Because I grew up in Holland, I had been to Germany many times. I had been in the North, in the West, and in the South, but never in the East. Moreover, I had never been to Berlin.
Everybody who had been there, upon returning, immediately turned to me to tell me how much I would love it there. I had been meaning to go for years, but every time I was close to making it happen, something came up. This year, I had decided, it was finally going to happen.
I thought this over on the plane. While planning this trip, Berlin had been, by far, the place I had looked forward to most. I had spent countless hours researching places to visit, things to do, bars to drink in and a million other things but there was one thing that stood tall above everything else: The Wall. It may seem like ancient history to younger readers but, growing up in the 80s, Berlin, the Wall and the Cold War were important influences on me in my teenage years. Berlin was one of the defining images of my youth. I couldn’t focus on my book and just stared at the seat in front of me. The Wall, the Berlin TV tower, Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburger Tor. All the images I had seen a million times on TV, all those years ago, all appeared before me again. I checked the time on the watch of the girl sitting next to me and silently wished the pilot would fly faster and then tried to focus on my book. I was as excited as a little boy going to a big football game for the first time, or a teenage girl on her way to a concert of her favorite boy band. I had another drink to kill time and then, at long last, we started our descend.
We touched down just after 5PM local time and as I made my way through the terminal, I saw a sign saying “WILKOMMEN IN BERLIN SCHONEFELD”. A big smile formed on my face. I was in Berlin.
Despite my normally impeccable planning, I had not given much thought to the matter of getting to Berlin proper. I just assumed that there would be a bus from the airport to take me to central Berlin, or at the very least a train station. There was a bus outside the terminal with a sign saying “U RUDOW” on the front. I stepped in and said ‘Central Berlin’. The driver looked and me and said “Wohin gehen sie?” and it all of a sudden occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to practice my German again. I speak pretty decent German, and about 25% of my work is in German, but it had been a while since I actually had to speak it out in the wild. I explained to him that I wanted to go to Alexanderplatz, and he explained to me that he would drop us off at the Rudow U-bahn station (the U-Bahn is the Berlin subway) which was fine with me. Berlin has an amazing subway system and as I’m very good with subway maps I’d find my way from there.
During our conversation, a girl walked in to the bus and when I sat down, she sat down across from me. She had immediately deducted that I wasn’t from there. And come to that, neither was she. She was from Scotland.
We got talking in the way that 2 strangers on an airport bus do, in the knowledge that we would never see each other again after about an hour from now. She had moved to Berlin some 3 years earlier, with the intension of staying for 6 months but she had never left. (Sounds familiar?)
We got off at Rudow station and had to take the subway in the same direction. After a dozen stations, I had to change trains at Hermannplatz and she continued on the same train so we said goodbye and she went home and I went in search of the train to Alexanderplatz. 6 stops later, the PA system said “Alexanderplatz” and I left the train. The station was swarming with people hurrying in all directions, buskers making music and other panhandlers doing their thing. I already liked it here.
I exited the station, walked out onto the Alexanderplatz,
turned my head, and immediately stood transfixed. There, towering high above me
and the city, in all its might, stood the famous Berlin TV Tower. A knot formed
in my stomach and I swallowed. I knew it straight away.
I had fallen in love with Berlin after one second.
After staring at the tower for about a minute, I managed to pull myself out of the moment, and walked down the square. I wanted to get the check in formalities at the hostel over and done with so that I could explore Berlin. The hostel was just around the corner, literally a minute walk from the Alexanderplatz and it was huge. I found later that it has 10 floors and every floor had 10 dorms with 10 beds each. That is a big hostel. The part of the ground floor that wasn’t taken up by reception and a storage room for bed linnen was occupied by a large bar. I was helped by a girl called Caroline, who was friendly and efficient. To my dismay, I saw that I had been assigned a top bed. Look, I know that hostels are so cheap because they fit 10 or 12 beds in the same space that a hotel only puts 2, and that, depending on the occupancy rate, you have a 40-50% chance of ending up with a top bunk, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like climbing things, especially late night when I have been drinking, but I accepted my allocated bed and went upstairs. My bed was on the third floor so I took the elevator. That elevator became a source of frustration during my stay, but I’ll tell you more about that later. I messed up my bed linnen, left a tshirt, a book and a waterbottle on my bed, which is hostel speak for ‘this bed is taken’ and went back downstairs. I asked Caroline about the opening hours of the bar and got the answer that every serious drinker wants to hear: it was open 24 hours a day. Good news. I looked at the bar menu and saw that they only had 1 beer on draft: Carlsberg. I’m not a huge fan of Carlsberg, but fortunately they also had a selection of bottled beers so I opted for a bottle of Astra, a beer from Hamburg, but at least it was German so I could stick to my habit of drinking local beer rather than something from a multinational corporation. Or so I thought. I found out later, while doing some research for this story, that Astra was bought in 2003 by Holsten which, in turn, was sold in 2004.. to Carlsberg. But hey, at least I tried.
