Berlin, the city with way too much history

While I knew I could never make it to all the historical sites in Berlin in two days, I did my best. Basically, each of my days was devoted to a war: WWII on Monday and the Cold War on Tuesday. This meant a walking tour with a premier WWII historian (that my father and uncle would have drooled over) on Monday, which was both incredibly informative and very tiring. We covered all the major spots, including the location of Hitler's bunker, and some more out of the way things, like the office in which Operation Valkerie was planned and executed. One of the most interesting things about Berlin is that you can tell if the building pre-dates the bombing of the city because they all have bullet holes in them. Afterward, I wandered some of the non-entry city sites like the Reichstag (which is now similar to the White House's entrance policies, you have to request admission in advance to go inside or up in the dome) and the Victory Column in the Tiergarten.

Tuesday, I made up my own tour of the Cold War sites. I returned to the Topography of Terror, a museum on the former site of the Gestapo, SS, and SD headquarters that also happens to have one of the longest remaining stretches of the wall in the city. From there, I went to Checkpoint Charlie, which is the former entrance/exit point of the American sector in West Berlin. Finally, I hopped on the S-Bahn and went to the Memorial to the Wall in Northwest Berlin. While the whole thing was cool, the best part was an artist's reconstruction of what the "Death Strip" (i.e., the area between the wall on the East side and the wall on the West side) probably looked like. They're working on an extension of the memorial - which is also an outdoor museum in its own right - that looks like it should be done soon. The major Wall site that I missed was the East Side Gallery, which is a 1.3km strip of wall left in southeast Berlin that has had paintings added to it by artists after the Wall "came down" in 1989. Luckily, we drove by it on the way out of the city this morning, so I got to see it nonetheless.

Oh, and before I went on my Cold War spree, I went to Museuminsel (Museum Island) and visited two museums. The second one, the Neues Museum, holds the famous bust of Nefertiti...no big deal.

The bus arrived relatively early into Prague this afternoon, 2pm, which is good because I'm only here until tomorrow morning. But I'll leave that for the next entry.