Day 68 29 May 2015 Berlin

Today was a river cruise on the Spee River (pronounced Spey and R…i…v…e…r) that allowed us to see a lot of the major buildings from a different perspective.  It is not a large river, looks more like a wide canal.  You can see the parts where it was destroyed as part of the battle of Berlin in April 1945. You can also see the bullet holes and the shrapnel splashes. The weather was sunny though it did cloud over later in the morning, though there was no rain in it.

We had considered visiting the Berlin Zoo, which apparently has the Guinness World record for the number of species (the most I am guessing, it wouldn’t be much of a zoo if it had the least number of species.) 

We visited the Jewish Memorial which was very powerful and most cleverly designed. There were stone stele representing people at all different heights and you walk among them.  The artist was inspired by walking through a wheat field with the stalks at all different heights. It is quite a clever design. The free museum was underground. You could take photos and we had on the outside but we decided that we probably wouldn’t take any inside.  In fact no one else took photos inside.  I guess because it’s a memorial, almost a cemetery really, that people refrained from photography.  There were poignant stories of shattered lives and families from all different countries.  Ones you don’t think of like Hungary and Greece. There was an audio of a woman who was 11 at the time and some of her children had migrated to Australia but who returned to support family was from Australia. As we are visiting Auschwitz, I had already decided that I would take photos on the outside but not on the inside for the same reasons. 

We walked down towards the island of museums (an island in the Spee), and on the way we photographed a statue of Frederick the Great, the Humboldt University, the German Museum and the plaza and building where the Nazis did the book burning in 1933 Fig 6).  There is display on the ground in the plaza, where there is a glass sheet on the ground and you look down and see rows of empty bookshelves, symbolic of the destroyed books. We ventured to the Berlin Concert Hall.

Not enough time to visit any of the museums, you would need the best part of a week. Not much chance of us coming back unless Elizabeth’s Lotto numbers come in. Berlin is quite compact and quite easy to get around.  It’s a pity we didn’t have more time to visit the museums.