11th – 17th May 2024
Berlin. A city which has seen so much change in the past eighty years. War, division, fear, reunification, rebirth, rebuilding, optimism and reflection. It was definitely a place we both wanted to see. I had visited a couple of times as a young child in the latter part of the cold war, my military father having been posted to Northern Germany twice in my childhood, and Nick had been here on a school trip as an 18 year old, months before the fall of the Wall. Our plan was to stay outside the city, in the nearby, picturesque town of Potsdam and visit Berlin by train.
Potsdam is full of charm and has plenty to offer the tourist in its own right. It is a popular daytrip destination for both Berliners and tourists from further afar Its main attraction is the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Sanssouci Park, the wonderful royal summer palace and gardens of the Prussian king, Fredrick The Great. The original palace, built in the 1740s, is fairly modest in its scale and Rococo style but he built the Neues Palais, the New Palace, in a very grand Prussian Baroque style about twenty years later mainly as a place to accommodate visitors and have parties. Hulluva guest house, Freddie. He is buried near his beloved Schloss Sansouci in a very unprepossessing grave covered with commerative….potatoes… This is a nod to the fact that he was instrumental in bringing this previously unpopular vegetable-disaffectionately known as ‘the devil’s apple’-into the hearts, cuisine and bellies of the Prussian, and laterly the German, people, where it has resolutely stayed
Our camp in Potsdam was another glorified car park. It had a few power hookups, but they were all taken, so we found a sunny spot on the perimeter and let the sun power us through our solar. Sanssouci was an easy 1km walk from here and the old town an even easier 2km cycle. We spent some time cruising the old town which was buzzing with people wandering the streets in the sunshine. Lots ice creams were being eaten and the pavement tables were full with happy people drinking beers listening to the quite talented buskers.
Potsdam has the original Brandenburg Gate, another of Fredrick The Great’s splendid errections. It was completed in 1771, 20 years before he decided to build another one in Berlin and call it the same thing. Potsdam’s gate now stands alone as the remains of the city wall was demolished in about 1900. It was the perfect backdrop to our ice cream and beer sampling in the sunshine. A nearby square looked like it was hosting a market but it was in fact a wine festival. Here there were also lots of happy people cooking in the sun getting quietly, and in some cases noisily, sloshed on local German wines. We resisted.
Unfortunately, after this foray into the old town, Nick sustained another rear puncture. Two in two days. Unlucky. Luckily we were just about home and managed to walk it the last 200m or so. We had no spare tubes, but did have some patches and resolved to fix it ourselves this time. It took an hour and a half, some trial and error, a bit of swearing, fleeting moments of marital disharmony, moderate sweating (remember we had deliberately parked in a sunny spot) and a liberal distribution of grease and dirt over all four of our hands but we managed it. The isolated puncture was located and patched successfully and having realised that our bike pump was actually non functional we remembered that we were actually carrying a footpump for the van tyres, and this worked a charm. The thorny issue of re-connecting the electric motor was also successfully navigated. We were very pleased with ourselves.
We spent half a day wandering through the gardens and parklands of Sansouci. The four or five palaces of various shapes and sizes are dotted throughout the park and we decided to make the day about the park and to appretiate the buildings from the outside, rather than buying tickets to do the interior tours. There were formal and informal areas, formed and unformed paths, mown grass and unmown meadows. It was charming. The modest crowds, (because although this complex has been likened to Versailles, Versailles it ain’t), were concentrated mainly around the palaces, so there was plenty of quiet and lovely, peaceful corners. Weary with wandering, we slowly shuffled home and had a nice cup of tea.
We took a day trip against the traffic and headed to Berlin. The station was an easy and safe 4km cycle from camp, with Potsdam also boasting a fabulous network of cycle lanes. With the bikes locked up in a seemingly safe place we bought some tickets, found our train and were soon on our way to the capital. This was, as you can imagine, an efficient, clean and pleasant experience. The main station building is an epic structure of glass and cavernous space, built in the grand spirit of the late 19th century heyday of train travel unlike most other modern and modest station buildings. It provided quite a welcome to the city. I didn’t take a photo for some reason.
With the mantra ‘you can’t see it all’ in our heads, we gave it a bloody good go. Well, to see the things that we wanted to, anyway. I had no recollection of Berlin at all, but Nick did quite vividly remember his time here in early 1989 when the city was divided into East and West by the infamous wall. We took in a few of the classic sights starting with The Reichstag and the other, more famous Brandenburg Gate. In the past there were fences and barriers here to keep people in their place. Now there were still fences, but to cordon off the construction sites that will become a massive fan zone being prepared for the Euros Football tournament which Germany is hosting next month. Nick had found an old photo of himself here, and we tried to recreate it despite it missing his old friend, Ed.
