An unofficial guide to Berlin Mitte

Hallo alle! (Hello everyone!) I’ve been pretty busy since the last time I wrote, so I’ll do my best to sum up what I’ve been up to without making this post extremely long.

Two Fridays ago, I achieved my childhood dream of seeing the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum. Ever since I learned about the gate in middle school and found out it was in Berlin, I have really, really wanted to go see it. Since I didn’t get a chance to see it the last time I was in Berlin in 2008, I made sure that on my first day off from my internship (Good Friday) I went and saw it. It was spectacular! I posted a video you can see in the link above, but it is better to just visit it in person if you ever get the chance. The rest of the museum actually wasn’t all that amazing, but the admission cost of 6,50 Euro was worth it just for the gate. After the museum, I wandered around Berlin a bit and managed to get into the Berlin Cathedral for free by going to a Good Friday service there. It really does seem like the best way to see a church is to simply go to a service there, which worked very well for my friend Dylan and I at Notre Dame in Paris. Speaking of Paris, there was a copy of Hammurabi’s code in front of the Ishtar Gate. It felt pretty good to know that I had already seen the original in the Lourve J

Saturday was also a fun night since my friend Emily invited me and several other students from the Middlebury program in Berlin to her place for dinner (Danke Emily!). We made lasagne sandwiches that Paula Deen herself would have been proud of and a veggie lasagne that I think she also would have appreciated after her diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Oh well, but as one of my biology professors once said “what would life be without bacon?” After dinner, some of us went clubbing until the wee hours of the morning, so that was a good time.         

On Sunday, two new people entered my life. The first is named Jim and he will be my roommate for the remainder of the month. The second is named Ben. Yeah, he’s not exactly a new person in my life as we’ve known each other since childhood, but I had a great time hosting him for a week as he travels around Europe.

I’ll employ a list here (in chronological order) to give an overview of some of the places I visited last week with Ben and/or Jim. Consider it an unofficial guide to Berlin Mitte!

Reichstag: The home of the German parliament. Haven’t found a reason yet to wait in line to go up to the roof

Brandenburg Gate: Commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm II in the 1730s to represent peace. Perhaps the most iconic image of Berlin (at least on the windows of the U-Bahn)

Holocaust Memorial: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe covers 4.7 acres with its blocks of concrete that make the visitor feel disoriented while walking through. Whether you like the memorial or not, it does immortalize the remorse Germans feel to this day concerning the atrocities committed during WWII

Potsdamer Platz/Sony Center: I made the mistake of showing Ben and Jim this place during the day. Luckily, we went back in the evening to watch Hunger Games at the Cinestar there and when we got out of the theater, both understood why this is one of my favorite spots in Berlin

Philharmonie: This crazily-shaped yellow building is the home of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra. Also the subject of my college admissions essay, as I managed to locate it during my first trip to Berlin and got to hear the orchestra from the lobby

Checkpoint Charlie: The best known crossing point between the American and Soviet sectors of Berlin during the Cold War. Today you can pay to have your picture taken with the “border guards” there.  

Gedarmenmarkt: A cool square in Berlin that is the site of the Konzerthaus and the French and German cathedrals (actually museums). Bring your camera!

St. Hedwig’s Cathedral: The seat of the Catholic archbishop of Berlin. Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, who helped Jews during the Holocaust, is buried in a crypt here. 

Schinkel Museuem: A small, free museum located in a Neo-Gothic church. Keep walking east past the museum for a nice panorama of the Berlin Cathedral and Alexanderplatz

Book Burning Memorial: Located in front of the German Opera House, this memorial is comprised of a window embedded in the ground that looks down into a library with empty shelves. Accompanying the memorial is the eerie quote from Heinrich Heine, a German poet who lived 100 years before the Holocaust: Wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where one burns books, one also burns people in the end).  

Neue Wache: A memorial for all victims of war and tyranny. Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture Mother with her Dead Son is at the center under the oculus, which leaves it exposed to rain and snow.

Berliner Dom: The Berlin Cathedral, a famous Protestant church in Berlin. Pretty cool interior, but as I said earlier, just go to a service and you don’t have to pay for admission.

Alexanderplatz: A cool square in Berlin that is the home of the towering Fernsehturm (TV tower). About a 5 minute walk from my apartment.

Topographie des Terrors: A free museum that documents that Nazis rise to power and atrocities during WWII. Ben and I spent a few hours here last Tuesday.

Restaurant Haus Berlin: A fairly inexpensive restaurant with a pretty good Wiener Schnitzel. More importantly, quality German beer from the tap for 3 Euros.    

East Side Gallery: A 1.3 km stretch of the Berlin Wall that is also the world’s largest open-air art gallery. A bit out of the way, but must-see for visitors to Berlin.

 Kurfürstendamm: Historic shopping area in West Berlin

 Nollendorfplatz: Berlin’s most prominent gay village

Natural History Museum: Jim and I checked out this museum on Saturday. Probably the most technologically advanced museums I have ever been to. Most exhibit descriptions have a hands-on interface that lets you touch certain words and a video or picture will pop up on an imbedded screen. There is also a cool outer space exhibit that has a circular couch that allows visitors to lie down and watch a movie about the formation of the Earth projected on a moving screen up above. Throw in the world’s largest mounted dinosaur and you’ve got a museum more than deserving of its own U-Bahn stop!  

Last night, Jim also taught me how to make Wiener Schnitzel! It was quite lecker (delicious). Now I’ll have a pseudo-German (Wien= Vienna) specialty that I can make for family/friends when I get back to the US! Danke fürs Lesen und bis nächstes Mal!