Tapetenwechsel: Berlin Blog

Welcoming 2008 in Berlin

Fri, 4 Jan 2008 21:11:55 +0100

If this had been any other normal New Year’s Eve at home in Reno, my wife Cheryl and I would have been sitting all warm and cozy on the TV room couch at home watching the festivities around the world on our big-screen television.

But Cheryl had flown over 6,000 miles to visit me here in Berlin for the holidays, and this was not any “normal New Year’s Eve.” It was Silvester in Berlin and we weren’t about to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the way Germans welcome das neue Jahr.

It was cold at the time (but not nearly as cold as the first few days of January in Berlin!), but it wasn’t raining or snowing, so we had no good excuse. Around 10:30 p.m. we got on the U5 U-Bahn and headed out for the Party-Meile (“party mile,” actually 2km or a mile and a half) via Alexanderplatz and the S-Bahn. With temps in the mid-thirties (Fahrenheit, of course), we walked from the Hauptbahnhof (main rail station) across a foot bridge over the Spree River to the area between the Reichstag and Angela Merkel’s offices in the chancellory (das Bundeskanzler[in]amt) – along with many other people who had the same idea.

To say the least, the Germans have a rather liberal attitude about fireworks. During the weeks leading up to New Year’s Eve it is legal to buy personal fireworks, some of which are pretty serious explosives! The local stationery store where I usually buy envelopes, cards, pens and such suddenly turned into a fireworks shop with a new huge orange and black sign proclaiming “FEUERWERK”! It gave new meaning to the German phrase “ein Bombengeschäft” (“a booming [bomb] business”).

All day on December 31 (and in the days before) you could hear individual fireworks going off all over Berlin. After dark it just got more intense. People had their firecrackers, rockets, and other stuff, and they couldn’t wait for New Year’s Eve. (The law says they should, but hey, this is Germany.) However, even before we arrived at the Reichstag, it was very apparent that they hadn’t even come close to using up all their sparkling firepower. People were setting off rockets and Knaller (firecrackers) all over the place. The smell of gunpowder was overpowering and at times there was so much smoke from all the private pyrotechnics that it was difficult to breathe!

Partly to get away from all the smoke, we meandered over toward the stretch of Berlin boulevard between the Brandenburg Gate and the Siegesäule (Victory Column) that had been designated the “party mile” along the Straße des 17. Juni. There were police lines and fences to control the crowds, but we managed to get to the actual party mile with its music, beer stands, vendors, and an atmosphere a bit reminiscent of a U.S. county fair. There was even a giant, lighted ferris wheel in the middle of the party mile for anyone lucky enough to get there and brave enough to ride it in the damp cold.

Midnight caught us a bit by surprise. We had just bought a funny, flashing light-up button that Cheryl was wearing as we walked back towards the ferris wheel, when the official fireworks started to go off. It was 2008 in Berlin! But the public fireworks were not where I thought they would be, and we weren’t positioned very well to get the photos I had planned. (See our photos!)

Foolishly thinking we could beat the crowds if we left right away, we walked briskly back toward the Hauptbahnhof – until we came to a real bottleneck as the throng tried to cross the lone pedestrian bridge across the Spree. It was like a Stau on the autobahn! We were at a standstill and getting pushed from behind. It was a little scary – and then I lost Cheryl! But the biggest problem was some guy holding a cigarette that threatened to burn a hole in my leather jacket. Finally, he pushed ahead and my only worry now was trying to find my wife. But in the crush all I could do was move with the crowd. I suddenly realized how people can get killed in a stampede. Once across the bridge, I waited off to the side until Cheryl came along.

The whole experience was amazing, but not over just yet. After almost getting crushed at the top of an escalator, we boarded a packed S-Bahn train. Because of all the people, the train was staying in stations much longer than usual, so it took forever to get to the Ostbahnhof. Now we were just one stop away from Warschauer Straße and a short walk home. But then there was one of those announcements in German that you really don’t want to hear. Contrary to the schedule, the train was ending here and everyone had to get off. Great! Rather than follow the horde over to another train, we decided to walk. It takes about five minutes longer than from the Warschauer Straße station, but we had had enough of standing in a sardine can. Safely back in the apartment, we relished the fact that we had ventured forth and survived New Year’s Eve in Berlin. Einen guten Rutsch! (Happy New Year!)

