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| Victory Column |
Hopped off the #100 bus in the center of Berlin's major park, the Tiergarten, to photograph the Victory Column that Hitler had moved there from in front of the Reichtag. This probably saved it from being destroyed in the Second World War. Originally, it was designed as a monument to various German victories, but Hitler wanted it to be part of a triumphal route through the Berlin Gate and up the grand avenue, Unter den Linden. He probably envisioned his own triumphal processional there after he'd conquered the world.
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| The Reichtag |
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| Memorial Slate Slabs |
The old #100 bus then took us to the Reichtag (Germany's parliament), beside which is a memorial of slate slabs, one for each of the 96 politicians who resisted Hitler's rise to power and were subsequently murdered by him. Each includes the victim's name, dates, and place of murder—usually a concentration camp. On the other side of the building along the Spree River is another memorial of simple white crosses on a fence for people who died trying to escape from East Germany during the Cold War.
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| The Brandenburg Gate |
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| Memorial |
The Brandenburg Gate, which is beside the Reichtag, looks sadly dwarfed by modern buildings built near it. It was also roped off when we were there, so workers could prepare for some German holiday in October—not a bike race. And a short walk from there took us to the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” erected in 2005. Unlike holocaust museums in Germany or Washington, DC, which document human stories and graphic details of the systematic extermination, this one consists of 2,711 gravestone-like concrete forms of different heights that you can wander through, contemplating in silence that monstrous atrocity.
We walked up Unter den Linden to Museum Island pausing along the way for a couple of photo opts. The first was of Steward being captured by a Berlin bear. The other was in Bebelplatz Square where a glass window in the pavement looks down to a room of empty book shelves. This is where staff and students of Humboldt University burned 20,000 books banned by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels. Nearby is a plaque with a quotation from German poet Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, at the end, they also burn people.”
Finally, after walking past a small park filled with young people enjoying the sun and each other, we reached our destination, the Pergamon Museum. We knew it contained examples of ancient architecture, but nothing prepared us for the monumental scale of the exhibits. It was like visiting the Acropolis or the Pantheon inside a museum!
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| Pergamon Altar |
The Pergamon Alter is part of a complex from the City of Pergamon (now in Turkey), a renowned center of culture and learning during the Hellenistic Period. Its library housed some 200,000 volumes! In another room, is the facade of a temple that the Roman Emperor Hadrian finished, and in another is the Market Gate of Miletus, an ancient city south of Ephesus, in Turkey. The gate looks almost exactly like the ruins we saw last year in Ephesus—except that it was inside a museum.
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| Gate of Miletus |
Then we went through the Gate of Miletus which backed onto the Ishtar Gate and a long processional passage lined with lions leading to it from the opposite direction. These all came from Babylon, about 55 miles south of current-day Baghdad. They date back to Nebuchadnezzar II (6th Century BCE) and retain most of the color baked into the bricks that they're made of. (Note the close-up of one of the lions.)
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| Istar Gate |
Somewhere along the way to this museum, someone on a sidewalk was playing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” on a horn. When we left the museum, we all felt we'd just visited that place where we'd dared to go.
