Ich Bin Ein Berliner...

I was really excited to get to Berlin. Everything I had ever heard made me think I would love the city. We arrived on the bus, and then got the train to Ostbahnhof, which was near by to our hostel. The hostel was huge, heaps of people staying, pretty friendly with a bar downstairs and TV etc.

There was a free walking tour available, where basically the tour guides just accept tips at the end of the tour. We had a young American guy called Ben. He was brilliant, had lived in Berlin for a while and had a really good grasp of the history and context. He was also a fantastic storyteller and had us hanging on every word. We paid him as handsomly as we could afford at the end.

Brandenburg Tor. The statue was taken to Paris by Napoleon in 1806, when he was defeated in 1814, it was restored to Berlin.

The tour took as past all the major tourist sights and buildings and sites in the city. Great to get some history to go along with what we were seeing, and Ben was awesome.


Frank Gehry's interior sculpture inside the DG bank in Pariser platz.

Berliner Dom, Berlin's largest church.

A section of the Berlin Wall.

The tour took us past architect Peter Eisenman's holocaust memorial. Eisenman stated that the memorial was designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. The memorial was quite controversial in Berlin as it really didn't offer any symbolism in the traditional sense and was quite a different approach to a memorialising the holocaust.

Angie in one of my favourite photos


Personaly I loved the space. Whether or not it is an adequate memorial to the lives lost in the holocaust is probably a personal opinion I guess.

The Reichstag building was the home to the first parliament of the German empire. It was severly damaged by fire in 1933. The fire was the source of much controversy, a young Dutch insurrectionist was found at the scene and hanged for the crime despite scarce evidence on which to convict him. Some historians have proposed that he may not have acted alone and could have been a scapegoat in a larger political plot.

Regardless of the perpetrators of the fire, it was pivotal in the rise of the Nazi party and the destruction of civil liberties in Germany. The Nazi's used the fire as justification to supress and drive out the communist opposition whom they implicated in the crime. Hitler proposed the Reichtstag Fire Decree which was approved by president Hindenburg. This suspended most of the civil liberties in Germany and was used by the Nazis to ban all publications deemed unsuitable to their cause. With his new scope of influence and control, Hitler painted the fire as a communist plot to take over Germany, crushing the communist opposition. With the communists out of the way, further intimidation of Social Democratic Party and the manufacturing of fear in the people of the possibility of a communist revolution, the Nazis were able to obtain the majority they required to pass The Enabling Act. This was a special law which gave the Chancellor (Hitler) sole power to pass laws by decree without the involvement of the Reichstag. This paved the way for Hitler's eventual rise to dictator of Germany.

View from the Reichstag steps at sunset

The Reichstag building

In 1999 a new dome was added to the top of th Reichstag to replace the one that was destroyed in 1933 and never rebuilt. The new dome, designed by British architect, Sir Norman Foster, symbolises the reunification of Germany.

The new Reichstag dome.

At the top of the dome looking down inside. On the floors below, through the glass you can see the German parliament in session.

Angie inside the top of the dome


Dome interior, Foster won the Pritzker prize for this building.

High on the huge list of stuff to see in Berlin for me was Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum. I had written on this building at Uni, so it was really cool to see and photograph it in the flesh.
Incredibly complex conceptually, the building pays tribute to generations of lost German jews.
The exhibits were interesting, but somewhat overshadowed by the building for me.


The position of the cuts and intrusions in the building are dictated by a complex process of conneting points and events as mapped by Libeskind's very complex architectural concept.

The garden in the Jewish Museum complex.


Memory void

Interior stair

As we walked into the city we decided to track the Berlin wall as it used to stand. The position of the wall is now marked by bricks in the ground that run through roads, footpaths and sometimes, buildings.



We spent a day around Checkpoint Charlie, the former border between the American and Soviet sectors.


The Soviet soldier looking into the American sector. Around the area there were huge graphics that told the story of Berlin from the end of WWII up until 1989 when the wall came down. The history was fascinating and some of the personal stories, such as that of Peter Fechter, where just amazing. On the 17th of August, 1962, an East German teenager, Peter Fechter, was shot and wounded by East German guards while trying to escape from East Berlin. His body lay tangled in a barbed wire fence, slowly bleeding to death, in full view of the world’s media. American soldiers could not rescue him because he was a few yards inside the Soviet sector. East German border guards were reluctant to approach him for fear of provoking Western soldiers, one of whom had shot an East German border guard just days earlier. Over an hour later Fechter’s dead body was removed by the East German guards,

Peter Fechter, left for dead.


The ultimate standoff, seconds away from destruction. This photo was printed about 2m high on a story board of the history the fall of the wall. Upon reading the history of the photo I was amazed by it, the potential of what might have happened, the photographer sitting behind it all, the tension in it, everything, great photo. This conflict revolved around German police stopping allied personel as they passed from West to East Germany. It had been decreed that this was not allowed, however when the US Chief of Mission in West Berlin, E. Allan Lightner, was stopped in his car while crossing at Checkpoint Charlie to go to a theater in East Berlin, the Americans remonstrated and the the conflict ignited. Despite how close they came to serious violence, this standoff was resolved peacefully.






We spent a lot of time at the nightmarkets, heaps of good food, entertainment and stuff to see.... and gluhwine. Cant remember exactly where this one was, the photo below probably says it in German.






Night Markets were so much fun, best food, especially deserts.



Me, Damo and Lisa. A couple from Perth that we stayed with in the hostel. We caught up with them in London again in early 09.




The art scene in Berlin is still buzzing, despite the true underground bohemian squalor of the 90's being a thing of the past. I saw and shot great stuff on the walls all over the city.


After the German reunification, heaps of buildings were vacated due to the demise of former state-run enterprises and migration to west Germany. Some of these buildings were then occupied by squatters. The squats scene in Berlin produced a huge amount of art and artists that thrived on the lawless nature of the scene.

One of the most famous of all the squats is Tacheles.

The word "Tacheles" is a Yiddish word for "plain, honest, straightforward talk" it's based on censorship problems in the GDR. As a result of limited freedom of speech, musicians, directors and artists were not permitted to openly express themselves, and they were forced to conceal the true message of the work. The former squats in the Tacheles building are now home to artists studios. Fantastic building to photograph.



There is some great stuff in the hallways and stairwells.

Out the back there are a lot of bigger works of sculpture and big murals etc.

Angie outside Tacheles



Back at the night markets again. This one was at Alexanderplatz. The ice skating rink was the highlight. So many stacks, great viewing.


We loved this guy!! Watched him for ages and ages. He was trying his guts out and really making hard work of it. There was some Italian guys next to us who were in hysterics watching him get around. See video...





The Berlin Wall is obviously a major attraction and we spent a few sessions walking past various sections. These photos are from the East side gallery, the unofficial artistic hub of the wall.

The Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kiss painting is probably the most famous piece of wall on the East Side Gallery. This has recently been erased due to erosion which is a massive shame. Glad I got a photo there while it was intact.

Homage to the best NBA rivalry of all time.

East Side Gallery with Berlin's trademark streetlights and the space needle in the background.

The wall is slowly fading away, but the layers and layers of history make it that much more interesting.





Walter on the Berlin Wall.



We both loved Berlin... so much! For me it is in my 2 favourite cities (along with NYC) that we had visited anywhere in the world. The history really defines the city in a way I hadn't seen in other places. The people were incredibly friendly and helpful, and I really got the feeling that they owned the city. I got a vibe that after all that had happened in Berlin, the people really value their freedom and rights, and that they wont be pushed around again anytime soon.

Ich Bin Ein Berliner!! ........ I wish.