-and-wait queue, we figured out that there were no tickets until 6 PM and after considering a few options decided to just rent a car, which was very expensive but turned out to really be the best choice. Also, who builds a train station with nowhere to sit down???
We also sprinkled in a couple of trips to Domi’s favorite smoothie place called Daluma, which had a very high concept aesthetic, and a trip to the supermarket where I got corn flakes wrapped in chocolate. I can’t say I had an amazing time in Berlin, but I guess it really isn’t the city’s fault; bad timing.
The main point, of course, was to meet Domi, and that was worth the trip by itself of course. Meeting her was great; she was exactly what I expected and hoped for, but an even better conversational partner and just all around a great person. I wish her the best of luck in recuperating from her time in the hospital, and I hope I didn’t get her sick.
