Mauerreste - Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer

 One of the (in my opinion) worst places in Berlin is Checkpoint Charlie. I never understand why all the tourists clump there. All you can do is take pictures of the famous sign "YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR". There is no wall, and no way to gain a good sense of what the Berlin Wall was, or what it looked like. On the other hand, Berlin does have a great memorial/museum/historical site at Bernauer Straße, where you can see a section of the wall as it would have looked, watch (free!) documentaries about the wall, and gain a sense of what the entirety of the wall was like.

What I didn't understand for a long time, was that the Berlin Wall was actually around WEST Berlin, not East. It isolated West Berlin as a capitalist island in the middle of East Germany. The wall that faced "inward," to West Berlin, was eventually covered with graffiti. West Berliners could get right up to the wall and touch it. On the other side, the side facing East Germany, there was a second wall, guard towers, an electrified fence, and guards...no getting close to the wall. So that side was pure white. On the Bernauer Straße site, you can see this system, and they have a (also free!) tower to climb up and look over/into the "death strip" between the two walls.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...

 K: "Elisabeth, you narrate what we did today for the blog."
E: "First, Kathryn took me to a bridge."
K: "Oberbaumbrücke! What do you remember about it?"
E: "It's the bridge that was between East and West Berlin and they used to send spies across it."

 K: "Ok, now what's this?"
E: "That's the 'U' on top of it." (pronounced "ooo")
[Elisabeth calls the "U-Bahn" the "ooo"]

Then we went to the East Side Gallery, which is the longest standing piece of the Berlin Wall.

The Gallery is blocks of paintings by different artists from all over the world.

 Then we took the train to the Hackescher Markt to see the Hackesche Höfe, a beautiful early 20th-century courtyard.
E: "They were cool. Cool tiles."

 

From there we walked back along the Spree, past the Berliner Dom (below), back through the buildings of the Humboldt Universität, to Gendarmenmarkt. 

E: "It's cool. It's the university where Einstein and the Grimm brothers taught, and when we walked by we saw people studying and having classes there."

E: "Then you should tell them about the bullet holes, too."

bullet holes below (aka war damage)

Berlin Wall

I may have already posted on this, but just wanted to include more shots of where the wall used to run through the city that I had collected.

memorial to those who died in this area by trying to escape, including a few children