A Visit to France and the New Photo Pages

Mon, 3 Dec 2007 13:09:39 +0100

Thanksgiving 2007 was a very special occasion for me – mostly because it passed without notice! My son Kirk and his fiancée Sandrine had invited me to join them during Thanksgiving week at her parents’ home just outside Paris. I flew Air France from Berlin to Paris on November 19. I’m pretty sure it’s the first Thanksgiving that I ever spent without realizing it until later.

I do remember (with the help of my EC card receipt) that the five of us had dinner on Friday at the Lion d’Or restaurant in Selles sur Cher (the town where Sandrine’s parents have just finished building a new house). But I really can’t tell you what we had to eat on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day! That day passed without any of us mentioning the American holiday that is just another day in Europe.

I do know that we enjoyed some French wine that we purchased at a local winery (Château Quinçay) the evening of November 22, and that we ate dinner at the new house. Lunch that day is not a memory I can call forth right now. But I have very vivid of memories of all the marvelous châteaux (plural of château) we saw in the Loire Valley on the banks of the Cher and Loire rivers. And thanks to my son and his camera, you can also see what we saw! I have thus inaugurated my new Photos page with photographs I didn’t even take myself.

But in coming days and weeks I’ll add my own photos of Berlin and Germany. Watch for them! > Photos page

Related Sites
Château de Quinçay: www.chateaudequincay.com (in French)
Château de Quinçay: www.chateaudequincay.com (in English)
Selles sur Cher: www.mairie-selles-sur-cher.fr (in French)

Die Post and Shoppen (Denglish is alive and well)

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 20:51:25 +0100

My first visit to my local post office here in Berlin reminded me of how much the German Post has changed since I first did research for my book The German Way in the early 1990s. Pictured above you see the post office I visit every now and then near the intersection of Warschauer Straße and Frankfurter Allee right next to the Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn (metro) station. The first time I went there, a little after 2:00 p.m. on the day after the Oct. 3 holiday, I was standing in a line of about 15-20 people that ran out the door onto the sidewalk! Luckily, that proved to be out of the ordinary, and I usually don’t have a long wait. The clerks are friendly, and the postal branch here reminds me a little of the postal substation in a drug store in Reno. There are usually two clerks on duty, handling everything from my air mail packages to the U.S. to postal banking.

In the “bad old days,” the Bundespost was a bureaucratic, government-run affair where you had to be sure you were in front of the correct window for what you wanted. There was a specific window for stamps, another for packages, another for this, another for that. Signs above each window (in German, of course) told you what kind of postal business you could conduct there. If you didn’t understand German, you were doomed. Tourists often stood in the wrong line only to be told that they had to start all over again in another one. In the new, modern, privatized Post, you stand in one line and wait for the next clerk, pretty much as in the U.S.

Germany has also made a lot of progress in another area – shopping, or as they say in German, das Shopping. It was not that long ago that you could be certain of one thing about shopping in Germany: the stores would be closed when you had time to go “shoppen” (known in those days as “einkaufen gehen”). Most shops, and even bigger stores, closed at 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, and usually by 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. On Sunday only restaurants and tourist-related businesses were open. (That’s still the case today!) The German sales clerks’ unions were strong, and they resisted pressure from German consumers to expand shopping hours for a society that was no longer made up mostly of stay-at-home moms who could go shopping from 8 to 5, while their husbands were at the office and the kids were in school.

But finally consumers won some concessions. The laws were changed so that German shops could stay open until 8:00 p.m. on Thursdays. At first only large shops and department stores actually stayed open until eight, but as time went by, Germans could even buy groceries as late as 8:00 p.m. Mon.-Fri. The Kaiser’s grocery store near me here in Berlin now stays open until midnight Mon.-Sat.! Yes, things have definitely changed.

