Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Berliner Landschaften - WWII Bunker


One of the things I love about Berlin is how many little pieces of history you discover walking/biking/running through the city. It's fascinating, and the city never lets you forget that it has this multi-layered history that never goes away. Today biking home I went by this apartment complex which was built over/above/around a WWII bunker that was impossible to get rid of after the war (the amount of explosives it would have taken would have destroyed too many of the surrounding buildings).  Most were destroyed by the Allies. This older post from a few summers ago also has a bunker that survived the war, in Mitte near the Deutsches Theater. There is an organization (Berliner Unterwelten) that does tours of bunkers and other "underworlds", but I have never done one. Maybe when Anna and Paul come to visit this summer we'll do it. Their website also has some good information about the various sites they go to. For example, in the Volkspark Humboldthain, the bunker was also too close to railroad lines to be destroyed, so they piled it with rubble and it created a so-called "Trümmerberg", rubble mountain. In this case, it was over 1,4 Millionen cubic meters of rubble! There are many of these "Trümmerberge" in Berlin, formed after the war when they were trying to rebuild and reorganize the city from the pile of bricks it was. The most famous is the Teufelsberg, which I have also not yet visited, in the Grünewald. Some of the U-Bahn stations also had bunkers, like Gesundbrunnen, and under Moritzplatz.  

from: www.berliner-unterwelten.de

2 comments:

  1. Wieder, solch Aufklärung!!!! Überraschung!!!! Ich habe die Umlaut gefunden!!!!! ganz besser!!

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  2. Kitty,

    I watched A Woman in Berlin this weekend and thought of you. Lately I've found myself more drawn to learning about Deutschland than Franceland-- strange, huh?

    Ich habe ein grossen hunger! (That's my one reliable German phrase.)

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