Montag, 25 August 2008
Started class today: orientation at Humboldt and a luncheon (interesting Kartoffeln, delicious Kuchen). Later a walking tour of our part of Kreutzburg (specfically along the old route of the Wall). Turns out our place was right on the border: Michealkirchstrasse (the next block over) has patches on the pavement from where the wall supports used to be and the church itself is still being repaired from the war (getting stuck in no-mans-land for 40 years will do that to you). The parish was split west-east, and apparently had a bit more trouble reuniting than the rest of the city, so there are two neighboring St. Micheal's Parishes in Kreutzburg. The old canal-turned-no-man's-land is now a pretty park with a large fountain and a cute cafe. That seems to be the pattern in this area: there are lots of small parks on oddly shaped lots that appear to be left-overs from the second world war. Just down the block west of here there's a park with a little petting zoo (ponies right next to high rise apartments).
It's almost a sort of a time warp, really. The buildings are quite new and all*, but 1945 seems a lot closer than in the states. There I tend to think of it as being very much in the past—my grandparents' time (and too old even for some of them!). Here, it's very recent news. I suppose that's more of the cold war legacy speaking, though: the delayed rebuilding owes largely to that (besides the sheer size of rebuilding—some parks have hills made of post-1945 rubble). It's not just St. Micheal's either: we walked by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (sort of hard to miss), and you can still see empty frames from the stained glass windows, portions of the roof gone, and the remaining 'shell' blackened and gouged. Mind you, that was intentionally left thus; but to make things worse, they added a horrible 80s addition (ala the disaster behind Suzallo). Way to make an architectural tragedy even worse.
Also toured Humboldt today. It's pretty cool and historical too—I want to go to a university that's a remodeled Prussian palace (since 1810). Planck worked there; so did Karl Marx. There's also this huge plaque noting the wing were Einstein lectured when he was in the city. Mind you, that whole part has been rebuilt, as it was destroyed during the war (so its floor doesn't match the rest of the building, though they did a great job getting the outside looking right— well, done GDR). During the cold war, actually, Humboldt was the premiere Universitaet of the GDR. Consequently, quotations from their favorite student figure prominently in the décor (which includes marble “recycled” from Hitler's chancery to repair wartime damage). There's also a stained-glass window featuring Newton and Leibniz (I took a picture for Matt). The neighboring library was one of the main victims of the Nazi book-burnings; the Operplatz, right across Unter Den Linden from Humboldt, was the sight of the conflagration, and has since been renamed Bebelplatz and bears a monument (complete with the obligatory Heinrich Heine quote, which was actually a reference to the Inquisition...)
On a completely unrelated note: this country has awesome baked goods. The bread is delicious. Also, chocolate. Yum. I got some peaches today, and they were very tasty too.
Shout-out time: I totally got a picture of a Schulteiss beer sign (or rather, a little corner store devoted to the same), as per Sara's request (will look into securing something more tangible in honor of Dan). Also saw a store named “Eichhornchen” (with stylized squirrel motifs) which made me think of Nori. It was also virtually adjacent to a bar called “Molotov Cocktail”--another 5 points to Sara and her knowledge of Finnish history. And T, the Ipod is awesome. Es gefaellt mir sehr gut! RHS is in Berlin starting on mid-October, so I'm just missing it! Have yet to see anything that screams “Kathy”, though I imagine it's the part of town we're in (though the Baroque palaces come close).
*Well, comparatively. There are still some older facades, but just everything in the inner city was built/rebuilt in the last 60 years, especially in the last 20). That's what we call 90% destruction. It makes things sort of inverted: the oldest extant buildings are at the edges of the city rather than the center. Also centrally-located apartments being fairly cheap: the Wall, when it stood, really drove down property values—which makes sense when there's a frickin' militarized border between the apartment house and its sidewalk.
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