Potsdam

The hostel I was staying at had numerous advertisements on what to do in Berlin. My sightseeing desires for the city itself were easily satisfied, and I didn’t want to wander around Berlin for a day. The advertisement that caught my eye read, “Potsdam was to Berlin what Windsor is to London and Versailles was to Paris.” Well, I had never been dissatisfied with visiting a palace, so I decided to catch a train to Potsdam. I was immediately satisfied with my decision. Potsdam was beautiful…

I highly recommend that anyone who is visiting Berlin and is getting a little overwhelmed with the size of Germany’s capital visit Potsdam. It has a small town feel and the food and beer is all a lot cheaper than it was in the city. Now for the part that makes Potsdam the Versailles of Germany. Potsdam was the home of the Prussian kings from around [insert date]. Prussia was a part of the Holy Roman Empire that became increasingly powerful. It was Austria’s arch rival for control over the other German states, and with its Protestant king, it was immensely popular and powerful in the north. Prussia was relatively small when compared to the other states of Europe and it was only a highly trained and well disciplined army that allowed it to not only fend off its rivals, but expand into their territory. Frederick William the "Soldier King" forged the Prussian army into the single most efficient fighting force on the continent and his son, Frederick II der Grosse, Frederick the Great, used that army to launch Prussia into the status of a world power.

Under the machinations of Otto von Bismarck in the mid to late 1800’s Prussia rose to the height of its power. Prussia fought three wars in quick succession, the wars of unification. First, Bismarck forged a temporary alliance with Austria; in theory, the two German states would go to the "defense" of Schleswig, a German duchy under the control of Denmark. It did not go well for Denmark and in less than a year, they ceded Schleswig-Holstein to German Confederation. Theoretically Austria and Prussia would dually administer the new territories, but Prussia's status as a Protestant state made it much more popular and as the two states vied for supremacy tensions exploded. In 1866, Austria declared war. Foolish of them because under the generalship of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the Prussians annihilated the advancing Austrian army in a single battle. Bismarck wanted Austria as an ally not an enemy, and used Napoleon III of France as a mediator and peace was restored, albeit with Prussia in charge off all of Northern Germany. Ironically, the arbiter of peace for that war, Emperor Napoleon III of France, was diplomatically outmaneuvered by Bismarck just four years later. Napoleon, like the Austrians, foolishly declared war on Prussia. Again, the Prussian military under von Moltke crushed the French forces at the Battle of Sedan in 1870, and captured Napoleon. Even before the last war was over, the German Empire was declared from Versailles Palace. With that declaration the Prussian king became Wilhelm I, Emperor of the Germans.

Unfortunately, only one of the palaces was open, the Neues (New) Palace…

Now for my diatribe against all Europeans: Why are the museums closed on Mondays!! For heaven’s sake, you are in the middle of the tourist season and you close the attractions. That is so stupid that you would think that a monkey who fell out of a tree could come up with a better way to make money!! No wonder you are having so much trouble with your economies!! If the Germans are being this economically irresponsible and lazy the rest of the continent is probably doomed!!

By the time I actually got to the ticket office for the one that was open I was too infuriated to purchase the photo permit, so yet again, I have no pictures of the palace. You aren’t missing much with the exception of “the Grotto.” Over a quarter million seashells were used to create the mosaics that covered the walls and the ceilings. It was really dark so I doubt any pictures would have come out anyways. They rest of the palace was only memorable because it had original flooring and they made us wear giant slippers over our shoes so as not to damage what was left.

Even though I was disappointed with the palaces not being open the palace grounds contributed magnificently to what I said about palace gardens always being worth a walk…

That is the main palace at the top of the hill. [name]

That is the Orangerie with Frederick the Great in front. Even though the terraced and landscaped gardens were neat, it was the untouched grounds that resembled the forest that I liked walking though the most…

As you can see, I think the German summer has been a little low on rain for quite some time. Oh well, the walk reminded me a lot of home. The same is true of the train ride through Northern Germany and Denmark. I am watching Danish farmland go past the window. It is a little strange because I keep remembering that I am on an island, but I see red barns, machine sheds, and steel grain bins. I am also seeing a windmills. Not the wooden ones you think of, but the big ones made for generating electricity, again a lot like the drive across Iowa. I am not getting homesick, I am just reflecting on what it is that I truly call home.

Berlin

I have four nights scheduled in Berlin and they will be more than enough for me. The city itself doesn’t really have the sights or the character of any of the other cities I have traveled to on my journey. It is a sprawling modern metropolis. That just means that I needed to get away from Berlin and head someplace nicer for one of my days. I spent one day in Berlin seeing the sights, one day in Potsdam relaxing, and then another day in Berlin seeing the museums I missed. Potsdam will be a separate post, but the Berlin pictures are a little jumbled. For starters, this is the view from my hostel’s bar terrace…

A good start if ever there was one. The next day was beautiful and I went on an impromptu walking/museum tour with a couple of Australians and a South African. We walked past the Berliner Dom, the Berlin Cathedral…

At the time we just walked past, but two days later I came back and took some more pictures and learned a little more about the building. It has never been an actual cathedral since by the time it was completed in 1905 during the second Empire, northern Germany had been Catholic for over 300 years. It was severely damaged in WWII, but I think the replaced work is quite nice…

