Saturday, 25 May 2024 Potsdam to Berlin: the Reichstag

Written 11 August 2024

The reception desk was decorated a little eccentrically, with this globe and typewriter . . .

. . . but the hall stand was graced with a flower arrangement that included this amazing three-foot tall candle larkspur.

After breakfast we packed up promptly and set off for Berlin. On the way in, near the Kurfürstendamm and not far from the hotel where we stayed with Viking, I finally got a good photo of this strange structure. Nobody I asked could tell me what it is. It's perched like a little control tower above a convenience kiosk on the street corner (advertising soft drinks, souvenirs, and cigarettes). It's equipped with a desk (the end of which forms a large clock, facing outward) and chair and a desk-top microphone. My hypothesis is that it's where a radio announcer sits during morning rush hour reporting on traffic conditions.

On the way to drop our luggage off at the Hotel Henri Kurfürstendamm (actually most of a block off the Ku'damm, at 9 Meinekestrasse), I managed to get a quick shot of the entrance to the Berlin Aquarium, next to the zoo in the Tiergarten. Viking drove us past it as well, but I wasn't quick enough with the camera that time. The outer walls are ornamented with painted tiles and carved reliefs of sea creatures.

I also got a good shot of the Saudi Arabian embassy, which I missed on the Viking bus tour. I see what the guide meant about its looking like an ornamental petroleum tank.

We left the car in a parking garage near the Brandenburg gate and continued on foot. On our way was the memorial to the Jews murdered during WWII. The list of rules for visitors, which referred to the monument as a "field of stelae," were that one must enter slowly and on foot, no loud music or noise, no jumping from stela to stela (though I saw no prohibition of climbing, standing, or sitting on them), no dogs or other pets, no bikes or skateboards, and no smoking or alcohol.

A notice added that 13 pathways through it were wheelchair accessible and especially suitable for those with mobility impairment.

You can see, as we walked farther into the field, how the ground gradually dipped, revealing that many of the stelae were taller than they looked from outside.

Near the center, they towered even over Leon. At that point, we were in very deep silence.

We continued on, once more past the Brandenburg Gate, where crews were still working on the set-up for the grand soccer watch party, and where an unfortunate bride and groom, in full regalia, were trying (successfully, I hope) to have photos taken that didn't include construction trailers, guys in hard hats, and half-empty party-rental vans.

A new security checkpoint is under construction that will admit visitors, through a tunnel, to an underground entrance to the Reichstag building, but until it's ready, what should be a nice vista in front of the building will remain cluttered with many temporary buildings, looking a lot like white-washed shipping containers, where the checks are being done now. I think the flying-saucer-shaped thing hanging from a pole is an inflatable, temporary police-station sign.

Just in front of one of the temporary buildings was this series of jagged flat cast-iron plates set in concrete. It's a memorial to 96 members of the Weimar Replubic Reichstag who were murdered by the nazis between 1933 and 1945. Each plate is engraved on its edge with the name of a person and information about them. I didn't know that story, so I looked it up. Quite a lot of them died in concentration camps, others in penitentiaries, jails, or prisons. A few were assassinated.

We had 12:15 pm reservations at Käfer ("Beetle") the restaurant on the roof of the Reichstag building, so we bypassed the line at the security checkpoint, were escorted up in an elevator, and found ourselves on the roof with an hour still to kill. That was easy, because the 360° view over the city's landmarks was fascinating, and inside, under the iconic glass dome, was an illustrated history of the building and its functions.

Here's what the glass dome looks like up close. It was designed by Norman Foster, the same amazing guy who designed the Viaduc de Millau.

At the right is the view of the Charité Hospital, especially easy to recognize because its name is written on it in really big letters—actually, it occupies several buildings, of which this is only the tallest. Later in the day, a guide reminded us that Charité is where Alexei Novalny was treated after his near-fatal poisoning.

On every side of the roof are orientation tables pointing out landmarks visible from the parapet, and I have many photos of those views and notes about what we saw (of the form "to the left of the tall green dome, the white tower is . . ." and "just beyond the low part of the Charié is the spire of . . ."), but in the size I could display them here, you really couldn't distinguish much.

At the left here is the view down into one of the building's smaller inner courtyards, almost an air shaft. I think the bottom of it is still well above ground level.

At the right is the tall mirrored funnel in the center of the glass dome. You can see me and David reflected in a column of its panes as I took the photo. The individual panes can be tilted and adjusted to reflect indirect natural light down into the parliamentary chamber below.

You can walk to the top of the dome on a spiral ramp that runs just inside its outer wall, and it would have been fun to walk at least part of the way up, but unfortunately, the path is one-way (you come down by a separate spiral ramp), so you can't turn around; it's all the way to the top or nothing. We regretfully settled for nothing and repaired to Käfer, on the roof but outside the dome, for our lovely lunch.