We took in the spot where Hitler’s bunker used to be. Here he holed up in the final weeks of the war, here he married Eva Braun, here he died by his own hand, here his body was removed and burnt. Here is now a completely normal, un-paved car park with only one modest information sign. The lack of any monument is a deliberate act to deter it becoming a shrine to those who might feel the need to celebrate their idol.
Someone who has been memorialized in modern art, face profile form is Georg Elser, the man, who in November 1943, nearly managed to assassinate Hitler. He played a long game, guessing that Hitler would return to a Munich beer hall to repeat a speech a year after a 1942 gathering. He moved to Munich, made his own bomb from explosives he stole from his work at a munitions factory and spent many months of nights in the beer hall hollowing out a pillar near the lecturn and packing it full of the explosives . Hitler, Goebels and many other leading Nazis did indeed return to the venue for a meeting but the bomb exploded 8 minutes after Hitler left building, his onward travel plans having been brought forward due to bad weather. Eight were killed but Hitler, as we all know, was not. Elser was caught, sent to Dachau concentration camp, and killed on the orders of Hitler in 1945 just before he himself died by suicide. Esler’s exploits were only discovered in the 1960s when Gestapo records were made public and in Nov 2011 a 56 foot sculpture depicting his face in profile was errected in the city. It’s very cool, and apparently lights up at night, which is even cooler.
The holocaust memorial was only built in 2005, so not a memory lane item on the agenda. It is an epic, city block-sized sculpture of concrete blocks that you are encouraged to walk amongst, the ground levels and the heights of the blocks changing so that one moment you look down on them and the next they tower above you. It was both sombre and a place for reflection but also a place where children and grown ups alike could have fun playing peek-a-boo. I think both are equally valid ways of remembering the normal people this momument was built in memory of.
Our next stop was Checkpoint Charlie, officially Checkpoint ‘C’ in the Berlin Wall. It was the highest profile of the check points and the only place where allied military personnel were allowed to cross. All of the original structures and watch towers on both sides have long since been removed with most memorabilia being transferred to a nearby museum, but on its original site there is a mock-up of the guard house as it appeared in 1961. I took my place in the queue to take a photo. Near here are segments of wall left as a memorial and in other places there markers on the ground where it once stood. Nick clearly remembered seeing the intact wall and passing through Checkpoint Charlie on his last visit.
Our wanderings took us past the Gendarmenmarkt, allegedly Berlin’s most impressive square. It houses three large buildings: The Deutscher Dom, originally a church and now an exhibition space, The Franzosischer Dom, a French church and domed tower, and the Konzerthaus, a concert hall. I am sure it is all marvellous, but currently all closed off for construction and renovation. Onward we marched. We crossed the river, passing by ‘museum island’, another UNESCO site of five impressive Prussian-built buildings housing museums and another exhibition space and found ourselves coincidentally in the Nicholas Quarter, a place to stop for lunch. Nick had identified a local Berlin delicacy that he wanted to sample – Königsberger Klopse. Veal meatballs in a creamy, anchovy flavoured sauce. I was in! We found a little family run restaurant with sunny outdoor tables that was serving the aforementioned, served with a pile of potatoes, and to add to our light lunch, I ordered Schweinhaxe, a whole slow cooked, crispy skinned pork knuckle served with potatoes, veg and gravy. It was all delicious. There was masses of food. We ate it all. Good job we were putting in some kilometers today to work it off.
Our post-lunch waddling took us back over museum island and via a bike shop to get some spare inner tubes and a new pump. Next stop on our tour was possibly the most exciting of them all. An Atlas Obscura special, the David Hasselhoff Musuem. I know, I know, how thrilling! Many of you may not know that The Hoff, as he is affectionately known, is incredibly popular here in Germany. This started when he sang his 1988 song ‘Looking For Freedom’ at the recently fallen Berlin Wall at a New Year’s Eve event in 1989. It became an anthem for German reunification and he became the darling of the German people, many saying that he was instrumental in helping Germany unite (?!). All of the publicity certainly helped to boost his musical career, which possibly might not have done so well based purely on his singing talent…. We headed to the museum to see how this city had celebrated and glorified its favourite former Baywatch actor, turned crooner. Poorly, is the answer.
