Zis German Life

oddly themed playgrounds

There have been a number of times when I've been walking around Berlin and run into something that makes me say "Wha'?"

Here's one of them.  It comes from a playground near my house on a street that doesn't get much traffic.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I absolutely love the playgrounds in Germany and particularly in what was formerly East Berlin.   They are so well-designed, fun-looking, and precarious enough to make an American liability lawyer croak from excitement.  And I can't wait to have Larry play at them, too.

But this one throws me for a loop.  Check it out.  It's a wall, a red wall, a red wall that - with its rounded top - bears striking resemblance to the Berlin Wall.  And it has climbing grips screwed into it.

Now, what sort of message is this s'posed to send?  Really?  "Climb the wall, Kevin, just like daddy did!"  Is the Cold War so far behind us in the eyes of many people here that you can use its iconography without baggage?

I'd love to ask the designer and am rather curious about which side of the divide s/he came from.

Sad old ladies...

May 8, VE day, a fairly important date in this neck of the woods.  Inspired by history, a few friends and I braved the threatening rain and went to Pankow's Ehrenmal Schönholzer Heide, one of Berlin's three large Soviet war memorials/cemeteries.  Imagine: over 13,000 Soviet soldiers are buried in this former forced labor camp, a number of whose victims lie in graves marked "unknown"  in a separate plot a bit deeper into the park.

About 30 people were on hand around noon for the annual wreath-laying ceremony.  Most were rather deep in their years, except for the slightly younger loco-politico types in attendance.  The most poignant thing for me was an old lady who ambled down a side path before the ceremony and away from the crowd.  She was crying silently with her head up and her jaw locked.  You could tell she'd seen a lot.  She laid a meager bunch of cheap carnations on the understated memorial to soldiers who'd died in P.O.W. camps, which lies hidden behind the enormous central obelisk memorializing those who supposedly died more proudly.

I bet she'd have some stories to tell.

wing to wing and oar to oar

A wise friend of mine told me that the best way to see the so-called "Berlin Wall Memorial" - aka Gedenkstaette Berliner Mauer - was to walk into the cemetery (Friedhof Sophienkirchgemeinde) from Ackerstrasse and see the wall as an East German would have seen it.  I did it recently, and I completely agree.  The tower at the Wall Documentation Center on Bernauerstrasse gives you the nice eagle-eye, but not the as-it-was feel.  If you do this, though, and stray from the course a bit, you might come upon the pile of gravestones documented in these photos.  For a good, refocusing "mortal moment" of the memento mori type, I highly recommend doing so.  These dust-to-dust moments can be very powerful, especially when you're about to bring the next link in the chain into the public viewing area we call life.  Bring a flower.

Spuds for the "Old Fritz"

He was elector of the Holy Roman Empire, student of Voltaire, king and leader of the famed and fearsome forces of Prussia, and hero of Bonaparte.  So, on New Year's Day, while visiting Sanssouci, his old pleasure palace in Potsdam, I came upon this lovely, lonely rose and these troubling taters on his modest gravestone. 

Can someone please explain to me why Frederick the Great, the so-called "enlightened monarch," is commemorated with...kartoffeln?  Is this like crop circles deutscher-style?

Giving One For The Team

Well that explains it...

These are from Berlin's (relatively) new DDR Museum.  For the most part (thanks to being encouraged to give it a try from BerlinBites), it's a very nice museum-lette, though I would say that one does get the feeling that the writers of the explanatory texts felt like they were playing to two crowds.

This little detail sent me for a loop, though...why would a detail like this get attention?  Seriously?

The Very-Annoying-Guest Bathroom

Watch your step.

Look familiar, Auslaender?

For anyone who's stuck around long enough to apply for a work permit, this should be a familiar sight: staring at the ceiling of the LABO (Das Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheite), waiting for your documents to get the beloved Stempel.   Which brings me to this thought:  did the Pope get a Stempel, "A PONTIFICE BEATUS"? 

Very uninspiring architecture... depressing, in fact...

(ps. does anyone know if there's  a particularly good place to look for a part-time english-native-language j.o.b.?)

Talk about the ironies!

Here we are in Bebelplatz, aka Opernplatz, site of the notorious Nazi book burning of 10 May 1933.  In the middle, an enormous sculpture depicting a stack of books from famous authors in German history, both the persecuted and the "merely" famous, rises to the heavy-with-gray-clouds sky.  Next to it is a plaque bearing the words the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote in 1820: "Where books are burned, in the end people will burn."  Well, it looks like the burning has one more "victim," though I can't say whether it's Mr. Grass or the Germans as a whole (or both).  Thank God his is on the top, though...it'll make it all the easier to take off...

It all reminds me of a scene I witnessed the first time I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.  If you know the museum, it covers aspects of the rise of Hitler and National Socialism and then the Holocaust in (somewhat) chronological order.  I was jammed in with a bunch of people near the beginning of the tour where there was a display about the book burning.  An elderly woman in the bundle of people mentioned under her breath: "Well, at least they were burning the right books."  She obviously didn't get the point...

Olympia Stadion

An evening at Berlin's Olympia Stadion for a (gulp!) Robbie Williams concert.  Shocked when I saw the diving platform from which the (in-)famous and inventive filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl shot such beautiful angles in her film Olympia.  It was almost as if the world had suddenly gone black and white.  A shot from the men's room shared  the aesthetic.