Although Germans have a reputation for being efficient, sometimes it really isn’t so, and things get out of hand. Here in Berlin there was an article in today’s paper about how confusing it is for German shoppers to know when stores are actually open. Different establishments, even on the same street, have different opening and closing times. During the Christmas season (it’s not called the “holiday” season here), it gets even wilder, because even in Germany it has long been traditional for stores to stay open longer and on more days than usual during the Advent season and the lead-up to Weihnachten, even on usually verboten Sonntag.

German law allows stores to stay open from 13.00-22.00 Uhr (1-10 p.m.) on Sundays during Advent, but it’s not required. So some stores will only stay open until 8:00 p.m., while others won’t close until two hours later. As of Nov. 26, the biggest European department store outside of London, Berlin’s KaDeWe, will stay open for business until 10:00 p.m. Thu.-Sat., but only until 8:00 p.m. on Sunday. While the new Alexa shopping center at Alexanderplatz will be open Sundays from 1:00 until 8:00 p.m., most of the shops and department stores on Friedrichstraße and on the Kudamm will be open only from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. But the Potsdamer Platz Arcaden will be open daily until 9:00 p.m., just as they usually are. The three Ikea stores in and around Berlin are always open until 9:00 p.m. except on Fridays and Saturdays until 10:00 p.m. And... In fact, it’s all more complicated than that, but I will mercifully stop at this point to take a breath. It’s enough to make you long for the good old days when you couldn’t find a German store open after dark!

By the way, my German post office is closed from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. each day. The opening hours also vary slightly on certain days, but I can’t tell you exactly without looking at the sign on the door.

Related Sites
Book and Website: The German Way
The German Post Office: Deutsche Post AG

The Second Fall of the Wall: The East Side Gallery

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:00:42 +0200

A few days after I first arrived in Berlin, I went over to visit an old friend. I had visited this friend several times over the last 20 or so years, but had never seen her in such bad shape. The East Side Gallery, one of the few sections of the Berlin Wall still standing, is in very sad condition. It was like seeing a loved one you hadn’t seen for a year or two, who had suffered a surprising decline in health. It was painful to see.

This former barrier along the banks of the Spree River between what was then West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district and East Berlin’s Friedrichshain district has a special history, one that is unlike any other section of the Berlin Wall. After the Wall opened up on the night of November 9, 1989, this section became a “living” symbol of that breakthrough. To celebrate German reunification in 1990, this 1.3km-long segment of the Wall was chosen for a special art project that was dubbed the East Side Gallery (because the paintings were on the east side of the Wall, the side that had been blank, unlike the graffiti-covered west side).

Ten years later, the paintings were crumbling and fading, so in the summer of 2000 a restoration was carried out on about one-third of the Gallery, running 300 meters from the Ostbahnhof in the direction of the Oberbaumbrücke (bridge made famous by its appearance in the German film Run Lola Run).

So now another seven years have passed since that project, but like many things in the German capital, the East Side Gallery is suffering from neglect. However, as you can see in the photo, it’s worse than mere neglect. In earlier years, even graffiti “artists” had respected the historic nature of this section of the Berlin Wall and largely left it alone. But what I saw today (when I went over to take photos) went far beyond neglect and on past disrespect and barbarism. Almost all of the art lovingly restored in 2000 has been covered with second-rate smearings and amateur graffiti. Even the classic “communist kiss” is gone. Birgit Kind’s wonderful Trabi bursting through the Wall (photo above) is still visible, but the work of various cretins has devastated even this gem – which was restored several times between 1990 and 2000. I was unable to find most of the illustrated Wall sections I had first photographed in the early 1990s.

But the drastic decline in the condition of the artwork is only part of the problem. Ever since 1989 there has been a series of plans proposed to turn the land between the Wall and the river into a park or something else for the public. Not one of these plans ever got past the drawing board. Right now there is a large sign proclaiming yet another project: the Berlin version of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. But this seems to be yet another false promise following many others. And another Wall river park project was put on hold recently when local residents objected to its commercial nature. They are also against a proposed new bridge across the Spree that would punch a new street through the East Side Gallery at the Ostbahnhof – and increase traffic and pollution. After 17 years, the only successful project now standing here is the Berlin Wall itself, first built in 1969.

