Berlin

Welcome to a collection of random photos I took in Berlin that didn't deserve their own blog post. So I squished them all together. Ready?

This is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The original church on the site was built in the 1890s. It was badly damaged in a bombing raid in 1943. The present building, which consists of a church with an attached foyer and a separate belfry with an attached chapel, was built between 1959 and 1963. The damaged spire of the old church has been retained and its ground floor has been made into a memorial hall.

I kind of like that they didn't try to repair any of the damage done during the bombing raid. Somehow it's a better reminder than any kind of memorial.

Where would you like to go?

This is a large tower in the middle of a big roundabout. I don't have much more information than that. It's on the road that leads towards the Brandenburg Tor.

This is one of the few pictures I took while standing atop what formerly was Hitler's Secret Bunker. Of course, the bunker is underground, and not much remains of it other than rubble, because it was destroyed when they were building the buildings that now stand around it. But these little birds seemed to be enjoying their bath, and I thought that was cute.

More signs.

This is a memorial located in a large building that used to house the guards/soldiers. It's not empty except for this one statue and a hole in the ceiling letting light it. It was designed by a woman who had lost her husband and all of her sons in the war. Sad.

These are the birds (ravens?) that I shared my crackers with. They were pretty friendly and seemed to enjoy the crackers. Eventually they must have gotten full, because they started taking the crackers and burying them in the snow. So I stopped giving them out. Cheeky birds.

Flowers that someone left on a Russian war memorial just outside the Reichstag building.

This is a panorama view of the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. If you are thinking to yourself that those two cathedrals on either side look identical, you'd be correct. Except for a few things. Such as the fact that the German cathedral is just a wee bit taller than the French one. Take that.

One of them is the French cathedral and the other is the German cathedral. Both of them were heavily damaged and/or destroyed during WW2, and not rebuilt until after reunification, so they are quite modern.

You can read more about them here.

This is a plaque on the site where the Nazis burned well over 20,000 books that were deemed 'Un-German'. The quote on the left reads:

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where they have burned books, they will in the end burn people.) It's interesting that this particular quote was written in 1821, and it rings eerily true for WW2.

This is the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral), oddly named because Berlin has never been the seat of a Catholic Bishop. The site was consecrated in 1454, although the current structure dates from the 20th Century. My tour guide didn't like it very much, he said something about good design having thrown up all over it. It's made to look old, which is appealing, but I didn't go inside, since it's all new and it's pricey to get in.

While this may look exciting, it is simple the city hall building. I can't find much more information about it, and given that most of the city was levelled in WW2, it can't be that old. But it looks cool.

This was the last picture I took in Berlin. I snapped it on the way back to the train station, while standing in the middle of the road. Don't worry, the road was empty. The sacrifices I make for a photograph. Heh.