Berlin, Sunday, July 14

Today was our first full day in Berlin.  In the morning I went with a few of the other fellows and Mary, our tour leader, to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral for 8 o’clock mass.

After church our entire tour group took a bus tour of Berlin with our new guides, Martin and Rodrigo. They met us at the train station when we arrived yesterday. Berlin is a city- state in northern Germany that is completely encompassed within the state of Brandenburg.  Berlin has existed for 750 years.  Germany as a country has only existed for 150 years.  It was formed from many different regions and dukedoms. The area that is now Berlin used to be part of Prussia.  There is a lot of regionalism in Germany. National pride is not as prevalent. Berlin has several city centers due to the nature of how the city developed.  The first area we exited the bus to explore was the Berlin Wall.

It's hard to describe my emotions upon seeing and touching it. The Berlin Wall was built to keep citizens from leaving East Germany. The wall was constructed in one night in 1961. It was West Berlin that was walled in, not East Berlin. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls- one inside the other. So if you made it past one wall you would then find yourself trapped in between the two walls. The only section that wasn't "double walled" was the area backed by the river.   of Berlin after World War 2. The graffiti has been preserve as a piece  of history.  It has been sealed so that it cannot be removed.  The Bundestag library contains over 1.3 million volumes and is linked to the Reichstag by a long tunnel- like hallway structure. The offices of the members are housed in a third building that is also linked by a long hallway.  Parliamentary meetings, committee meetings, and roll call votes are mandatory. Any member who does not attend will be fined.  After leaving the Reichstag we went on a walking tour of some German memorials and monuments.  First we stopped by the memorial to the Sinti and Roma who were murdered during the Holocaust. It is both hauntingly beautiful and simple. This poem, written by a Roma poet, surrounds the memorial:

 Next we went to the Brandenburg Gate.  The Brandenburg gate was originally constructed during the but has been damaged several times. It was last rebuilt during the 1800s after its destruction during the Franco-Prussian war.  The sculpture on the top was brought from Paris in 1840.

Next was the memorial to the murdered Jews, which opened in 2004.  This is by far the largest of the memorials depicting Nazi era terrorism, covering an entire city block.  It is made of hundreds of free-standing stela of various heights. Lastly we went to the memorial to the murdered homosexuals, which was erected in 2008.  Accessible by a delineated dirt path and partially obscured by a clump of trees, it is symbolic of the persecution felt by homosexuals during the Nazi regime.  We later visited Checkpoint Charlie before heading to lunch.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews

Checkpoint Charlie