I drank my beer while I was charging my phone and got talking to a German guy. He was from some other part of Germany, I can’t remember now where exactly but I think it was Dresden, and was in Berlin because he had an important job interview the next day. He was drinking bottles of cider at an impressive rate, and I wondered why he would drink so much if he had a job interview the next morning but I’ve done that myself too so who am I to judge? After I finished my second beer and had recharged my phone, I decided it was time to see something of Berlin other than the subway or my hostel. But what would I go and see?
As it was getting dark by now, I decided to put off sight seeing until the next morning and just go for a beer. I had made a long list of bars that I wanted to visit but I had 5 days here so I had time enough to do that. I had also noticed that Berlin is much bigger than I thought. I knew ofcourse that Berlin is a big city, but it is also very spread out, as I would find out during the week. I typed in the name of a bar that seemed close by and found that it was nearly 2 miles away. Fortunately, I love walking and it would give me the opportunity to get a bit of a feel for the city. I set off and walked down the streets of Berlin. It immediately stood out to me that there is a lot of graffiti in Berlin. I mean A LOT. The ubiquity of it reminded me of Barcelona. Like there, pretty much every vertical surface was covered in paint, and quite a lot of the horizontal surfaces too. I loved it. I took over 30 photos of the graffiti alone in the first 10 minutes of my walk.
After a while, while I was checking my map for directions, I noticed that I was standing in front of a bar called Kaschk, which was also on my list of interesting places. I wasn’t aware that it was there exactly, but I thought I might as well have a look inside. Kaschk markets itself as “Craft beer and craft coffee house”, which is an odd combination if you ask me, but they seem to be doing well. The good thing about this dual purpose is that they are open from 8AM until 2AM because most of the coffee business takes place in the morning, and most of the beer is sold at night, so you can always go there. I walked in and was greeted by the Australian bar man. I checked the beers on offer and found that they had a beer called Lenny’s Weizen so that decided it. Pete McCarthy always said that you should never pass a bar with your name on it, and I think you should never decline a beer that has your name on it.
I sat down at the bar and when the bar man was done cleaning his fancy coffee machine (coffee time was clearly over by now) he came over to talk to me. Like my friend on the airport bus, he had come to Berlin some years ago with the intention of staying for 6 months or maybe a year but he, too, had ended up staying indefinitely. I guess that when you arrive somewhere you really like, you gradually start feeling, somewhere deep down inside, that this is really the place for you. I had the same thing when I first moved to Dublin. My intention was to stay for 6 months. I then decided to make it a full year and go home for Christmas, but that was 12 years ago and I’m still there. The bar man nodded in acknowledgement as I explained this, and we had a talk that you can only really have with someone else who found themselves in this situation, discussing the advantages and annoyances of not having your friends and family close by and having to find your way with the rules and customs of your new home country. I finished my second beer and told the bar man that I would come back later as there was another very interesting beer on the board, so we shook hands and I went on my way. I had decided to take in one more beery place and then make my way back to the hostel so I set off for Mikkeller.