Related Sites
More East Side Photos: www.german-way.com/
Official Site (last updated in 2000): www.eastsidegallery.com

German Unity Day - Tag der Deutschen Einheit

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 19:03:58 +0200

Coffee at McCafé
October 3 is the German national holiday. Today I ventured forth with some German friends to see how Germans celebrate their own version of the Fourth of July. Fall is a nice time of the year to have your country’s big national day, and after a rather dismal, wet, gray week, the weather gods chose to bring out the sun for the Germans to enjoy on this particular October day in Berlin.

For all sorts of historical reasons, Germany’s citizens – except for a few neo-Nazis here and there – are generally uncomfortable with things like “patriotism” and “national pride.” Flag waving is reserved for soccer games (Fußball). Most people living in the Federal Republic of Germany identify first with their region and/or hometown – and only then with “Deutschland.” It is also easy to forget that, although it has the most people and the biggest economy in the European Union, Germany is the youngest nation among the major EU powers. What we now call “Germany” did not come into existence until 1871, six years after the American Civil War ended! Britain, France, and Spain have much longer histories as nation-states. Even Italy, not united until 1861, is older.

Germany’s national day is also very recent. The October 3 date only became official in 1990 following reunification of East and West Germany after the Berlin Wall fell, so it’s not exactly a long tradition. The German national day has never been a very big deal, even before it was moved to the current date. Germans get far more excited about the soccer World Cup than they do about October 3. I heard fireworks last night, but that’s about as close as it gets to July 4th.

Although there were the usual newspaper articles and television commentary about just how unified Germany really is on this Unity Day, I don’t think any of the people I saw today (and it was a lot of people!) gave that a thought. It was a beautiful fall day, and most people were probably like me, thinking how great it was to see the sun on a day off. Do the people in the photo below look like they are worrying about national unity? No, they’re simply enjoying the Berlin version of the Riviera!

My friends and I couldn’t even get close to the masses spread out along the Straße des 17. Juni between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column. We could definitely hear the music of Juli, one of several German bands featured at this year’s free October 3rd concert at the Brandenburg Gate, but security people kept us moving around all the action. You can get out, but you can’t get in seemed to be the order of the day. “Kein Eingang” (no entry) was the sign of the day! Just to get to my friends at the Reichstag, I had to make a giant detour walking back from the Adlon Hotel near the Brandenburg Gate past the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz, then a long trek through the Tiergarten park. I definitely got my walking exercise for the day!

Once we met up (using cell phones like walkie-talkies) we decided to walk through the government building complex (the Bundeskanzleramt, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office, etc.; she was on her way to Africa at the time) along the river Spree and across the river to the new Hauptbahnhof (main train station), where, along with many other people who had the same idea, we paid 80 euro cents (about a dollar) per person to use the restroom. (There was a line for the women. Seems to be universal.) Then it was off to the McCafé in the station for some excellent coffee and a rest for our weary feet. (McDonald’s is definitely giving Starbucks a run for its money.)

Then we took the S-Bahn home. (The S-Bahn trains may not be running as of Friday. German locomotive drivers (Lokführer) are planning to go on strike then. At least they were kind enough to wait until after the holiday.) At the Ostbahnhof we went our separate ways. Not the day I had planned (Before my friends called, I had planned to take advantage of free admission to the German Historical Museum.), but a fun experience for sure, despite the minor blisters I’m feeling on my tired feet right now. I’m glad they called. After all, the sun was shining!

Footnote: The first McCafé opened in Australia in 1993. The first one in Germany came ten years later in Cologne. There are now over 200 McCafés in Austria and Germany, all as part of a McDonald’s restaurant (“Das etwas andere Restaurant.” - “Ich liebe es.”), and most of them in airports or train stations. McCafés are also found in the UK and Ireland. One of the first US McCafés opened in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2003. Apparently, there are also McCafés located in other countries worldwide.

Web > McCafé (Deutsch)