There’s a company that operates free tours in several major European cities, including Berlin.\u00a0 The tour guides are usually liberal arts college graduates who fell in love with Berlin and now live here.\u00a0 Our guide, Mary, was an English girl who studied German in college and now lives in Berlin.<\/p>\n
The tour lasted for a little over four hours so I imagine the guides do fairly well in tips.\u00a0 We started at the Brandenburg Gate (more pictures later) and walked around the former East Berlin, roughly following the path of the Wall.\u00a0 We heard lots of good stories which can’t all quite fit in the captions:<\/p>\n
Pictures 3-6: This is the old Luftwaffe (Nazi air force) building.\u00a0 It was hardly damaged in WWII, possibly due to a gentleman’s agreement between sides.\u00a0 The building then became East Germany’s Ministry of Ministries.\u00a0 The mural shown is along the street and shows what communism is supposed to be like – everyone is equal and happy.\u00a0 Next to the mural along the street is a panoramic picture of East German protesters in the 1950s – communism wasn’t working out like it was supposed to.\u00a0 The building is now home to the Finance Ministry.<\/p>\n
Pictures 7-8: Checkpoint Charlie.\u00a0 It got its name just because it was the third checkpoint along the border (alpha, bravo, charlie).\u00a0 The soldier picture wasn’t there 30 years ago, but it represents the Americans looking over into the East German side.\u00a0 The other side has a Soviet soldier doing the same over the West German side.\u00a0 This was a great place for spies to mingle, supposedly.<\/p>\n
Pictures 10-13: This used to be the library of Humboldt University, a very prestigious European school.\u00a0 It’s now undergoing construction as the Law School, but it is the site of the Nazi book burnings<\/a> that started on May 10, 1933.\u00a0 Underneath the plaza outside is a memorial consisting of empty book shelves with a capacity to store 20,000 books – about the number burned by students that night.\u00a0 Next to the window in the ground is a plaque with a quote by Heinrich Heine, a Jewish author whose books were burned that night.\u00a0 It reads<\/p>\n “They that start by burning books will end by burning men.”<\/em><\/p>\n It’s from his play Almansor<\/em>, written in 1821, over 100 years earlier.<\/p>\n Picture 14: This statue is in a small building that has been given a new name by every regime in the last 100 years, but is now called the Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny.\u00a0 The statue is of a woman holding her dead son.\u00a0 It was created by K\u00e4the Kollwitz, a German citizen who lost her son in WWI and her grandson in WWII.\u00a0 There’s a hole<\/a> above the statue to expose it to the elements.<\/p>\n\n\t\t