Mikkeller is a Danish brewery that is revered by beer enthusiasts the world over. Well, technically it is not exactly a brewery as they don’t have an actual brewery of their own, but they come up with an idea for a beer, rent space at an existing brewery and then make the beer. It is an odd way of working, I think personally, but their beer is really good so I’m not in a place to criticise. While Mikkeller does not have a brewery, they do have some 30 bars around the world. Mikkeller being the hip, think-outside-the-box people that they are (or is, it really is only one guy, assisted by a bunch of people doing the paperwork) these bars are not typically in obvious places like Paris or London or Rome, no, they are in places like Reykjavik, Taipe and Warsaw. A lot of people think that Mikkeller are obnoxious hipsters that do exactly the opposite of what they should do, but it works pretty well for them, so they must be doing something right. The thing about Mikkeller bars is this: they have amazing beers, but you easily miss them because they often don’t look like bars. I’ve been to the one in Barcelona half a dozen times and the first time I went there, I walked past it 3 times before I noticed where it was. Inside, it looks like an IKEA showroom that just happens to have 20 beer pumps stuck in the back wall. The entire place is painted white, the floor is a strange, bright shade of blue, and the place is filled with patio furniture made of unpainted wood. It is an odd place, but the beer is amazing and the staff is very knowledgable, and that is ofcourse the main thing. Like in Barcelona, I walked past the bar several times before I realized I had been standing in front of it while checking my map. From the outside, it looks like a house. The only thing that indicates that it is a bar is a small sign with the signature Mikkeller intentionally wacky looks-like-it-was-drawn-by-a-5-year-old artwork. I went in and found that the place looked pretty much like the one in Barcelona, but I didn’t mind. The beer was amazing. I spent an hour or so there, tried a couple of really nice beers and then went back in the direction of the Alexanderplatz. I stopped by Kaschk for my special beer, a Peated strong ale, aged in single malt whisky barrels. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Barrel Aging, what you do is you brew a beer, then stick it in a used whisky barrel (or rum, or cognac or whatever spirit you prefer) and leave it there for a couple of months. Your beer will now taste like whisky and is probably slightly stronger than it was before. If done well, it is delicious. So was this one. It was amazing and I was glad I had gone back for it. After this great beer, I walked back to my hostel, found that it was reasonably busy in the bar and decided to have one last beer. I had that, and then another and then another one. I don’t know what it is. When I’m in a hostel, I always have the feeling that the biggest party of the year is about to get going and I don’t want to miss it, so I stay up longer and longer. After my third beer, however, I decided to call it quits. Berlin is a city that parties 24 hours a day and the crowd that was assembled in the hostel bar was probably just getting ready to go out, even though it was well after 2AM. I decided to do the smart thing. I finished my beer and went to bed, full of alcohol and excitement. I wanted to get up early the next day. I was going to dive into the history of Berlin.
Night cap
I had fallen in love with Berlin after one second.
After staring at the tower for about a minute, I managed to pull myself out of the moment, and walked down the square. I wanted to get the check in formalities at the hostel over and done with so that I could explore Berlin. The hostel was just around the corner, literally a minute walk from the Alexanderplatz and it was huge. I found later that it has 10 floors and every floor had 10 dorms with 10 beds each. That is a big hostel. The part of the ground floor that wasn’t taken up by reception and a storage room for bed linnen was occupied by a large bar. I was helped by a girl called Caroline, who was friendly and efficient. To my dismay, I saw that I had been assigned a top bed. Look, I know that hostels are so cheap because they fit 10 or 12 beds in the same space that a hotel only puts 2, and that, depending on the occupancy rate, you have a 40-50% chance of ending up with a top bunk, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like climbing things, especially late night when I have been drinking, but I accepted my allocated bed and went upstairs. My bed was on the third floor so I took the elevator. That elevator became a source of frustration during my stay, but I’ll tell you more about that later. I messed up my bed linnen, left a tshirt, a book and a waterbottle on my bed, which is hostel speak for ‘this bed is taken’ and went back downstairs. I asked Caroline about the opening hours of the bar and got the answer that every serious drinker wants to hear: it was open 24 hours a day. Good news. I looked at the bar menu and saw that they only had 1 beer on draft: Carlsberg. I’m not a huge fan of Carlsberg, but fortunately they also had a selection of bottled beers so I opted for a bottle of Astra, a beer from Hamburg, but at least it was German so I could stick to my habit of drinking local beer rather than something from a multinational corporation. Or so I thought. I found out later, while doing some research for this story, that Astra was bought in 2003 by Holsten which, in turn, was sold in 2004.. to Carlsberg. But hey, at least I tried.
