east_germany1

EAST_GERMANY continued

Berlin

We'd first visited Berlin on our way back from Russia in 1971. Those were the days of the GDR and the WALL, Checkpoint Charlie and two entirely different Berlins. We were coming off a month in Communist countries and couldn't wait to get into the West again, so we didn't see much of the Ost. It is a totally different place now and we were keen to see how things had changed. Our main focus was to have a look at the 'museum precinct'.

The world-famous Museum Island lies between the Spree river and the Kupfergraben, its buildings housing archaeological collections and 19th century art. The five-building complex's starting point was the Old Museum, completed in 1830. King Friedrich Wilhelm III opened up royal art treasures to the public for the first time here, the oldest of Berlin's museums. This ensemble of museums was to become, according to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, a "sanctuary of art and science". Schinkel's student, Friedrich August Stüler, designed the first development plans in 1841 for the Museum Island. In 1904 the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum (today the Bode Museum) was opened. With the opening of the Pergamon Museum in 1930, building on the Museum Island was, for the time being, completed. Nearly seventy percent of the buildings were destroyed in the Second World War and continue to bear the wounds of these damages today. In 1999, the Berlin State-Owned Museums - Prussian Cultural Heritage decided upon a master plan for the Museum Island which included renovation plans and plans to reunite and reorganize collections that had been divided up after the war, making the Museum Island Europe's largest cultural investment project.

Pergamon Museum pictures http://www.oocities.org/snufflesyoung/bvo/perg.htm

The Pergamon Altar is a magnificent structure originally built in the 2nd century BC in the Ancient Greek city of Pergamon (also known as Pergamum; modern day Bergama in Turkey) in northwestern Anatolia. The Pergamon Altar has been transported from the original excavation and reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin in the 19th century, where it can be seen alongside other monumental structures such as the Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon. The Altar has a 113 metre (371 feet) long sculptural frieze depicting the struggle of the gods and the giants. It is rumoured that the architect of Lenin's Tomb in Red Square designed the mausoleum after the Pergamon Altar

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar"
The collection goes back to the Kurfrsten of Brandenburg, who collected objects from antiquity; the collection was started with an acquisition of the collection of an old Roman archeologist in 1698. It first became accessible (in part) to the public in 1830, when the Altes Museum was opened. The collection was expanded greatly with the excavations in Olympia, Samos, Pergamon, Miletus, Priene and Didyma. The main exhibitions are the Pergamon Altar from the 2nd century BC, with a 113 meters (371 feet) long sculptural frieze depicting the struggle of the gods and the giants, and the Gate of Miletus from Roman antiquity. As Germany was divided, so was the collection following the Second World War. The Pergamon Museum was reopened in 1959 in East Berlin.

Islamic Art Museum
When the Bode-Museum was opened in 1904, a section for Islamic art was created which was later on (in 1930) was included in the Pergamon Museum. Besides artwork from the 8th to the 19th century by Islamic people from Spain to India, the main attraction is the Mshatta facade, which originates from a pre-Islamic desert castle. It was a gift from the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II to Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany. Parts of the facade are still in Amman, Jordan.

The Middle East Museum
The reconstructed Ishtar Gate of Babylon. The Middle East Museum exhibition displays objects, found by German archeologists and others, from the areas of Assyrian, Sumerian and Babylonian culture. Additionally there are historical buildings, reliefs and lesser cultural objects and jewelry. The main display is the Ishtar Gate and the Procession Street of Babylon together with the throne room facade of Nebuchadnezzar II.
Parts of the gate and lions from the Processional Way are in various other museums around the world. Only two museums acquired dragons while lions went to several museums. The Istanbul Archaeology Museum has lions, dragons and bulls. The Detroit Institute of Arts houses a dragon; the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston each have lions. A reproduction of the gate was built in Iraq as the entrance to a museum that was never completed.

Berlin's flagship car showrooms are are pure soft-sell seduction - there's no pressure to buy, admission is free, and you can climb behind the wheel of the latest model. They're interesting for travellers too, as they are more like museums than showrooms, with old-timers and distractions like internet stations, films, restaurants and art exhibits. The Volkswagen family lives at Unter den Linden 21 with its offspring Seat, Bugatti, Škoda, and Bentley. Each brand is proudly presented in this glossy three-level mall. There's an accessories shop, five free internet terminals, while the basement hosts free art exhibits. Fuel up on breakfast, lunch, or cakes at the Linden Lounge. The reception you'll get at the Bugatti showroom may be icy, but you are allowed in to view the vintage and current models.

The BMW showroom has been the anchor of Kurfürstendamm 31 corner for about 40 years now and shows its age in its lack of slick sophistication compared to its rivals. The music of a pop radio station is piped onto the two floors that present all BMW models, rather than a cool, jazzy CD compilation. It's a non-intimidating environment where you can ogle the latest BMW.

