Berlin Journal August 2009 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com

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On Friday, we took a long sight-seeing boat ride on the Spree River in Berlin. Tom was getting sunburned, so we went to the lower deck and had lunch. Arnold and I ordered the ubiquitous curry wurst that one sees being sold and consumed throughout the city. It is pork sausage served with a barbeque sauce. Ours was mild, but I’m told this sauce can be very spicy. I also ordered the pea soup because Arnold said it was good. It arrived, and I was stunned by the size of the portion. Plus it had a whole sausage in it! The soup was more than split peas. There were finely chopped potatoes and other vegetables, too, and finely chopped ham. It was the best pea soup I’ve ever had. I shared it 50/50 with Tom, and we both had plenty. At one point during the boat tour, we saw a piece of the wall which was left standing. It is about a kilometer long. We also saw the modern palace where Angela Merkel works. We walked around in west central Berlin after the tour. All the bombed out areas have resulted in, of course, mostly modern architecture comprising the city. Because Arnold had to leave communist East Germany to get an education as an engineer, he had to work to support himself all the way through school. He worked as a mason, so that meant that he helped to build a number of these modern, post-war buildings in Berlin. Because of working, he did not complete his schooling until the early 1960s. So Arnold was there before the wall was built, during the time the wall was built, and just after the wall was built. He knows the city in a way that probably most Germans do not. This is why he was most interested in being our guide in the “city of his student days.” We visited the old tower of the bombed out church of Emperor Wilhelm. A newer church was built around it in the 1960s. What’s left of the old church is a sort of memorial and reminder of the bombings. This church was destroyed on November 22, 1943. The message in the displays is one against war, and featuring the suffering people as the city was destroyed by war. We had the tremendous feeling that the Germans see themselves as the victims of the war, and indeed they were victims. But how could this war not happen? How could the Holocaust be allowed to continue? Why do we feel that the Allied soldiers who died, like my uncle George White, are not considered to be victims as well? The angst grew in both of us. In the afternoon, we toured the Charlottenburg Schlosse, the other home of Kaiser Friedrich der Grosse. All in all, we liked his home Sanssouci in Pottsdam better, but this Schlosse was interesting, too, particularly for its art collection and elaborately built rooms. The English audio guide was enlightening. It was a hot day, and the Schlosse was hot, too. We tried a walk in the gardens after visiting the Schlosse, but we found we were too hot and tired, so we made our way back to the hotel. Rather, we took a taxi to an ATM not far from the hotel, extracted money, and then had a pleasant walk back up Knesebeckenstrasse to the hotel. Once there, we relaxed in the lounge on the 7^th floor rooftop and consumed mineral water and apple cake for teatime. Then Tom and I had to succumb to a nap. Arnold went out in search of the quintessential German restaurant, and he found it. He made a reservation for us at Marjellchen (Mommsenstrasse 9, 10629 Berlin, tel. 030/883 26 76, web www.marjellchen-berlin.de ). It features authentic East German cuisine. Tom and I each ordered the duck special – a half duck, perfectly cooked, served with delicious red cabbage and potato dumplings and a very fine sauce. It was the best duck I’ve eaten in a long time. La Patronne was a woman with a movie star voice who could speak English, Italian, and Spanish in addition to her German. Tom ordered a dessert which he said “would delight any 12-year old” and thus he was delighted, too. It was apple dumplings with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and cinnamon sugar. On Saturday morning, Arnold had to leave early, so we said our goodbyes at the hotel after dinner on Friday. Saturday was calm. We had time to relax, read the newspaper, have a late breakfast, and check out at the last minute at 11AM. Frau Ullrich kindly offered to keep our suitcase while we shopped a little. There was an interesting store around the corner from the hotel called Manufactum. We’d been wanting to visit it. Tom bought colored leads for mechanical pencils. I hope these work well for marking copyedited manuscript. I bought a little spiral notebook to use to write my notes from the trip. There had been no time to do this each day, so now I was going to try to remember everything on the plane ride home. I did fairly well. Manufactum has many interesting tools, gadgets, and useful items for the home, garden, and home office. Last year, in western Germany (the Rheinhessen) with Arnold and Mareen, I had the feeling I had in Scotland: a good, warm feeling that I’d come back to the land of my roots. But in Berlin – no. While I love how clean it is, and how little car traffic there is, and how wide the sidewalks are, and how many trees and parks there are, the awful reminders of past atrocities and evil are there, everywhere, and must be there because we must not forget. But I had no warm feeling as a result. I had this feeling of angst. Several times I was involuntarily feeling thankful that my German ancestors had left Germany before 1900 – before the worst of the evil. Sometimes it is hard to enjoy the beauty in Germany, knowing what horrors came before now. Interestingly, the taxi driver who took us to the airport on Saturday spoke about a general feeling of unhappiness which he thinks is characteristic of his countrymen. He was a talkative an amiable fellow. We liked him, so we gave him the two bottles of wine that the hotel had given us to say they were sorry about the problems with the room we had on the first day. We would not be allowed to carry this liquid on the plane, we knew, and we didn’t want the hassles of checked baggage. ←Previous Sign my guestbook. View my guestbook.

Friday-Saturday, August 7-8, 2009 The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman. Bridge on the Spree River. Berlin, like Paris, has a “beach” in the summer. A plaque embedded in the ground marks a place where the Berlin Wall once stood. Building designed by the American architect I.M. Pei.