In the basement of the hostel-style Circus Hotel, unsignposted and unadvertised, near the toilets and the baggage storage room, is a short dead-end corridor. This is the museum. There was a mural which he had signed, a few pictures, and a cabinet of crap. Surely The Hoff deserved better? So did we. We had walked 2km out of our way to get here! We were amused, took the obligatory photos and then it was time for the long walk back to the station and then to get the train back to Potsdam. We had walked 13km and were quite weary by now. The bikes were just where we had left them, of course, and they carried us home in no time with no real effort. I love this electricity stuff.
The next day we headed north from Berlin to Peenemünde, on the recomendation of our friend Phil, who lives next door to my parents. This place, originally a sleepy fishing village, is situated on the northern point of the island of Usedom, on the Baltic coast. Known now as ‘Berlin’s bath tub’, it being a very lovely piece of coast with lost of safe boating within 3 hour’s drive of the capital, it was identified by the Nazis in the 1930s as the perfect place to build a research and manufacturing facility for the fledgling technology that was to spawn the V1 and V2 rockets of WW II. Thus it became one of the most important military-industrial sites in all of Germany. The inhabitants were relocated and the area was covered with hundreds of acres of concrete and buildings to support the huge endeavour. A massive coal-fired power station, and a port to supply it, was built to produce the energy needed to produce the hundreds of tonnes of liquid oxygen needed to propel the rockets. There was an airport, a railway, thousands of personnel and all the support infrastructure. There is a test launch site here from which the first man made object was propelled into space, so Peenemünde is not only infamous for being the home of the first real weapons of mass destruction, it is also famous for being the birthplace of space-flight. In 1943 the RAF staged its largest single bombing raid of the war, sending about 500 planes to destroy the plant. The powerplant and the oxygen extraction building survived, but much of the other infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Then the Soviets further smashed it up it after the war.
Nowadays this place is only partly returned to its original state of natural peacefulness as it is home to a world class, but very low-key museum about the rocket program. Most of the exhibitions are housed in the surviving power plant building with a few outdoor exhibits including an example of both the V1 and V2 rockets built from spares. Of note, the V stands for Vergeltungswaffen, the German word for vengence. The museum told the story of this place in a very measured and neutral way, a testament to how relationships between countries can be rebuilt and flourish despite the horrors of war. We had the obligatory few hours here and it was well worth the trip. There is also a guided tour of the ruins of the area, which we didn’t do.
Instead we took a ferry across the inlet to the tiny fishing and holiday village of Freest. Here there are, according to a local fish restaurant owner, only two things to do: one can either take a walk around the small harbour then have a fish sandwich, or one can have a fish sandwich then walk the harbour. We took the latter option, substituting a beer for a fish sandwich, and adding in a short walk on the beach. I dipped my toes into the water. Although this is nearly the Baltic Sea here it was suprisingly warm. For the Baltic, that is.
One of the highlights of our stay here was the place that we found to camp. This was a grassy area belonging to the local sailing club and overseen by Rolf, the ‘Hafenmeister’, the harbour master. He spoke no English, but a combination of sign language, my very dusty GCSE German and Google Translate helped us make friends. We managed to grab the prime waterfront spot, overlooking the inlet, the marshes and the small yacht marina. It was beautiful. A couple of times a bunch of kids and teenagers came down, rigged up their sailing dingies and went out racing and there was a fairly consistent procession of yachts passing past, all making use of the persistant easterly breeze that blows here. This is was dubbed ‘Putin’s Wind’ by one lady we met.
Peenemünde’s main harbour is also home to an eye catching, large 1960s Soviet U-boat which houses the largest submarine museum in the world (allegedly). It is quite impressive up close from the outside and that was enough for us. We took a stroll with a picnic on our second full day here. Having battled a few gazillion mosquitos and come across a couple of naked Germans (normal for Germany) our route was unfortunately cut short by coming upon a large chain link fence and some scary signs warning of not going any further due to ‘the danger of death due to unexploded bombs’, a problem that will probably blight this area forever. Sorry, chaps.
The island of Usedom is shared between Germany and Poland, with the border running through it. We bade our farewells to Rolf and gave him our glass recycling so he could collect the deposits for his ‘kaffeekasse’ or ‘coffee cash’, seemingly a euphamism for a tip. We only had a short drive today, but it was take us all the way to Poland. A place that was physically close, but far removed from our comfort zone. A completely different and totally incomprehensible language and a new currency. Our brief journey through Germany had been amazing, and we hadn’t expected to enjoy this country so much. It is clean and organised, the roads are great, the food is hearty and the people are really friendly. Oh, and we may have mentioned the war, but I think we got away with it……