It started with this bread service: two kinds of bread, schmalz dressed with an herb oil, and a dish of pickles and olives.

Gritta started with the "rooftop salad": white asparagus, chard, arugula, curly endive, strawberries, tarragon cream, and hazelnuts. You can see splodges of greenish tarragon cream here and there as well as a red purée, probably strawberry or beet.

I had slices of cold, corn-fed chicken stuffed with wild garlic and herbs, resting on a bed of whole grains and apricots. The white slices in the salad are radish. It was supposed to have elderflowers, but I didn't see any. It was garnished with what looked like pink and blue flower petals, maybe cornflowers.

David chose the asparagus soup with "flamed asparagus," pink pepper, chervil oil, and croutons.

Here's my main course of zander (a freshwater pike-perch, Lucioperca lucioperca), coated on top with a mixture of capers, mozzarella, and lime. Behind it is a parallelepiped of deep-fried polenta topped with fennel slaw, and on the right is a fennel purée topped with chopped bell pepper and chopped green fennel. Very tasty.

And at the right, Gritta's veal schnitzle with white asparagus and potatoes, a slice of Amalfi lemon, Hollandaise sauce, and a little dish of cranberry sauce.

At the left here is the nonvegetarian dessert, "strawberry-elderberry slice," consisting of strawberry ragout, almond spongecake, ginger cream, and vanilla crumble.

At the right is the vegetarian dessert, a "Dulcey eclair," consisting of dulcey chocolate mousse, coffee cream, vanilla crumble, and apricot ragout.

At this point, you've seen almost the whole menu, which wasn't long. Nobody ordered the vegetarian starter (white asparagus risotto), the vegetarian main course (carrot flan with green asparagus), or the German cheese assortment, but among us, we tried everything else.

We lingered over dessert until it was almost time for them to throw us out to begin the afternoon-tea service, then wandered back over the Paris Square (just east of the Brandenburg Gate) to meet our guide for a 3-hour private tour of the immediate area, which ended with a rare opportunity to tour the interior of the Reichstag building. We had been warned to bring our passports and to be prepared to go through airport-style security, but by chance it happened to be "Freedom weekend," when the masses are invite to wander freely in droves through areas usually accessible by advance reservations, so nobody was interested in our IDs or made us do anything more elaborate than a pass through a metal detector.

The tour covered some of the same ground we had already seen with the Viking guide, so I didn't take a lot of photos, but this time, it was easier to ask questions or stop for photos, and we also gained more information.

One of the buildings on Paris Square is called the "Palais am Pariser Platz," and in its courtyard is this overside statue of a man, but I haven't been able to find out much about him.

This time, we got to cross the street and look more closely at the white crosses on the fence that commemorate those killed trying the cross the Berlin wall. This one is dedicated to Axel Hannemann, who died in May of 1962. He jumped from a bridge onto a passing boat, then jumped from the boat into the river and tried to swim to the Western side but was shot in the water.

The American and British embassies are here in the square. The Canadian embassy is elsewhere, but Quebec maintains a house here. The guide told us something about the embassies of Japan and Italy being forced to move after WWII, but that the Swiss ambassador stood his ground and refused, so the Swiss embassy is still where it was, but not here in the square.

As we learned on Viking's tour, the horses, chariot, and goddess of victory atop the Brandenburg gate were taken back to France by Napoleon. On this tour, we learned that it was the Prussians who brought her back, adding the eagle and iron cross when they put her back on top of the gate. Someone had said something about her being turned around on that occasion, but this guide assured us that she has always faced inward, toward historic center of the city, because she was bringing victory into the city.

While the city was divided, when concerts were played just this side of the wall, and when Reagan spoke here and said "tear down this wall," East Fermans crowded close to the gate, but the East German authorities hung thick carpet curtains to dull the sound and block the view.

She also reminded us that groups other than Jews were persecuted and murdered under the Nazis. A memorial for the Roma who died in the holocaust is located in the tiergarten, but it's partially blocked now by all the preparations for the soccer tournament.

Another interesting point she made is that "Berlin" is a very odd-sounding word to Germans. In fact, it's not a German word at all; it's slavic, and it means "swamp." The city's ground is in fact still not very stable. Lots of pilings support museum island including a large concrete block built there to measure the ground movement. It now houses a museum about Germania.

She pointed out the vista through the Brandenburg Gate to the victory column and told us that the hill beyond the column is a rubble mound. The Americans apparently built a silo-shaped listening station on top of it, and a structure to the right of it that looks like the Eiffel Tower was a radio transmission tower.

From the square, we made our way back to the Reichstag building, passed through the very light security in the portable buildings, and once again started by going straight up to the roof.