This is certainly one of the nicest sets of painted glass windows I have seen…

It also provided me with some good photo opportunities for the city since we got to go up on the roof…

Jumping back to day one, we walked from the Dome to the Neues Museum. It houses a portion of the antiquities collections and is home to the famous bust of Nefertiti. Unfortunately, no pictures of her but the interior shots of the actual museum should give you an idea of how the Germans like to present history by recreating little pieces of it…

Apparently it used to be even more spectacular. They are still doing reconstruction work from the war damage. All this destruction from WWII they really like to point out. They don’t cast blame, at least not overtly so I have to give them credit for that. However, even though I don’t like the loss of pretty buildings and historical art, to say nothing of the people killed, my sympathy was never aroused. Not once did I feel the slightest regret or shame in my nation’s WWII policy or strategy. I will say more later; for now, back to Museum Island and the Pergamum Museum. I thought the Neues Museum was cool for using rooms that created a feeling of stepping back in time, but it was nothing compared to the Pergamum Museum. Check these exhibits out…

This is the reconstruction of the great altar of Pergamum, a powerful city-state along modern day Turkey’s Aegean coast. The city was set at the precipice of a very steep hill. The altar itself is the square construction on the right…

The enormous frieze is in the process of being preserved and what is left is being reconstructed around the room you saw above. It was an incredible battle scene depicting the Olympian Gods and Goddesses in battle with the giants. But it was just one exhibit. Now on to the Miletus gate, another reconstruction from Turkey’s coastline…

It was the great market gate for Miletus during Roman times. What was really cool about this one is that you walk through it and step back several centuries in time to see this…

It is the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. This will give you some idea of the scale…

It isn’t even the big part of the gate. The museum itself is just not big enough to house a reconstruction of the rest of the gate. The part I saw was only the first little gate you see in this model…

The other neat thing was that all of the buildings you saw used original pieces in the reconstruction in Berlin. You can see it really clearly when you look at the photo of this Babylonian frieze…

Again, this museum was set up to give you a feel of what things would have looked like and they were sure to remind people that even though we are used to seeing classical statuary as white marble, they would have painted everything…

I had to come back to this museum, because we simply didn’t have the time the first day. That is a big plus for Berlin. You can buy a cheap three day pass that will get you in to several of the museums and once you use it for one, you can come back and use it again. So some of the photos you just saw actually came from day number two. For us, the walking tour we had planned out took us along the river…

We stopped at the Reichstag (the German Parliament) for a quick photo…

Then the Brandenburg Gate…

For those of you who are curious, it is the only gate that remains from the old city entrances. Actually it simply marks the spot where the old gat was, the monument you now see and recognize was finished in 1791 as a symbol of peace. That changed when the Iron Cross was added to the statue after the final victory over Napoleon, in which Prussia played a leading role.

We then headed in the direction of the SS museum. Along the way we literally stumbled upon the Holocaust Memorial…

Then we found the place Hitler’s bunker was at. Now it is fittingly marked only with a sign and used as a parking lot…

Upon our arrival at the Topography of Terrors, the name of the SS museum we were delighted to find a section of the Berlin wall…

I was pleased with the SS museum. Nothing was hidden and there were a large number of very somber people learning this history…

After an hour and a half we walked to Checkpoint Charlie and took the typical tourist photos…

That was day one of my Berlin tour. Two days later I went back to see more of the Pergamum Museum and the Altes…

The Altes was a great disappointment for me because they are moving the exhibitions. What I wasn’t disappointed with was the German History Museum’s titanic, and I think successful, effort to accurately portray the entire historical story of the German people. They begin during Roman times and go all the way to the modern day. It is an epoch that I feel they portrayed very accurately…

They were very frank about the wars they had waged and the way they had waged them. Nothing was hidden in their recording of Hitler’s rise to power and I actually learned some things I hadn’t heard before. It was only towards the end where they were portraying themselves in a modern light that I felt they were being a little over the top in their own pride. They really see themselves as the modern leaders of Europe. In a way they are, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of room for sharing that title.

I ended up spending over three hours of time at that museum and the only reason I left was my hunger pains were getting a little much. Berlin was a lot of fun. One thing that was a lot more fun than I thought it would be was the low key pub crawl that advertised at my hostel. I was getting a little tired of the night scene, but this was actually kind of cool. You could actually have called it something of a night life tour. They took us to some places we never would have found on our own. The bars and clubs in Berlin have so many competing styles and themes that you will never see the same thing twice. Each place is trying to outdo the others with their showmanship of a particular theme. One place had an old black-and-white movie playing, one didn't have any room on the walls it was so crammed with Alice in Wonderland-esque decor, another was designed by the band Rammstein, and yet another was recreating the East German ping pong club. Crazy stuff and it was a lot of fun. The absinthe bar had 180 different brands of the exceptionally strong liqueur. I don't care for the taste of black licorice, in fact I despise it. So, now that I can say I have had real absinthe, I'm done for a while. That actually describes my entire Berlin trip. Now that I have experienced this thriving metropolis, I'm done for a while. Only Paris had the same effect on men. Every other place I have been I would gladly go back, but Paris and Berlin can wait a while.