I drank my beer while I was charging my phone and got talking to a German guy. He was from some other part of Germany, I can’t remember now where exactly but I think it was Dresden, and was in Berlin because he had an important job interview the next day. He was drinking bottles of cider at an impressive rate, and I wondered why he would drink so much if he had a job interview the next morning but I’ve done that myself too so who am I to judge? After I finished my second beer and had recharged my phone, I decided it was time to see something of Berlin other than the subway or my hostel. But what would I go and see?
As it was getting dark by now, I decided to put off sight seeing until the next morning and just go for a beer. I had made a long list of bars that I wanted to visit but I had 5 days here so I had time enough to do that. I had also noticed that Berlin is much bigger than I thought. I knew ofcourse that Berlin is a big city, but it is also very spread out, as I would find out during the week. I typed in the name of a bar that seemed close by and found that it was nearly 2 miles away. Fortunately, I love walking and it would give me the opportunity to get a bit of a feel for the city. I set off and walked down the streets of Berlin. It immediately stood out to me that there is a lot of graffiti in Berlin. I mean A LOT. The ubiquity of it reminded me of Barcelona. Like there, pretty much every vertical surface was covered in paint, and quite a lot of the horizontal surfaces too. I loved it. I took over 30 photos of the graffiti alone in the first 10 minutes of my walk.
After a while, while I was checking my map for directions, I noticed that I was standing in front of a bar called Kaschk, which was also on my list of interesting places. I wasn’t aware that it was there exactly, but I thought I might as well have a look inside. Kaschk markets itself as “Craft beer and craft coffee house”, which is an odd combination if you ask me, but they seem to be doing well. The good thing about this dual purpose is that they are open from 8AM until 2AM because most of the coffee business takes place in the morning, and most of the beer is sold at night, so you can always go there. I walked in and was greeted by the Australian bar man. I checked the beers on offer and found that they had a beer called Lenny’s Weizen so that decided it. Pete McCarthy always said that you should never pass a bar with your name on it, and I think you should never decline a beer that has your name on it.
I sat down at the bar and when the bar man was done cleaning his fancy coffee machine (coffee time was clearly over by now) he came over to talk to me. Like my friend on the airport bus, he had come to Berlin some years ago with the intention of staying for 6 months or maybe a year but he, too, had ended up staying indefinitely. I guess that when you arrive somewhere you really like, you gradually start feeling, somewhere deep down inside, that this is really the place for you. I had the same thing when I first moved to Dublin. My intention was to stay for 6 months. I then decided to make it a full year and go home for Christmas, but that was 12 years ago and I’m still there. The bar man nodded in acknowledgement as I explained this, and we had a talk that you can only really have with someone else who found themselves in this situation, discussing the advantages and annoyances of not having your friends and family close by and having to find your way with the rules and customs of your new home country. I finished my second beer and told the bar man that I would come back later as there was another very interesting beer on the board, so we shook hands and I went on my way. I had decided to take in one more beery place and then make my way back to the hostel so I set off for Mikkeller.
