Germany Highlights 2024: Berlin Part 2

We were nearing the end of our time in Berlin, so we decided to take the tram to the heart of the city and check out some other important sites. The transit system in Berlin is excellent with a mix of buses, trams, trains, and plenty of bike and walking paths. 

We started off this day at the Reichstag, the German parliament. Unfortunately, our luck began to run out at this point of the trip. The grounds of the Reichstag, and the building itself, were off limits to the public in preparation for a Democracy Festival. If memory serves me correctly, it was the 75th anniversary of their current constitution. We were still able to take some time to admire the exterior of the building and it is amazing. It is a pleasant blend of traditional and modern architecture. The carvings that adorn the building are reminiscent of the Acropolis, and there are strong Greek/Roman influences on the design of the building. 

Since we couldn’t get inside, we ended up walking over to the nearby Brandenburg Gate. Fun fact: Berlin used to be the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, a major principality of the Holy Roman Empire. The Gate was busy, as was expected. Again, a large area was fenced off for construction. There was also an obscene amount of astroturf being laid out in front of the Brandenburg Gate in preparation for the Euro Cup (of football) which Germany will be hosting. For a country which is really pushing the eco-friendly, paper straws, no big trucks mindset, there sure is a LOT of plastic in several kilometers of artificial grass. 

Brandenburg Gate also carries strong Greek/Roman architectural notes. It was built in the late 1700s and has featured prominently in many historical events, including demonstrations by the Nazi Party as well as state visits from foreign dignitaries during the Cold War.

Beside the Brandenburg Gate is another park packed full of history. We visited a display about the Roma and Sinti people who had been persecuted during the Holocaust. I had never heard of the Sinti before. They are a subgroup of the Romani people found in Germany, still distinct from the Roma but considered “gypsies” by many, including the Nazis. There was a very beautiful memorial featuring a black circular pool of water with a triangular plinth in the middle. Every day at 1:00 PM, somebody changes the flower on the plinth. There were speakers playing violin music from the trees. Again, I was amazed by just HOW MUCH HISTORY was being presented in this city. At this point, I realized I would probably need a month in Berlin just to read all of the plaques and displays. 

Continuing the theme of incredibly heavy topics, we then visited the nearby Holocaust Memorial. There were thousands of concrete blocks spaced above uneven undulating ground symbolizing the Jewish lives lost. After walking through the blocks, we went underground where there was a display featuring information about some of the Jewish families that were killed during the Holocaust. By just hearing “6 million people died”, it’s easy to stay detached. It’s a statistic. A number. But reading about what these families were like, what their contributions had been to their communities, how they became split up, how some lived and some died; it was rough. We had already visited some historic cemeteries on this trip, and Berlin is a city rich in both life and death.

We briefly stopped by Potsdamer Platz before continuing to the Kulturforum. By this point in the day, we had been reading until our brains were mush, so we ended up in an interesting church featuring a sculpture made of multi-coloured plexiglass. We spent a long time just admiring the sculpture from different angles. Pictures won’t do it justice but it catches the light quite nicely and provides you with a dynamic experience as you move around it.

We ended up going home with a step count of just under 20 000 steps for the day. If we included a “pages read” count, we had probably finished a mid-sized novel that day.

We only had one more day in Berlin and we intended to make it count!