The Final Day
By
Christopher Williams
June 4th, 2018 was the departure
date for many people. Time to say
goodbye to the country and people that welcomed us (or not, sometimes) into
their city for the past three weeks. A
bittersweet time for many of us. Germany
is a great country and we have truly done our best to experience it to the fullest,
but there’s no place like the USA.
Unfortunately, I’m actually not going anywhere myself. Nope, myself and a few others decided to run
out the lease on our rooms to the very end of the period, which happens to be
the 8th. So, instead of
travelling back to the states or elsewhere yesterday, I got to walk around the
city some more. First off, I spent most
of the day doing housework, cleaning the apartments and getting groceries for
the next 4 days. Later in the day, we decided to go and try to see the city
monuments at night. Taking the U Bahn
into the middle of the city and just getting off when we felt like it, the
first place we walked through was the Sony Center, a big megaplex filled with
shops. It was pretty, sure, but we wanted
to get out of the urban sector, so we walked out and over to a line of trees we
saw, lo and behold there was an entire park in the middle of the city that we
hadn’t been to yet.
Figure 1: A monument to famous Austrian and German composers and Musicians
Very serene and
calm. It was so quiet I could hardly believe it was in the middle of this concrete jungle we've lived in the past 21 days. It was expansive and well kept, it was green and lush, and it was beautiful. As we made our way through the meadows, we ended
up at a road. To our surprise we had
stumbled right onto the road connecting Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. It was an unusually long and straight, with no intersections save one near the Gate. It intrigued me, and I learned afterwards that it has two
names. The first one is "Street of the 17th
of June", and the second is the Bundestraβe 2. The first name
is in reference to the worker uprising of the 17th of June in 1953. during this uprising the Red Army shot and killed unarmed East Berlin civilians to keep them oppressed. Ironically, across this road we found the soviet memorial
to those Russian soldiers lost in taking Berlin.
Figure 2: Warped panorama of the curved monument
We found that somewhere
in the fields behind are 2000 buried soviets.
Very powerful feelings around. You could almost cut the air with the heaviness of memories in those stones.
Figure 3: 1943 Variant of the Soviet T-34, the most influential and effective tank of WWII
We then went down
the road to the Berlin Victory Monument.
Originally created in 1873 to commemorate the Prussian State’s victory in
the Unification Wars, it was “gifted” to Adolph Hitler in 1939 by the German
people (himself to himself). Or at least,
this is what a security worker nearby told us about it. On reflection, it seems so totally within his character to take something that the German people had once revered for such an important, national, and connecting reason and turn it into a monument of his own praise and worship.
Figure 4: The Berlin Victory Pillar
We
then took a much longer walk than anticipated back up to the Reichstag and the Brandenburg gate.
Figure 5: From the Victory Pillar to the Brandenburg gate, if you can see it.
A very long walk. (photo credit: Constantin Schäfer)
Lit up against the night sky, they are both such dominant sights, it makes you wish you could see them in their hay day, when no other buildings could tower over them as they do today. After this, we decided we hit our step count, and that we had enough
walking for a night. we started to make our way back to the apartments for some
well deserved rest. As the days keep passing, I can't help but wonder how close I've gotten to the city's soul on this trip. Some days it seems as if I've lived it, and others remind me how foreign I am. Still, in a city reconstructed with such a heavy foreign influence, I think there must be many locals who share the same sentiment.
About the Author: Chris is a native Berliner in the true sense
of the word, since he isn’t from Germany, German isn’t his first language, and
he now complains about tourists being loud and disruptive at popular Berlin
landmarks. Currently recovering from a
three-week long trial of extensive, usually heavy German beer consumption, he’s
looking forward to taking a break from it for a little bit. Just a little bit. A week probably. Maybe only a few days. Who knows?
Maybe a couple hours… I have one
open right now.
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