After two days spent uncovering the history of Berlin, more or less in a pack, our group began to fall apart, for various reasons, some connected with external temptations, others with inner compulsions.
Shannon was enticed by the prospect of hanging out with two young friends, who coincidentally had also arrived in Berlin. She set off to meet them for lunch and this rapidly extended into dinner. In the end, she stayed up till five in the morning and returned to our hotel the following day, having sampled Berlin night life and passively inhaled a dangerous amount of smoke. It was up to her to explore Berlin’s potential for partying and she did her duty with aplomb.
Courtney was seized by the necessity of completing homework. She needed hours rather than minutes to prepare for her Global Politics SAC and she therefore settled down in the hotel to read her beautifully ordered and colour-coordinated notes. In the evening, she realized to her horror that the practice exam for this subject is taking place the day after our midnight return. That’s simply brutal.
In my case, the temptation to experience yet another Hugendubel drew me to the three-storey bookshop (almost a department store) in Wilmersdorfer Straße. I find this chain of bookshops irresistible. We all have our idiosyncrasies, after all: Linda is fixated on Australian Rules Football, Courtney is devoted to Lady Gaga, and Davey is obsessed with maps. My visit to Hugendubel was both satisfying and relaxing: I sat on the red leather couches, read two or three first chapters, and ended up buying a children’s novel called Mein Zuhause für immer (My Home For Ever). That’s going to be for the long plane flight.
During our morning team meeting, Davey and Dwayne mentioned that they would like to go to the Stasi-Museum. I felt a pang of guilt for absenting myself from this excursion, since it involved a history that I felt I ought to explore more thoroughly; but it is also an unremittingly grim and unsettling story, like many aspects of Berlin’s past. As it turned out, the men found the museum riveting. The malicious methods to which the Stasi operatives stooped to spy on people and wreck human lives were almost beyond belief. One woman, even seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, discovered a former Stasi bug, still embedded in her front door. Twelve years of Nazi Germany, followed by decades of East German dictatorship, must have warped and twisted thousands of lives.
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| Linda wanted to do something cheerful for her last evening in Berlin, so she took her family to the “Monkey Bar”, where you can sit high above the city… | …and look down on the monkeys and the greenery of the zoo. It was a funky and welcoming place. |
Perhaps it was a mistake to come here directly from Barcelona, for after the architectural cohesion of that city, the hotchpotch of Berlin was particularly striking. It was too foggy to climb up the television tower, but we could see well enough to notice that some witless entrepreneur had built a Park Inn Hotel right next door, a box-like, foully ugly building based seemingly on the design principles of a Trabi. There are eyesores blighting the whole Berlin skyline; it is difficult to ascertain how many of them are simply hideous old buildings from East German times and how many can be attributed to unregulated and unbridled capitalism since then. There seem to be cranes on every corner. I could not perceive any sign of concern for maintaining what is old and beautiful and ensuring that new buildings are appropriate, coherent with the rest of the city and appealing to the eye.
Of course, I could make exactly the same complaint about some of the latest additions to the Melbourne skyline, especially those in Box Hill.
In any case, Berlin served us up many temptations, catered to several of our whims, and provided, above all, an education in human cruelty, frailty and resilience.
Final Notes
Hotel: Hotel-Pension Bregenz, Bregenzer-Straße 8 – a relatively small family concern
Restaurants: Our hotel was surrounded by restaurants worth visiting, especially the Vietnamese Restaurant, Pho 56.
