Berlin

Berlin Wall
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Rob scribbling now, at least this time I knew it was my turn.

19/07/08

LuxOase has proved to the best site we have been at so far, the facilities were excellent, clean and plentiful. The staff in the office couldn’t have been more been helpful with all our queries ranging from places to go and have the clutch on the E car checked, punctures repaired, questions about where and what the Green Vault Is, all were handled efficiently and with a smile. We were almost sad to leave and head for Berlin with some trepidation this is the first tow trip after discovering the clutch is faulty in the E car. Fortunately the trip went well but every variation in the engine note had me wondering if the clutch was slipping, only once when I tried to accelerate too fast at too high a speed did we get any slip. Only 1200 very long kilometres to go.

Brandenburg Gate
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Our target site for the day went by the name of Sans Souci, on the other side of the world and we have gone no further than 30km from home. We had rung two days ago to check on site availability and were laughingly assured that there were plenty of sites and no booking was required, come one come all. But in the early part of the drive Sister Sue was doing some reading in the Book of Words, Lonely Planet, and announced that the biggest festival in Berlin outside of Octoberfest is the Love Weekend and it happens in the middle of July, now, today. Another call to Sans Souci revealed that we were not without care as the name suggested they were full and all of a sudden they lost their English. Some frantic work with the computers and Nav systems soon had us on the phone to another site, “Haben sie swei platz fur swei caravan und feir adult fur feir tage”, I thought I had asked if they had two sites for two caravans and four adults for four days. I don’t know what they thought I said but the answer came back “Jah Namen”, yes your name. I know my alphabet well in English but it is very different in German so I have no idea who they were expecting but it didn’t matter because we missed a sign on the way and ended up at an entirely different caravan site also operated by the Deutsche Camping Club and only about 4 kilometres from the other. After sitting outside the gate for 2 hours, we arrived just after 13:00 when the gates closed and they opened for no one until 15:00, we were ragged by the guy in the office about not having a reservation and how short he was of sites while he gave us two adjacent sites very close to the amenities, just goes to show that even Germans do have a sense of humour of sorts.

20/07/08

The site is located at Kladow in the vicinity of Potsdam and is only about ½ an hour outside Berlin, we targeted the nearest parking area to Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and set out. Why Potsdamer Platz, Anne had an ambition to visit the site of the Berlin Wall and Potsdamer Platz is where some of the most public remnants of the wall are situated. On the way in we were staggered by the number of Polizei vehicles we saw, in fact we were actually part of a convoy of six or seven vans full of Berlin’s finest and the riot gear for a short time. I don’t think that Richard was sweating but he did get out of the convoy at the first opportunity without speeding. The closer we got to the city the more Police we saw and still no indication why, none of the Police we saw were in a hurry and they all looked very relaxed and jovial as they went by, a mystery.

Sure enough when we walked into Potsdamer Platz there is this immense square was a number of concrete segments of the wall covered with a multitude of graffiti and accompanied by some very good explanatory signs giving a potted history of the wall’s past and a glimpse into its future. Much of it has been demolished but what is left is to be preserved and their intention is to trace the entire path of the wall and keep it clear as a memorial to those who crossed it by various means.

While the war ended in 1945 and Germany was divided formally since 1946 the Wall did not actually go up until August 1961 and went through several early versions before the concrete barrier we are all so familiar with was created. In Berlin the wall was about 159km in length but it also stretched along the entire East/West German Border for more than 1000km some of which was concrete barriers but there were also expanded steel barriers, barbed wire entanglements, minefields, watchtowers, automatic weapons, barriers in waterways the list is endless. Some of the early escapes after the border was closed were simple, Bernauer Strasse formed part of the boundary and some of the more than 400,000 escapees until 1989 merely walked in the back door of the residences and out the front into the West. When the GDR bricked up the doors they jumped out of the windows and when the windows were bricked up they tunnelled under the road. Then the GDR opened up the dead zones of up to 70 metres where every structure was demolished.

The means employed by those trying to escape were truly amazing. We spent a couple of hours in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum that documents the spirit of the people trapped in East Germany. Can you imagine spending 4 hours confined inside an Industrial Welder, or 2 hours folded up inside a pop musicians speaker system, 30 minutes under the front fuel tank of a Volkswagen Beetle, 70 minutes on a luggage rack in a train with your body in two suitcases, work that one out.

The spirit of these people astounds you, one story worth retelling is that of a group of elderly citizens who when they were informed by a neighbour that he was digging a tunnel asked if all of them could go with him. They were incensed when he refused because they were too old and his tunnel was going to be only 80cm or so square and he felt that the oldies would freak out in the confined and they wouldn’t be able to crawl the length of the tunnel. Bear in mind that the oldest of this group was 81 and the youngest 46, but they decided that they would dig their own tunnel and in 32 days they dug a tunnel 32 metres long, 1.75 metres high and 0.8 metres wide successfully escaping to the West before the whippersnappers that said they couldn’t go. When asked why they had dug such a large tunnel they explained that they did not want their wives crawling through the tunnel, that was undignified. All except the 81 year actually dug in the tunnel relocating the spoil to a disused chicken coop. The 81 year was the lookout working in the garden continually replanting the same sapling for the whole construction time.

We tore ourselves away from the Museum and headed for the Brandenburg Gate on the City Tour bus only to find that today road access to the Gate was closed, now we know where all the Police are and we found ourselves at the Antique Market. After a quick troll through the market for who knows what we set out to walk to the gate only to run into a road block and finally found out why the Police were everywhere. There was to be a swearing in ceremony for the Army at the Reichstag and a huge area had been cordoned off.

After an enforced, politely of course, detour we finally arrive in Pariser Platz and were able to see the gate. The area was thronging with tourists and locals but nobody paid much attention at all to the Police barriers at the end of the street. They were more interested in the various street performers and the odd protestor in the area like the guy wandering around with a very large banner asking why Yugoslavia is no longer in the world. Or the living statute in weathered bronze makeup and an East German Uniform, or the acrobatic skateboard and BMX performers.

Enough is enough, we have seen Check Point Charlie and its Museum, we have seen the Brandenburg Gate, we have been to Alexander Platz and its magnificent reconstructed buildings and we have had a bus tour around most of the city, time to plod back to the car and go home.

Considering that more than 70% of Berlin was destroyed in WWII it is not surprising that there are fewer historic buildings than we have seen elsewhere, and it is only 20 years since a wall ran through the city the recovery and development is fantastic. On the bus they said that Berlin was the biggest construction site in Europe and even though the commentary was several years old it is not hard to believe it.

21/07/08

The weather is back what we now consider to be normal for a European summer, wet, windy and overcast. Anne’s problem is not getting any better, probably worse and the main concern is now for her health and with ear problems will she be able to fly to Helsinki and more importantly home in a matter of weeks. The problem is first to find an appropriate doctor who also speaks English, not an easy task. With the weather as it is we decided that a quiet day in camp would do us all a lot of good particularly Annie.