Mikkeller is a Danish brewery that is revered by beer enthusiasts the world over. Well, technically it is not exactly a brewery as they don’t have an actual brewery of their own, but they come up with an idea for a beer, rent space at an existing brewery and then make the beer. It is an odd way of working, I think personally, but their beer is really good so I’m not in a place to criticise. While Mikkeller does not have a brewery, they do have some 30 bars around the world. Mikkeller being the hip, think-outside-the-box people that they are (or is, it really is only one guy, assisted by a bunch of people doing the paperwork) these bars are not typically in obvious places like Paris or London or Rome, no, they are in places like Reykjavik, Taipe and Warsaw. A lot of people think that Mikkeller are obnoxious hipsters that do exactly the opposite of what they should do, but it works pretty well for them, so they must be doing something right. The thing about Mikkeller bars is this: they have amazing beers, but you easily miss them because they often don’t look like bars. I’ve been to the one in Barcelona half a dozen times and the first time I went there, I walked past it 3 times before I noticed where it was. Inside, it looks like an IKEA showroom that just happens to have 20 beer pumps stuck in the back wall. The entire place is painted white, the floor is a strange, bright shade of blue, and the place is filled with patio furniture made of unpainted wood. It is an odd place, but the beer is amazing and the staff is very knowledgable, and that is ofcourse the main thing. Like in Barcelona, I walked past the bar several times before I realized I had been standing in front of it while checking my map. From the outside, it looks like a house. The only thing that indicates that it is a bar is a small sign with the signature Mikkeller intentionally wacky looks-like-it-was-drawn-by-a-5-year-old artwork. I went in and found that the place looked pretty much like the one in Barcelona, but I didn’t mind. The beer was amazing. I spent an hour or so there, tried a couple of really nice beers and then went back in the direction of the Alexanderplatz. I stopped by Kaschk for my special beer, a Peated strong ale, aged in single malt whisky barrels. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Barrel Aging, what you do is you brew a beer, then stick it in a used whisky barrel (or rum, or cognac or whatever spirit you prefer) and leave it there for a couple of months. Your beer will now taste like whisky and is probably slightly stronger than it was before. If done well, it is delicious. So was this one. It was amazing and I was glad I had gone back for it. After this great beer, I walked back to my hostel, found that it was reasonably busy in the bar and decided to have one last beer. I had that, and then another and then another one. I don’t know what it is. When I’m in a hostel, I always have the feeling that the biggest party of the year is about to get going and I don’t want to miss it, so I stay up longer and longer. After my third beer, however, I decided to call it quits. Berlin is a city that parties 24 hours a day and the crowd that was assembled in the hostel bar was probably just getting ready to go out, even though it was well after 2AM. I decided to do the smart thing. I finished my beer and went to bed, full of alcohol and excitement. I wanted to get up early the next day. I was going to dive into the history of Berlin.
I woke up early, at around 9, lay on my bed for a few minutes
and then got up. I shuffled downstairs, got a towel and went to the shower
room. There, I found the first surprise of the hostel: the showers were not in
separate cubicles, but in an open plan, prison style room with 6 showers in 2
opposing rows of 3. This didn’t even bother me that much, but I’m sure there
are people who are not happy with taking a shower in front of other people. (When I later checked the reviews of the hostel on the Hostelworld website, I
found that about a third of the people remarked on this issue and weren’t happy
with it.) No, what annoyed me most is that there were no hooks to hang your
clothes and towel on so you were left with the choice of putting them on the
floor, which was always wet, or putting them on the ledge above the sinks, some
15 feet away. In the end, I hung my clothes and my towel from the window handle
and had my shower, and dry clothes at the end of it. Personal grooming over, I
went downstairs again, resisted the temptation of having an early beer, and sat
down on a bench in front of the hostel. The weather was amazing, 27 degrees
Celsius and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. This became my mourning routine in
Berlin. I would sit on the bench in front of the hostel, read my book for 20
minutes or so while I was waking up, then have a look at my map and my list of
possibly interesting things to do, trying to figure out a plan for the day,
while watching Berlin go by. I stared at my map and tried to come up with a
place to start. Checkpoint Charlie, The Brandenburger Tor, a brewery? No. There
was only one point to start. If I was only going to see one thing in Berlin, it
could only be The Wall.
It had to be.
I folded up my map, took my book back to my dorm and went on my way.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, but while most of it was demolished, first by the citizens of East Germany who were sick of oppression, and later by more organized state demolition teams, they had the good sense to preserve certain parts of it for historical purposes and as a reminder that something as ridiculous as building a wall through the middle of a large city should never happen again. (This, fortunately, holds true to this day, except in Nicosia, Cyprus, where the people in the Northern part of the country insist they are Turkish while the people in the South maintain that they are Greek. It is a complicated situation, that involves the island being cut up between Northern Cyprus, the Republic of Cyprus, a confusing UN buffer zone and 2 British Navy bases, which gives you the unique opportunity to be in 4 distinct different political regions in the space of an hour without leaving an island about the size of an Irish county.)
It had to be.
