Come to Berlin, Before Too Late

For her music video "Come to Berlin", Barbara Morgenstern stands in various parts of the city, mostly forgotten parks near derelict buildings and abandoned factories, which she describes as "places that are about to disappear, or have already." Indeed, Berlin has more construction projects at any given time than any other European city and the city is nearly unrecognizable from its former self. The tour books all say that Berlin is a city that is constantly reinventing itself, though I'm sure the pessimist would rather call it an identity crisis. For a city that had such a turbulent history over the past century, there are very few signs of it. On our final day in town, we made an effort to see what we could of the divided Berlin.

In the last verse, Barbara Morgenstern sings "Und meine Mutter in den 60er Jahren ist mit der S-Bahn ins Fremde gefahren", which translates roughly to "And in the 60s my mother would take the S-Bahn to a foreign country." I believe this is a reference to how all the subway and commuter trains would still go through East Berlin, only they wouldn't make any stops until they got back to West Berlin. They called the East German stations "ghost stations", except for Friedrichstrasse station, which due to its being a major transfer point on several West Berlin lines was the only station on the eastern side of the Wall where West Berliners could stop. Then it was a maze full of passport checkpoints, cameras, and security agents. Nowadays though, you'd hardly be able to tell as people rushed to catch their trains, stopping only to grab a bite at a fast food chain.

Street sign on Karl-Marx-Allee

We had better luck at Karl-Marx-Allee, one of the few streets in town that got to keep its communist-era name (which is quite remarkable, considering there are no Nazi-era names anymore). The boulevard was designed to be residential, but to highlight the achievements of communism, and so all the buildings are in a monumental Stalinist style. It was really something to behold as we walked down for about a mile.

Christmas trees being sold across from a massive apartment building

Even though Stalinist architecture was never popular in Hungary, this was the first place in Berlin where we really felt like we could just easily be back on the streets of Budapest (even though, again, there is not a single street in Hungary that looks the same). Since it was so amazingly cold, we stopped only at a small market to a candle bridge (which I'd been looking for everywhere).

Me, freezing on Karl-Marx-Allee

All of the buildings on the street are protected as historical monuments, and cannot be changed or altered, though if you look just one block over, you'll see more modern, gentrified apartment buildings. Overall, it was one of my favorite places in Berlin, since it was someplace where the past was hidden, but out in the open.

East Side Gallery

Our next stop was to the East Side Gallery, one of the few remaining segments of the Berlin Wall which has been painted over and now functions as an outdoor art gallery. Many of them had strong political messages relating to freedom and the fall of the wall.

Important dates in the wall's history

Lyssa commented how going there helped make it all seem a bit more real.

An East German Trabant, breaking through the wall

Various walls throughout the world

I said how strange it was to think that where we were walking thirty years ago was a no man's land, and we'd have been shot for being this close.

We came to this painting and the saying on it really struck me: "He who wants the world to remain as it is doesn't want it to remain at all." Just the same as I wouldn't want to learn science from a textbook published in the 1950s, I don't really want the city to be exactly how it was in the 1950s either. Things need to change and improve. I think sometimes we forget how chaotic the last century has been in Europe. In World War II all the bridges in Budapest were destroyed and Dresden was burned to the ground. Surely I had no problem with those cities being reconstructed.

It reminded me a bit of my trip to Sarajevo in 2005. As soon as I left the train station I saw the skeleton of the Parliament building, which hadn't been rebuilt since it was destroyed by fire bombs and mortar attacks in the 90s. It was truly one of the most haunting things I've ever seen. But since then it's been rebuilt, and is a shiny new skyscraper. As much as I wanted to take Lyssa to see that burned out building and feel the things I felt there, I've got to admit, it is probably far more advantageous for the Bosnians to have an actual building to house their government in.

So I guess what Barbara is saying with her song isn't so much that change is bad, she's simply saying to come now. Hurry before it's too late. I would admonish you all to do the same. If you can afford to, please visit Berlin, visit the world. If not, take a good look at your own neighborhood. Right now it's hard for me to go back to South Jordan. It is not the same city I grew up in. Even my parent's neighborhood where the houses are the same is different. None of my friends live there anymore. In fact, pretty much all of their families have gone. I don't recognize the place. Some change is good, some is bad, and some just is.