Day 34 Wars, walls and wombats

They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but in Berlin we discovered a new phenomenon in European travel, the free walking tour. After meeting the tour guide at our hostel we travelled to a central meeting place, where we waited with about 200 other people. We were then organised into groups of about 25 for our free tour (well a tour with no cost, but with the expectation of a generous tip for the guide at the end). Again we were the youngest by 20 years but the tour was informative, entertaining, exhausting and at times quite sad.

Berlin is not a pretty city as very few buildings survived the bombing of WW2. War still seemed to dominate our visit. Beginning at Berlin’s iconic landmark, the Brandenburg Gate, a monument to Prussian military dominance we moved quickly to the site of the Holocaust Memorial. This relatively new memorial was breathtaking. Set on a site of maybe 10 acres the site contains 2711 grey/black rectangular concrete prisms, some flat to the ground and others as high as 3 metres. Set on an undulating site this memorial has been interpreted as tombs, railway carriages or many other things. A memorial that is great art is very rare but this huge, foreboding and mysterious structure easily evoked an emotional response.

Within 300 metres of the memorial we were soon standing in a rough grass car park surrounded by what looked like unimpressive old East German public housing. However the guide informed us that we were actually looking at ‘elite’ old East German housing. He then surprised us by telling us that we were actually standing directly above Hitler’s bunker, and the site where he had committed suicide in 1945.

Again we walked less than 500 metres and found ourselves staring at a section of the Berlin wall, which was built in 1961 at the height of the Cold War. The wall, was in fact two walls with a section in between known as ‘No Mans Land’ or the ‘Death Strip’. The stupidity, sadness and suffering of WW2 and the Cold War continued to haunt our visit to Berlin. The city has made such progress since reunification in 1990, but the city’s past sufferings are evident wherever you turn.

If you read the heading of this blog you will understand ‘war’ and ‘wall’ but why have we included ‘wombats’? Well, on the advice of our eldest son Tim, our accommodation in Berlin was at a hostel called Wombats. This Australian owned hostel provided us with a very reasonably priced apartment with our own kitchen and bathroom. The public toilets downstairs were unique in Berlin for two reasons; firstly they were free, and secondly they carried the door nameplates ‘Sheilas’ and ‘Blokes’. (And we thought we weren’t homesick!)