Vere Are Your Papers?

The next morning (Saturday), though Sean and I planned on an early start to get to as many museums as possible, we were so tired from our 3 AM wind down, we didn't get out of the apartment until 1130.

Our first planned stop was the Hamburger Banhof, a contemporary art museum, which Google informed us was off a certain subway stop (let's just say Station "A"). We arrived quickly, getting out of the subway at 1145, though we had trouble finding the street to turn onto. My poor preparation skills left us with no map and just a few directions I had written us and we walked aimlessly around a certain street looking for the right turn. We stopped into a restaurant and struggled in a broken English conversation where she could not understand where we were trying to go.

A few minutes more aimless walking happened to lead us to the right street, on which we walked down to the address Google gave us, seeing no museum in sight. With no internet connection or physical map telling us where the museum was we found ourselves surrounded by embassies that all happened to be closed (Note to self: Make sure I don't need asylum on a Saturday). We stopped at a bus stop, scouring the map for the location of the museum, where a man who only spoke Spanish and German longingly tried to help us get to our destination. He first tried to speak to us in Spanish when I volunteered Sean (who I had assumed knew Spanish as he said he used in Peru a few years earlier) to translate. Sean was trying to communicate in his broken Spanish when the bus came and the man got onto the bus and put his hands against the glass as it drove away.

We had all but given up hope, but luck would have us run into a very lavish hotel. The elephant-sized, sliding, automatic glass door opened up to reveal a hotel designed for very wealthy tourists, and we were greeted by a bellboy who spoke perfect English and were directed to the Hamburger Bahnhof, which was several kilometers away from where we were staying. For wasting a lot of our time, I picked up a taxi to the museum and we were greeted with a plethora of fantastic exhibits, some great ones, and others that were a little pretentious (one that sticks out in my mind was this recreation of a repair shop that was bland and rather lame). But the best exhibit was a video of the inside of a box. The box was a long rectangular box (a little over a meter if I remember correctly), in which the interior had been carefully designed to resemble a hallway with a few doors, though it wasn’t too specifically detailed in order to exhibit the next few qualities. The box was taken around a forest, and the natural entrance of light changed the appearance of the hallway which the perspective of the video precisely and exclusively showed.

Another fantastic exhibit in the Hamburger Bahnhof was one entitled CLOUD CITIES by Tomas Saraceno, which consisted of several large balloons made of a hard plastic. Each bubble was elevated and represented various facets of life, with some of them having ladders allowing patrons to climb all over the orbs. One specifically looked like a bubble on the ground, with another on top (similar in shape to the “butt-bubble” kids used to blow by blowing a bubble, keeping it in tact and blowing another bubble with the remaining, attached flat gum). The bottom bubble was pressurized and lined with a reflective floor, which many individuals sat and relaxed on, and the top layer had individuals swimming around on their bellies like fish. It embodied the quality of serenity and was just a delightful exhibit.

We took the train over to meet my cousin Raquel for a quick soup and sandwich, and she gave us a quaint walking tour of the area, showing us everything she knew about. One in particular was a small holocaust memorial in the middle of a small park, that was represented by a table with two stone chairs, one being overturned and lay on the ground. Like the stumbling stones, small gold stones laid at the residences of Jews taken out of their homes during Nazi Germany, it was just another beautiful and humbling reminder that the government took so much care to exhibit.

Which brings about another interesting point about Germany. The German government, in its hopes of making Jews feel the most comfortable, have German police officers at every site that would have Jews present: the synagogues, restaurants, museums… This special treatment puts the Jews of Berlin/Germany between a rock and a hard place – it’s nice that the government respects the community and that they can assuredly be safe (anti-semitism isn’t non-existent in Germany), but at the same time, German citizens begin to look at the Jews as getting government resources that should be utilized for other projects and that all Jewish facilities are exclusive and that Germany’s non-Jewish citizens are not allowed inside. How can Germany expect the Jews to get back on track if they never can be accepted as normal German citizens?

That night, Raquel took us to several bars, all of which were fantastic and fascinating. The first of which was a hole on the wall inside what appeared to be an abandoned building. The stairwell entrance led to a bouncer’s kiosk that obscured a door leading to a room packed to the brim with patrons. The DJ was spinning 50’s American Pop, Rock and Motown, and it was here I noticed the most identifiably German personality quirk. Constantly I felt a little uneasy as I felt that I was being stared at, thinking that girls/guys/bartenders/old ladies/train conductors were trying to pick me up. Upon asking my cousin’s German friend, I was informed that its just something Germans do; they’ll match eyes with strangers for no reason other than its just common practice.

We then ended up at a smokey bar (which has tarnished my Kashmir sweater) which not only was packed to brim (all 4 rooms!), but the DJ here was spinning the typical European electronic music. We trekked home and that ended our Saturday night.

Sunday, Raquel’s friend invited us to a 10 am party/get together and we met them in East Berlin to travel to the location. I was shocked and awe-struck to find the communist architecture still so prevalent, with plenty of graffiti abound, and we arrived at the party site. Here, a bouncer and two of his friends were huddled around a fire in a barrel, where we stood waiting to find out why we couldn’t get in. One of the bouncer’s friends, who obviously had partying since early Saturday, kept taunting me, asking me if I know how to dance and attempting to make me keel over. We never got into the party, and walked to the Berlin Wall.

Now, I don’t know what made me think this, but I expected a 40 foot wall; a dark, sun-obscuring, metallic, turret-covered wall. Instead, I was greeted by an 8 foot wall, where I blurted out, “That’s it!?!?” and all my companions looked around uncomfortable at my outburst. Once getting past the size of the structure, I started to understand how it was still beyond daunting, with a long stretch of the wall still extending to the Russian checkpoint. From there, we rushed back to the apartment and I got ready to leave Berlin.

What really struck me most about the city of Berlin, was that, even after these few decades of integrated boundries, the East/West divide was highly prevalent. Westerners, who grew up in a society showered with the riches of the Western World, still had stigmas and stereotypes about those in the other half. The architecture was still drastically different, the price of food in each half different, the dialect a tad different. Raquel’s friend told me much about the attitudes of the west, that “they expected the two worlds to join together, but the west felt threatened, in that all of their wealth was taken and redistributed to the east, where people were so used to poverty and hand downs, that they expected it as if it were a normal part of life.” What could have been done? Why is this city the way it still is? What’s the future going to be for this city? 23 years seems like so long, but at the same time, it obviously hasn’t been enough.