I folded up my map, took my book back to my dorm and went on my way.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, but while most of it was demolished, first by the citizens of East Germany who were sick of oppression, and later by more organized state demolition teams, they had the good sense to preserve certain parts of it for historical purposes and as a reminder that something as ridiculous as building a wall through the middle of a large city should never happen again. (This, fortunately, holds true to this day, except in Nicosia, Cyprus, where the people in the Northern part of the country insist they are Turkish while the people in the South maintain that they are Greek. It is a complicated situation, that involves the island being cut up between Northern Cyprus, the Republic of Cyprus, a confusing UN buffer zone and 2 British Navy bases, which gives you the unique opportunity to be in 4 distinct different political regions in the space of an hour without leaving an island about the size of an Irish county.)
The East Side Gallery is the longest continuous part of the Wall that still stands. It stretches for about three quarters of a mile along the river Spree in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg part of town. I walked across Alexanderplatz again, which was busy as always, past the Alexa shopping mall that, I worked out later, wasn’t there at the time of the Wall. I regularly paused to take a photo of an interesting piece of graffiti, a nice looking building, or some oddity in the street, or just to sit down on a bench and look at the city for a minute or so and to realise how much I liked it here. You know what I said earlier about just knowing that a place is right for you? I had that here too. I hadn’t seen anything of Berlin yet, really, but this place felt like home. After walking for some 50 minutes, I started to notice groups of tourists walking in the direction of the Gallery, and others coming back from there. I was really excited now. I was almost there. And then, 5 minutes later, there it was. Across the street stood the remnants of something I had wanted to see since I was 8 or 9 years old.
The Berlin Wall.
I walked across and put my hand on the Wall when I got there. I was touching history. Moreover, I was touching a piece of history that was incredibly important to me personally.
I had a look at the dimensions of the wall, and was surprised by the flimsiness of it. It was, maybe, 10 feet tall and no more than a foot thick. You could easily have climbed across it with a ladder. Ofcourse, the Wall itself was not the main deterrent. Behind this wall was a no man's land about 300 feet wide, full of barbed wire, guard dogs and, most importantly, watchtowers with armed guards in them that had the instruction to shoot at everything that moved. All this was in the area behind me as, I first really realized now, I had been in what used to be East Berlin since I got here.
The East Side Gallery consists of 105 murals, created by artists from all over the world. Most of the painting was done in 1990, with regular restorations happening throughout the years. The political border at the time was actually the river Spree, which lays about 50 yards beyond. All the artwork is on the Eastern side of the wall, facing into what used to be the no-man's land between East and West Germany. It was busy at the Wall, as it always must be, given that it attracts 3 million visitors a year, or over 8000 per day on average. Because of this, there were groups of people waiting everywhere for the opportunity to have their picture taken at a certain mural. I walked along the Wall, admiring the diversity of the artwork. There were murals inspired by peace, ones that had musical themes, parts that showed the people of the world living in harmony and, ofcourse a number of political ones. The most famous section, and curiously the one that needs to be restored most often, is the image of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing the head of state of East Germany, Erich Honecker. It is the image that went across the world when the Gallery was first opened and today it was clearly the most popular section too.
I only had 1 photo taken with myself in it, at the section that shows a shackled arm coming out of a barred prison window. The shackles are held up by a dove in flight, which symbolizes freedom. This dove is also an excellent bridge to another Wall-related story that I want to tell you and we’ll get to that in a minute.
After I had spent an amazing 40 minutes looking at the artwork, I reached the end of the wall. There I found, inevitably, a souvenir store that sold Berlin Wall tshirts, ashtrays and everything else you expect to find in a souvenir store. This held little interest for me, but while I stood in front of the shop, I saw a girl take out her passport and hand it to the lady in the shop. This had my interest straight away. I walked inside and found a sign that informed me that I could have my passport stamped with 4 different stamps. They were a Euro each, or all 4 for 3 Euro.
I opted to get all 4 of them, the complete set. I’m not entirely sure how the goverment thinks about having official state documents defaced in souvenir shops or Disney World, but I didn’t really care and in any case I had done it with my previous passport, when I visited the Uzipis republic, a breakaway state within Lithuania of about 1 square mile, and I never heard any complaints about it from either the Dutch state department or any border agency around the world.
I got stamps for Checkpoint Charlie, the Wall House (the shop I was in) and, the one I wanted most, for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik- East Germany. The bonus stamp showed the text DDR – 9 November, a reference to the date the Berlin Wall came down. I was very happy with my stamps, so to celebrate this double whammy of having seen the Wall myself and getting a border stamp from a country that ceased to exist when I was in high school, I decided to have a beer. As luck would have it, there was a bar/restaurant right next to the souvenir shop, so I ordered a large beer and sat down, looking out over the river Spree, the border from back in the days.
