BERLIN

In Berlin we stayed with friends Sophie and Leo. The city is huge and varied, and impossible to do justice to in the three days at our disposal. However we had an enjoyable time as well as taking in some of the historical and cultural highlights. Magda had been in 1990, just after the wall came down, and found things very changed. This was my first visit.
We saw the inevitable sights - Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, Checkpoint Charlie, a preserved stretch of the Wall. While all important, they are so commonplace as to lose some of their impact. The same cannot be said of the Jewish memorial, two and a half hectares of big concrete slabs in sight of the Reichstag (parliament building) as a conscious reminder to legislators that ”never again....”
We climbed the cathedral dome (completed 1905) for a view over the city centre. Downstairs was a photo of von Ribbentrop coming out of the cathedral after his marriage in I think 1935 to a younger actress whose name escapes me. Opposite the cathedral is the site of the old imperial city palace. It was destroyed in WWII and replaced in the 70s by a new GDR government building. This has now been pulled down and the huge new Humboldt Forum is being built behind reconstructed palace facades. The decision has been criticised as resuscitating Prussian imperialism... Having said that, much of the city centre had to be reconstructed after the war when it suffered very severe damage. In the Soviet zone, which included most of the mediaeval city, not much money was available for the purpose, so less was done.
We saw the Concert House and Frederic the Great’s great matching catholic and protestant churches, all of which have been restored (east zone).  We also spent a day walking round the huge estate at Potsdam with its collection of mainly C18th palaces. The Bode Museum offered an exhibition in which European works of art were shown together with superficially similar African works, and a comparative analysis suggested. We also went to a concert of C20th composers from the old Soviet bloc, all of whom had suffered official disapproval of their art. The venue was an old warehouse full of old pianos and parts of instruments.