Mercedes Welt: Fitting for Germany's best known car brand, this showroom at Salzufer 1-5 is bigger and Besser than the rest. The cashier section in the huge glass and steel hall looks like the reception desk at a five-star hotel. Entertainment options include a sexy Formula 1 simulator, two rock-climbing walls border a silvery 15m-high water curtain and a children's driving school with electric cars. The pricy AMGs are on the ground level; from there you can wind the ramps up to the cabriolets. A smaller showroom and adjoining restaurant, Daimler's, are at Kurfürstendamm 203.

Jewish Museum pictures
http://www.oocities.org/snufflesyoung/bvo/BVOE.htm

For me, going to Germany is like a black visiting rural Alabama or Mississippi. I do not doubt that some whites have overcome the hundreds of years of anti-black conditioning that was a hallmark of Southern culture. Nor do I doubt that some, perhaps even many, Germans have overcome the thousands of years of anti-Semitic conditioning their culture fostered. Of course there were a few German righteous gentiles whose memories are enshrined at Yad Vashem.

I remember my visit to the bucolic town of Goslar in the Hartz Mountains, with its World War II memorial to the noble German soldiers killed in Soviet camps. I recall the good residents of Wolfenbuttel, who would never dare to cross against a traffic signal (just following orders), but who refused to allow a marker to be placed on a newly discovered synagogue in the town. Then there was my visit to the university town of Gottingen where, while having a cool drink at the sidewalk cafe, I was able to watch the neo-Nazi skinheads attack a group of Turkish teenagers eating ice cream in the town square. The nightly television news broadcasts also showed me the "new Germany." No longer were Jews targeted; now three-quarters of the broadcasts were concerned with the "auslanders" (foreigners) working in Germany. I also had the good fortune to visit the beautiful town of Lubeck just two weeks after the synagogue had been fire-bombed.

..... I too had the opportunity of visiting Buchenwald. However, contrary to the history presented to the students, Buchenwald was a concentration camp that had existed before the war began. Perhaps the student who "couldn't take it ... started crying and had to leave" should have gone through the museum to learn what really happened there. She would have seen the letter from the "new German" BMW folks requesting their next shipment of slave labor. Of course, to be even-handed, one should make mention of Bernard Bellon's "Mercedes in Peace and War" for those Jews who prefer this product of the "new Germany."

Let me close by relating an incident that occurred this summer. I had been trying to convince my wife to consider changing her research focus to the kabbalistic origins of the French Enlightenment. This would get us out of the "new Germany" and into France. While eating dinner in a charming restaurant near the caves of Lascaux in Southern France, we were discussing the CNN report of new skinhead violence that appeared on television. On my way back from the men's room, the couple that had been sitting next to us at dinner stopped me to tell me that not all Germans supported the skinheads. After dinner we joined this lovely German couple in the bar. He was a Ph.D. in classics and she ran a prosthesis firm. In the midst of our lengthy discussion, I was asked if I could please define a term that I had been using that they did not understand. That term was "synagogue."

The Harz is a mountain range in northern Germany located on the border between the states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.The settlement of the Harz began only 1000 years ago. In ancient times the dense forests made the region inaccessible. It was in the 10th century, when the kings of Saxony took possession of the mountains and used them as royal hunting grounds. In 968 silver deposits were discovered near the town of Goslar. The wealth of the region declined, after these mines were exhausted in the early 19th century. The towns were abandoned for a short time, but prosperity returned with the tourism. Between 1945 and 1990 the Harz was a divided mountain range, the west belonging to the FRG and the east to the GDR. Goslar,a popular tourist resort of Lower Saxony, was founded in the 10th century after the discovery of silver deposits in the close Rammelsberg mountain. It became a particularly rich town, which attracted the interest of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Kaiserpfalz (emperor's palace) of Goslar was built in the 11th century and became a summer residence for the emperors, especially Henry III of Germany who visited his favourite palace about twenty times. Henry is buried in Goslar. The cathedral of Goslar is as old as the palace, but only the porch survived; the church itself was torn down in 1820. Goslar is still intact and was not bombed during World War II beacuse it housed a P.O.W. camp. Other sights are the town hall (16th century) and the ancient mines of the Rammelsberg mountain, which are now a mining museum. Goslar and the mines are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

