Berlin

Rich's brother's eldest son, Chris Mawhorter, was here for a visit on his way home from his year working for a study abroad program based in Jerusalem. We had fun showing him around Hannover. Thursday we visited Rich's lab to see the experimental apparatus, and we took the elevator to the top of the new city hall for the view from the top of the dome. The elevator follows the curve of the dome as it travels upwards, and there are windows on the top and bottom of the elevator so you can see the gears. Quite unsettling. Great view of the church steeples and lake and the whole layout of the town.

Friday is the free museum day here and it was raining, so Chris and I explored the history museum and Niedersächsiches Landesmuseum. Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) is a province or state, and Hannover is the capital, so this is the state museum with a mixture of art, ethnography, natural science, and archaeology. Germany had master woodcarvers in the Middle Ages, and there are some amazing altar pieces. I wonder how the artist knew how to make the first cut. I would have ended up with kindling.

St. George & the Dragon Woodcarving, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum

 
Saturday we left Hannover on a high speed train at 7:30 and got to Berlin at 9:00. We took the local streetcar to the Eastside Gallery, a portion of the old Berlin Wall covered with paintings. Never having seen the old wall, Chris was surprised by how low it is. It certainly doesn't look like a significant barrier the way it is now, right beside a park and busy road, but we remember it with searchlights and guard towers and police dogs and barbed wire in the no man's land between the river and the wall and guards with orders to shoot to kill.

Rich & Chris, Eastside Gallery, remnant of the Berlin Wall

 

With only one day in Berlin, of course we tried to do too much. Chris went to the Pergamon to see the gates of Babylon (575 B.C.) while Rich and I explored an art museum. The Ishtar gates are wonderful, but we had seen the Pergamon several times already. We met up for a late lunch at a café next to the DDR (East Germany) Museum. Chris had found this on the internet. I thought it might be a tourist trap, but it was actually a great museum trying to give insight into what the DDR was really like. We even saw a menu and picture of a restaurant we'd eaten in years ago when we lived in Marburg and the DAAD subsidized a free week in Berlin for all the scholarship recipients. We'd had a bus tour with a Soviet tour guide spouting the glories of communism and Russia's wonderful contributions to East Germany and a bad meal at this restaurant in the city center that only took Western currency. The DDR Museum had a Trabant, the East German answer to the VW, that one could sit in. It had a two-cycle engine like a lawnmower and its body was plastic. There are lots of good trabi jokes. What do you call it when three trabis collide? Answer: A tupperware party.

Rich in a Trabi, DDR Museum, Berlin

Even though I walked along Unter den Linden from the former east to the west before with Ross six years ago, I still got emotional. Now it's busy with tourists and the American embassy has even moved to a building just east of the gate. Such a contrast to the echoing, empty street with East German police everywhere and goosestepping soldiers before when it was still East Berlin.

 

Jennifer & Chris, Brandenburg Gate

 

At the end of the day, we rushed to get to the Itten-Klee art exhibit before it closed. I'd been in Bern twice without being able to see the Klee Museum there, and I really like Klee. Lots of the pictures were on loan from Switzerland.

Pamphlet from the Itten-Klee Exhibit, Berlin

 

We took an evening train back and I got to hear more about Chris's experiences in Jerusalem.

 

Chris wanted to see a soccer game, but the 1st league team here was playing away and sold out. Sunday at church Rich found out that there was a 4th league game here, so we took the streetcar out to watch on Sunday afternoon. The best team will move up into the 3rd league and the local team Havelse needed to win in order to be in the running for moving up. It was 0-0 through most of the game, and Havelse finally scored but then had to play man-down for 15 minutes because of a red card. Lots of close calls, but Havelse finally scored again. Interesting to hear the comments of the crowd. Lots of police, even for a 3rd league game.

4th League Soccer: Havelse 2 Wilhelmshaven 0