Sachsenhausen and bikelanes

Weird combination of topics for this final Berlin dispatch. Want to show a bunch of photos at the end of the lovely bike lanes that are normal parts of the streets here in Berlin. Some are side-paths and some are pink marked lanes in the streets. So those photos come up at the end.

First, today we went off to see the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, thanks to Jessica Loof, our co-host here, who is just learning how to conduct the tour of the place. It’s unrelentingly bleak, even though we had the strange juxtaposition of visiting the sprawling site where the Nazis really figured out how to industrialize their death camps during a very warm, summer day among chirping birds and calm 21st century tourists. The fear of course is that people visit a place like this and leave comforted that “this will never happen again,” but of course it is. Though not under the rigid German organization of the Nazis, there have been slave labor camps continuously since the days of WWII.

While this place in Orianenberg just north of Berlin was in the hands of the Soviet Union, and then the German Democratic Republic, they emphasized the role of this camp in imprisoning and liquidating German communists. There are many explanatory displays and memorials around the huge facility, many quite interesting and informative. But towering over the whole place is this ridiculous monument, which has a statue at the bottom with a Red Army soldier and a Communist partisan freeing an altogether too healthy looking communist prisoner. Apparently the sculptor had to re-do it several times to beef up the characters and make the powerful socialist men look more socialist-realist and awe-inspiring than historic truth might have allowed for…

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Berlin, art mecca

As we’ve noted for some time in San Francisco, without cheap rent it’s hard to sustain a thriving art (or dance, or music, or political) scene… Berlin, full of ghosts, is also full of amazing amounts of space, both in terms of its lovely parklands, its still empty swaths of former Wall zones, and the apartments all over the city that are just huge, airy, sunny, warm, cozy…

“If you will suck my sticky soul, I will lick your funky emotions”… words to live by!

When I was here 17 years ago the eastern part of Berlin was full of squatted buildings and there were early efforts to create cafes and bars in the bleak, decrepit East. Some of what we’ve been doing is revisiting those same buildings, now refurbished and prosperous, which is ironic of course, but the neighborhoods are really fantastic (it doesn’t hurt that it’s glorious summer!) and extremely livable. Yesterday we went to this place, KA86, to the cafe just below and to the right of this photo, where they have a really great Sunday morning all you can eat brunch with great northern European cheeses, jams, spreads, and especially the BREADS! Yum!

Today we hung out with our host Jess C., and he took us by Ka77, one of the many squatted buildings on Kastianenalle just a few blocks away. Jess was around back in the early 1990s when the building was first squatted (it’s also the oldest building in the area, and actually consists of 4 separate structures going back in a row from the street front, separated by lovely courtyards). Hundreds of people helped make it an amazing place, and it’s still home to 25 adults and about 10 children, who still live collectively, have shared meals 6 nights a week, and are encouraged to bathe together in a big bathroom with two bathtubs and two showers all adjacent… The culture of collective living is considerably healthier here than in the U.S. as far as I can tell after a very cursory visit. Collective spaces still exist and actually seem to be thriving. They contribute a lot to what’s left of the radical political culture, though it’s far from what it was during the street-fighting times before the Wall fell. Rather, following the “natural” life-cycle of urban environments, Berlin was animated by the squatter scene and its attendant radical politics two and three decades ago. Following the fall of the Wall and German reunification, the next phase of city life ensues when the artists pour in and find lots of cheap space and easy living without huge incomes.

Here’s me and Jess enjoying a leisurely Monday afternoon in summertime Berlin:

As we’ve enjoyed staying at Jess’s place on Brunnenstrasse just in the eastern sector near where the Wall was, we’re close to Mitte (the center) and the place is chock full of art spaces! Galleries and buildings, cafes and bars, outdoors in balmy June Berlin… just fantastic place to be without cares or responsibilities. On Sunday Francesca and I re-found the place I visited in 1990, now known as Tacheles. Here’s some photos of it:

You can see already around Tacheles on Friedrichstrasse and Orianenbergstrasse the booming rise of commercial gentrification. The other neighborhoods nearby, currently home to many art galleries, will likely succumb to boutiquization as things proceed, assuming the pattern holds. Here are some more Tacheles shots:

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Ghosts of Berlin

Summer is upon us here in Berlin, sweltering heat during the day, but gloriously balmy all night long. Francesca and I have been touring around on rental bikes, enjoying the great bike lanes and normalized bicycle transit accommodations (you can take your bike on any train or tram, there are dedicated separate sidepaths on countless streets, even left turn lanes and signals at complicated intersections–photos to come in a later post).

There is a palpable sense of ghosts lurking in every part of Berlin, but especially here where we are a short distance from the old Wall. Berlin has replaced most of the Wall with a two-cobblestone inlaid marker in the ground along the entire original path. We are at 44 Brunnenstrasse and next door, at 45 Brunnenstr., there was a tunnel dug from West Berlin under the wall to its basement in 1963. Unfortunately Stasi informants betrayed it and the diggers and aspiring escapees were caught and imprisoned. We are outside the Bernauerstrasse U-bahn station and just a half block away was the wall; where we are was for many years the edge of East Berlin, a scary, heavily militarized place.

The yellow arrow at the right edge of this aerial photo points to where we’re staying and more or less corresponds to the route of the tunnel dug back in 1963 (one of several, only the first one succeeded in freeing a couple of dozen people).

Yesterday I took a lovely ride through Berlin’s famous urban park, the Tiergarten, a world-class park. Of course one of the main ghosts haunting any urban environment, including this one, is nature itself. In the Tiergarten I found this statue of a fox hunt and thought it illustrated well the lost nature of this area, which in turn reminded me of the Grimm Brothers (who apparently once studied at Humboldt University in the heart of Berlin) and their sagas set in heavily forested medieval Europe, Germany’s Black Forest among the most storied. Here’s the fox hunt statue:

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