Badeschiff ('Bathing ship')
Past the gritty, industrial sprawl of a decommissioned bus depot lies a scene straight out of Ibiza: tight bods bronzing in the sand, hipsters carousing at the bar and hotties cooling off in the blue water of … wait a minute. No, it's not the Mediterranean but a former river barge turned swimming pool anchored in the Spree River. After sundown, the Badeschiff morphs into an alfresco night club, and in winter they add a couple of saunas and cover everything with an eerily glowing, futuristic membrane.
How crazy does that sound??
So, I finally feel settled enough to begin my To Do List and actually read through my guidebook for things to do in Berlin. There is so much and it is super overwhelming. Most of the things I want to see are museums, but then there are those little things you just stumble across...I am most excited about those. The other day I was walking along the Unter den Linden and found that there was a memorial to the book burning that took place there. A few steps away there was this piece of plexiglass instead of the ground...when you looked through the glass you could see an empty room below you. In that room was about a dozen bookcases all with missing books. It was this eerie, phenomenal way of commemorating the book burning that took place there after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The quote, "where books are burned, in the end people will burn," is present on the memorial plaque. Heinrich Heine who wrote these words in 1820, a full hundred and fifteen years before the Holocaust.
Today I also went to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. It is a full square block and consists of concrete slabs of all different sizes arranged in rows. They are all on uneven ground and create a maze of sorts. It sounds random and even looks it from the outside but after walking through it, especially on a gloomy day like today, you can't escape the feeling that you can't escape. The blocks are about 2 feet high in the first two rows but as you get deeper and deeper, the blocks get larger until you cannot see the street any longer. It feels like you are walking through a graveyard of proportions you cannot fathom...which is, essentially, what you are doing.
There is also a small museum downstairs, in the so-called "coffin" of the memorial. There was a concise history of the Nazi take-over, but the impact really came with the 10 or so family stories they told. One wall would focus on one family, would provide photos and family background and would show where they fleed to in hopes of being spared and where they ended up. In almost all cases only one or two family member survived. This really personalized everything for me and made it more understandable and tragic. When you hear six million people were killed in concentration camps, it is too overwhelming to feel grief for all those people. But when you hear of a close-nit family of four and learn what they did, where they lived and studied...it all becomes way more intense. I'll never forget a letter a mother wrote to her children saying, "I'm hugging you right now, with my tears," or a letter from a twelve-year-old to her Father saying, "I'm really scared because I know they throw the young people into the pits still alive. Goodbye forever. I love you tenderly." I cried for an hour straight.
It has also been interesting to see how Germans discuss World War II and the Holocaust. I guess their numerous museums and memorials and even the Bundestag's glass cupola, which stands for transparency, tries to show that they are not trying to forget the things that happened. It is still a very sensitive subject...for instance in the Neue Wache, a very old building on the Unter den Linden, the government put a memorial to the victims of war and violent rule.
This caused outrage because it implied that the site commemorated not only Holocaust victims but the perpetrators or members of the Nazi army.
No comments:
Post a Comment