To get back to my other Wall story I mentioned earlier, let me take you back to 1983.
With the Cold War still very much on everyones mind in Western Europe, peace rallies were organised all around Europe. The one in Holland took place in Den Haag, the political capital of the country. On a large open field in the city centre, just minutes from the Dutch parliament buildings, half a million people gathered to make it clear that they were sick of the Cold War and that they wanted peace, not weapons. To give the rally a theme, a local band called Klein Orkest (The Small Orchestra) were asked to compose a song to provide a rallying cry. Rather than taking sides, the band came up with a song about Berlin, called Over de Muur (Across the Wall) in which they set out the pros and cons of both socialism in East Berlin and capitalism in West Berlin.
I’ll put the video here, so you can hear the song and see the original video. It is in Dutch, but for those of you who don’t speak that, the song basically explains that in East Berlin, under socialism, everyone is guaranteed a job for life and a place to live, but the downside is that there are shortages of basic staples and you constantly live in fear of being ratted out to the totalitarian state and arrested if you speak your mind. In West Berlin, however, you can say what you want, you can protest the government and do how you please, but unemployment is high and a lot of people are homeless, so the question is which of these systems is preferrable. The only beings that freely moved between East and West Berlin were birds, who could fly over the wall without being shot down.
It is a great song that holds huge significance for me. It is essentially the song of my childhood.
When I decided to go to Berlin, I vowed to visit all the locations that feature in the song. I had already been to one, the Alexanderplatz, which was the location I visited first on the account of my hostel being there, and is the location described in the final line of the song.
I put my beer down and took out my phone. I played the song for the millionth time, but listening to it here, literally on the spot where the Wall once stood, sent a chill down my spine. Over my left shoulder I could see West Berlin, where the people were free at the time of the Wall. Over my right shoulder, East Berlin, where everybody was afraid, and constantly monitored by the state.
I sat there, contemplating this, for 10 minutes or so, trying to figure out how this short strip of wasteland before me could have dominated global politics for decades, but came up empty. What a strange situation.
I regularly get asked that, if the hypothetical situation arose that someone built a functioning time machine, and I could pick one place and time in history to go back to, when and where would I go?
I have thought about this long and hard over the years. Where would I go? The Roman Empire? My own birth? The first pilgrims setting foot on an almost empty North American continent? Australia in the 1970s?
I had my answer now. I would give anything, ANYTHING, to have a look around Berlin in the 1980s for a few days.
Ofcourse, time machines do not exist, so it’s not going to happen, but it has always been a great source of inspiration for me to think about this. As someone who has a deep rooted interest in both geography and history, it has provided me with hours of happy evalution of the possibilities, but I guess I can put the question to bed now.
I finished my beer and said goodbye to the barman. What to do next? I had noticed, while walking towards the Wall, that the Berlin Ramones museum had been doing some pretty aggressive marketing around the area. Every second traffic light or lamp post had been covered in posters, flyers and stickers advertising the museum. I checked my phone to see where it was and found that it was only a 5 minute walk away across the Oberbaumbrucke. I walked across the bridge, again having the strange sensation of walking into what used to be West Berlin.
As a close-to-obsessed Ramones fan, I had to see the Ramones
Museum in Berlin. I had visited Johnny Ramone’s grave in Los Angeles, and found
that DeeDee Ramone is buried on the same cemetary, had been to Rockaway Beach
in New York, the inspiration for one of the Ramones’ most famous songs, and a
number of other significant Ramones locations around New York. This museum
certainly had to be part of my Ramones travelog. The museum is small, only
about as big as a mid-sized pub, but they have really used the space to maximum
efficiency by setting up an intricate maze of walls to cut off little sections
of the building for specific exhibitions. Upon entering, you find yourself in
the reception/Bar/shop area. Here you can buy your entry ticket, a Ramones
badge that gives you lifetime access to the museum for a one-off payment of
4,50. You can get the ticket+beer package for 6 Euros, but as I had already
picked a beer from the fridge, I found that this deal is only valid with one
brand of beer. Not a problem, I was more than happy to pay a bit extra to this
fine institution and I now had a beer from the local BRLO brewery. Next to the
reception is a small lounge area with couches and a few tables, and a wall full
of autographs and photos. These, as it turned out, were from bands that had
played there. I looked around for a short while, wondering where these bands
would play, but could not find a spot that wasn’t taken up by Ramones
memorabilia. They probably play in the lounge area after they remove the
furniture. I won’t bore you here with detailed descriptions of all the Ramones
exhibits, because if you’re interested in the band, you should go and see it
for yourself, but I spent a happy 45 minutes looking at old photos, framed
guitar picks, set lists and a million other items, all about the greatest band
of all times.
