Sounds good. I got the flights sorted and the accommodation, so I'm leaving the itinerary to the others. Long as there's beer n food I don't care where we end up
Stadium tour is excellent. Checkpoint Charlie Museum is mental. Curated by someone with ADHD. No coherence at all. Bauhaus Archiv Museum if you're feeling like a sensitive Gothy type with a decadent arty bent. Reichstag Dome is worth a spin. As is the TV tower. DDR museum is worth visiting, if only to remind yourself what 1970s Britain was like. I stood in no man's land in a remaining section of the Wall and played Heroes on my phone. Then cried. Felt right but got some funny looks from those of a less sensitive disposition.
Was there last year for a conference but had plenty of down time. Would love to get back their just to visit it properly. Currywurst and chips washed down with a few litres, you can't go wrong! The german diet is not the best but who cares. The Romany/Gypsy holocaust memorial in the park near the Brandenburg Gate is modest but eye opening and profound as well, just to add to the list. Got a piece of the wall on my desk I do, all authentic - so the piece of paper says...
There’s a sort of museum of nazi stuff called something like Typography of Terror not far of Checkpoint which was worth a look I seem to remember it being free, although obviously it’s harrowing
I went there on a stag night too I’d recommend eating a full suckling pig and shooting automatic machine guns in an underground bunker...but not both at the same time
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Most in the DDR would have swapped life in 1970s Britain with theirs. Except they were shot if they tried to leave. It reall was grim there except for the Party bosses.
I wasn't being totally serious. The DDR museum highlights social history in the DDR from the 60s to the 80s and pulls no punches. There is a exhibition on the Stasi which includes a mock up of an interview cell. Grim. There's also a nice juxtaposition of the differences between the haves and have nots in terms of transport with a Trabi and a Gothenburg stretch Volvo limousine. Mainly though it's a collection of everyday objects, food packaging etc, which many ex-East German residents naturally find nostalgic. I was surprised to find how closely they resembled British design and fashion of the time, if not the quality. An interesting section on cameras which the East Germans were very good at. Also a fascinating section on the 1974 World Cup game between East and West. The only time the two countries played each other at football. There's a display of photographs in the middle of a section of no-man's land between the two walls which show the majority of people who died trying to escape. It moved me to tears. Such young hopeful lives ended by a thoughtless and unnecessary bullet. The Checkpoint Charlie museum has loads of stuff about successful and unsuccessful passages from East to West. Tunnels, gliders, homeruns, smuggled in cars. You name it, someone tried it. Fascinating place. I could spend weeks there.
Remember seeing the East German train pulling up for that game. Windows covered in barbed wire, armed guards and the fans marched under the escort of East German guards to the stadium and back. And these were the elite 3,000 allowed to go to the game. Made you realise what things were like for the less trusted ones.
Not as much fun as the frisson when you passed over the border into an entirely different world. Of course first you had to purchase 35 East German marks which they laughingly pretended had parity withnthe Deutschmark. Then when you got there everyone wanted dollars and pounds and there was nothing worth buying anyway. So you invariably returned to the border with your 35 marks where a smirking guard informed you it was illegal to take the currency out of the country and took it off you and deposited in a bin. No doubt a perk of tbe job which was added to the bonuses, extra vodka and leave they got when they shot anyone trying to escape.
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Ironically people are still being royally ripped off at Checkpoint Charlie. There's nothing of the original set up left, just a sort of portacabin that's meant to be a mockup of the original guard station. A pair of actors dressed in American MP uniforms pose for photographs, on tourists phones, at €3 a pop. Plus it's in the middle of a rather busy road, which many tourists seem not to notice.
Its pretty tacky to be honest, you might as well just take a quick look whilst grabbing a McDonalds which is by the side of it. Says it all really.
Didn't do the Berlin wall but did Bergen Belsen concentration camp, there was an exhibition, if that is what you can call it, of pictures of the ovens, gas chambers, the whole lot. I stood there looking but not actually seeing what was in front of me, a life size picture of a skeleton laid on the cinders in the oven, a whole row of ovens. I had seen the documentaries, heard accounts from survivors of the camp and here I was seeing for myself right from the horses mouth so to speak, I'm struggling for words here. The camp itself was now a park like feature, just green gardens with huge humps every so often dotted about, plaques on the side of the humps explained that there were 5,000 bodies buried here, the next one 7,000, then after that the numbers seem to rise with each mound. I can only say that my generation were spared such things when they were ongoing, our parents had put an end to the conflict by the time I was born, other wars followed of course and no doubt atrocities were perpetrated. But having seen one presentation of what man can do to man, and women, and children, I didn't want to see anymore.