We were talking to an English couple staying at the same camping ground in the Hartz mountains ( we had met them before, it was quite common to bump into the same people who, because they were using the same travel guide, went to the same places and stayed in the same camps) and they said they had been to a concentration camp near the town of Nordhausen that was very interesting. So it was somewhat of an accident that we went to; Konzentrationslager "Mittelbau-Dora" The establishment of Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp was preceded by the development of the A4 rocket – later known by the propaganda designation "V-2". A heavy air attack by the Royal Air Force on the night of August 18, 1943 brought A4 manufacture in Peenemünde to an abrupt halt. A decision was made in favour of the tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain near Nordhausen in Thuringia. The tunnels are 20 km (12.5 miles) in length and up to 30 m (33 ft) high. KZ Dora was founded as a sub camp of KZ Buchenwald and from September 1943 the first prisoners arrived to enlarge the tunnel system. They were housed in the tunnels and seldom saw the light of day. "Mittelwerke-GmbH" was established in November 1943 to mass-produce the V2 rocket. In In January 1944 the first 52 rockets were delivered at the cost of 679 prisoner's deaths. The construction of a crematorium was begun in February 1944 to dispose of prisoner's bodies. At one time the prison population was 60000. From January 1945 onward the population grew due to the evacuation of the camps in the east, ahead of the Soviet advance. Many thousands died from industrial accidents hunger, exhaustion, beatings. Public executions were commonplace. It is estimated that 20000 prisoners died. The camp was liberated by the US army in April 1945. About 100 complete rockets, many tons of documents and key German technical staff were shipped to the USA. Twelve rockets were sent to Britain and a few to France. The site was then handed over to the Soviet Army. The camp became a transit camp for displaced persons (DP's). The Soviet Army removed any components and machinery. The entrances were blown up and sealed.

At about this time Rosemary was informed that her father was ill and so we headed back to Amsterdam so that she could fly back to Adelaide. On the way we took a quick look at;

Brugge

As an amateur history buff I'm fascinated by the connection between how the economic environment has an effect on how a city grows. Brugge (along with Budapest, Prague, etc. indeed most of the beautiful old cities we had seen) is a very ancient reminder that traders usually determine the success or otherwise of a city. The history of Bruges begins around 2000 years ago. At that time there was a Gallic-Roman settlement that traded with England and the rest of Gaul. Around 270 the Germanic people attacked the Flemish coastal plain for the first time. and when Saint Eligius came to spread Christianity in the area around 650, Bruges was perhaps the most important fortification in the Flemish coastal area.

Around a hundred years later trade started with Scandinavia in Bruges. The name Bruges, whichcomes from the Old Norse "Bryggja" meaning landing stage,appeared on documents and coins since the middle of the ninth century. At that time there was already a strong citadel in Bruges (the Burg). The oldest trade settlement of Bruges and the early middle age port was accessible from the sea until around 1050. The second area of occupation outside the Burg was close to the present day Steenstraat and the Oude Burg. It was here that the city grew fastest until around 1100. The two oldest parish churches in Bruges, the Church of Our Lady St.-Saviour's, were then at the edge of this district. They date from the ninth century.

In the eleventh century Bruges had expanded to become a commercial centre for Europe. But during this period the natural link between Bruges and the sea silted up. A storm flood in 1134 changed the appearance of the Flemish coastal plain however. A deep channel appeared, the Zwin, which at the time reached as far as present day Damme. The city remained linked to the sea until the fifteenth century via a canal from the Zwin to Bruges. So in the Middle Ages it was possible for Bruges to become the most important trade centre of north-west Europe. Flanders was then one of the most urbanised areas in Europe. Flemish cloth, a high quality woollen material, was exported to the whole of Europe from Bruges. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries Bruges had between 40,000 and 45,000 inhabitants, double the number now in the historic inner city. There was not only Flemish cloth manufacture but all kinds of other (craft) trades had developed. It is significant that in Bruges at that time there were already real bankers in operation, both natives of Bruges and Italians. Merchants could open a current account here, transfer large sums, change money and even pay with notes. The first stockmarket was housed in a building on the sqare owned by the family Bourse - now used to describe stockmarkets hroughout Europe.

The fourteenth century, a period of crises for Bruges and Flanders with revolts, epidemics, political unrest and war, ended with the dynastic merger of Flanders and Burgundy. The Burgundian court provided a great deal of local purchasing power. This was promoted further by the foreign merchants with their international contacts from Portugal to Poland. Prosperity increased, travellers came and were deeply impressed by the sumptuousness and luxury of the city scene. Art and culture flourished as never before. But all this came to an end with the sudden death of Mari of Burgundy in 1482. The revolt against her widower Maximilian of Austria meant that Bruges suffered political uncertainty and military force for ten years. Local prosperity disappeared from the city along with the Burgundian court and the international tradersand the city had clearly lost its leading position to Antwerp. Bruges shipowners and merchants still traded with the Spanish empire, England and the East and West Indies. The first industrial revolution hardly disturbed the city and around 1850 Bruges was the poorest city in the country. The new sea-port, inaugurated in 1907 in Zeebrugge, did not achieve full prosperity until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Since the end of the nineteenth century Bruges was also known throughout Europe as a city of art and a tourist centre. Today the Bruges monuments, museums and particularly the unspoilt historic cityscape attract millions of visitors every year.

After Bruges we drove quickly to Amsterdam where Rosemary bought a MAS ticket at a bucket shop and flew via KL to Adelaide. She arrived in time to see her Dad before he died. I hung around in Amsterdam to sell the van then flew home via Bali on GARUDA and arrived home in Darwin just in time to pick up our son and drive to Adelaide for the funeral. It was while we were in Adelaide that the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were destroyed on what has become infamous as 9/11 or as we say in Australia the 11th September 2001.