One thing that I do want to mention is a news paper article from September 2004. It was a New York Times article about Johnny Ramone, written 2 days after his death on 15 September 2004. On 15 September 2004, I was in Eindhoven, Holland, attending a gig by The Misfits. Just as the gig was about to start, the news started to trickle in that Johnny Ramone had died a few hours earlier. This delayed the gig by some time as the bands needed to get their heads around the loss of a close friend. Marky Ramone was, at the time, filling in on drums for the Misfits and now had a gig to play.
It was the most emotional gig I have ever
attended. The whole night, ofcourse, was one big Johnny Ramone tribute show,
and all bands played a number of Ramones covers. It was a night I will never
forget. One thing that I do want to mention is a news paper article from September 2004. It was a New York Times article about Johnny Ramone, written 2 days after his death on 15 September 2004. On 15 September 2004, I was in Eindhoven, Holland, attending a gig by The Misfits. Just as the gig was about to start, the news started to trickle in that Johnny Ramone had died a few hours earlier. This delayed the gig by some time as the bands needed to get their heads around the loss of a close friend. Marky Ramone was, at the time, filling in on drums for the Misfits and now had a gig to play.
Having finished viewing the exhibitions, and my beer, I decided to have another beer. I got a large bottle of Bayreuther, the beer that was normally included in the ticket+beer deal, and went outside. The museum has tables and benches out front, so I sat down on one of the benches with my legs stretched out along the length of it. The weather was amazing, 28* C, and I looked at Berlin. I just stared at the traffic, the people walking by and the buildings around me. I drank my beer, got another one and sat down again. After 5 minutes or so, I realised that I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my days sitting here on this bench, drinking cold German beer and watching the world go by. I had just seen one of the most important historical sites of my lifetime, and visited an entire museum dedicated to my favorite band. I can’t think of 10 times in my life that I was this happy.
After my beer, and then another, I decided that there was more to life than sitting in front of the Ramones museum, so I handed my bottle back to the bar man, said my goodbyes and went on my way. I had no real set plan for the rest of the day, so I decided to wander around for a bit. 10 minutes or so into my aimless walk, I started to notice something. Even though it was Tuesday afternoon, only slightly after 2PM, nearly everybody was drinking in the street. Most people I came across were carrying open cans and bottles of beer or small bottles of wine, from which they sipped constantly. Mind you, these weren’t mean street drunks like you would find in Dublin or Glasgow, these were people in suits, girls in summer dresses and normal people from every walk of life.
This was an interesting development. If drinking in the street was allowed, I could have even more fun in Berlin than I was having already. I walked into the first convenience store I saw, got a large bottle of lager and opened it on the doorstep. I took a big gulp of it and felt refreshed. People took it as normal to be drinking on city streets in mid-afternoon on a weekday. One man even raised his can to me in passing and said ‘Prost’.
Excited about my new found hobby of street drinking, I walked to a park across the street and sat down on a low wall. There were a dozen people on the 20 yard stretch of wall, all drinking and enjoying the September sun. At the center of the park sat a group of twenty-somethings on a bed sheet, with food spread out between them, and half a dozen beers and 2 bottles of wine. Just beyond them lay a guy who, by the look of it, hadn’t slept indoors since St. Patrick’s Day and was taking a nap with his head on a plastic bag full of beers cans. Every minute or so, he would tilt his head slightly, pour a sip of beer in his mouth and return to his relaxing position. Everybody just existed happily side by side in this park.
What a wonderful city.
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