In this view, maybe you can make out the golden dome of the new synagogue and the baroque tower of the Sophienkirche (with the blue top). I haven't been able to identify the black spire with the clocks on it, but the red roofs in front of the Sophienkirche are the Hackescher Markt.

In the right-hand shot (somewhat telephotoed) is a modern black bell tower in the Tiergarten, built in the 1970's. It's a memorial to the destroyed bell towers of Potsdam. To the left of it in the photo, you might be able to make out the Eiffel Tower–shaped radio tower and the mound behind the Victory Column. And sure enough, when I blow the photo up, I can see that the blob on top of the mound is supported on a silo-shaped stucture.

The hyperbolic paraboloid at the left here is the roof of a concert and event space that locals call the "pregnant oyster." The roof caved in in the 1960's but has been rebuilt.

At the right, and not telephotoed, is a gable end on the roof of the building that is pocked with bullet holes. They were apparently made, in defiance, by the last of the soviet troops to leave after the wall came down.

Our guide showed us this photo of a Soviet soldier clambering onto a pinacle on the roof of the Reichstag, waving the hammer and sickle flag, with an officer standing below. It was apparently a reenactment (like the flag being raised on Iwo Jima) of a moment no one was quick enough to photograph the first time around. The soviets considered the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate important goals, so they needed a photo.

And at the right is my shot of a neighboring green roof with stacks of active bee hives on it. We could see into offices below it, but on Saturday, no one was there.

In the distance, our guide pointed out some tall white Soviet-era tower blocks and a tall black tower on the western side that had a moving news marquee running across the top. Apparently, the white towers were built expressly to block view of that news feed. She also pointed out the GErmanechancery, a modern building three times the size of the White House, but still too small. They're building a newer, bigger one.

Looking back toward the Brandenburg Gate (that's Victory and her horses at the right-hand side of the photo), we could see the roof of the DZ Bank building, a multiuse building on Paris Square. From the square, it looks as flat and rectilinear as all the others—we walked right past it several times—but from this high up, you can see that it was designed by Frank Gehry, the architect of the Louis Vuitton Institute in Paris, who cannot resist wrapping his buildings in billowing, curvilinear sheaths. The nearer part of this scaly silver roof is apparently a glass dome covering an event space in the center of the building.

The guide told us that Templehof airbase, where the candy bombers operated, looks like a water tower over the tops of the buildings, but I can't spot it in my photos. The candy bombers were pilots who dropped bundles of candy to West Berlin's children on their approaches during the Berlin Airlift.

Then we went back inside to tour the interior of the building. At the right here is the ceiling of the chamber where the parliament meets. It's also the underside of the mirrored funnel under the dome on the roof. So although the glass dome is not, strictly speaking, a skylight, it does channel natural light into the chamber below.

Here are a couple of views of the chamber where plenary sessions of the German parliament take place.

Parliament comprises 700 members (!), and each one gets 20,000 euros a month to hire staff, so they need a huge amount of office space, hence the constant construction of larger government building. They're trying to get the number of members down to 630 or so.

The halls of the building were busy with visitors, and volunteer docents were stationed throughout to explain everything. We chanced on a particularly good one, a young Ph.D. in political science and history, who was initially stationed in front of this wall of graffiti (more extensive than my photo shows) left by Soviet occupying troops, but she left her post to escort us through several more exhibits and proved a fount of information. About the graffiti, she said that, in one case, a young soldier left an "A loves his sweetheart B forever" message on the wall, and only recently young soldier A brought his wife of many years, B, back as a tourist to see the inscription. The docents were charmed and took many photos of the two of them.

On our way back to the car, we cut through a corner of the Tiergarten and encountered Berlin's 1880 monument to Goethe (by Fritz Schaper), shown here at the right. The figures around the base represent Drama, Lyric Poetry, and Science.

In that same brief detour through the Tiergarten, we saw a rabbit, heard a nightingale, and spotted a family of baby coal tit groundlings!

Back at the car, we drove back to the hotel, where our rooms were ready. Here's the leafy view from my window down into a small interior courtyard. I don't think the other buildings surrounding it were part of the hotel.

For dinner, we chose a nice Italian restaurant a few doors from the hotel, Luardi. It was right next to another Italian restaurant, and I got the impression it might be one of the grown offspring from that one branching out on his own.

Gritta ordered a Greek salad. Note the large slabs of feta cheese leaning in from the sides.

David loves lasagna, so that's what he chose.

The menu promised that Leon's fish soup would include a variety of fish filets and one scampi, and it did, plus a couple of bivalves.

For dessert, I had "iced chocolate."

David went straight for the panna cotta, of course. It was beautifully garnished with an orange slice, strawberries, berry coulis, and a sprig of mint.

Gritta ordered a sorbet, lemon I think, that was so soft it was served in a brimming martini glass.