Travel log: Berlin

I'll try to give a history of Berlin in one, very long paragraph. Here we go...Berlin's history dates back to 1197 when a log was found in what is now the city. The name comes from the Polabian root meaning "swamp". The first recorded community was Spandau, now a suburb of Berlin, where there was a prison and surprisingly Rudolph Hess, one of Hitler's adjutants captured by the British early in WWII, was found there confirming the fantastical science (a Nazi found alive in 1197) espoused by Hitler. Spandau prison was razed when Hess died in 1987. I know this makes no sense but neither did Hitler, nor the Ring Trilogy. Anyway, Berlin puttered along through the pre-Enlightenment age until Frederick II, sometime in the 17th Century, was thought to bring architecture to the city. He was known by the name of "Irontooth" after an outing which included bicycling in Amsterdam. The Edict of Potsdam (another suburb of Berlin) 1685 was part of a move toward enlightenment by the Northern European countries which allowed French Huguenots (Protestants) refuge from Catholic France. This Edict also allowed for emigration of many from Poland and Slovenia, including Jews. The Jewish diaspora, occurring after the Romans destroyed the Temple of Israel in 70AD and dispersed the Jews to Egypt, Greece and Spain. In the Iberian Peninsula the Jews were known to be good citizens but helped the Moors (Middle Eastern terrorists and Jew haters, what were THEY doing working together?) invade Europe as of 700AD. The Spanish and Portuguese never got over this and under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella circa. 1492 the Jews were dispersed, again, "Thanks for coming!", from the Iberian Peninsula into many parts of Europe including to Germany and Eastern Europe. I think Jews were not liked because they were good at holding onto money and this made Christians jealous, since all the Catholics had to send their money to Rome so they could buy a place in Heaven (I think the song went something like this, "When coin in coffer rings the soul from Purgatory springs...") Anyway, you can see where this is going-the Germans are becoming more welcoming to others and there are many Jews in the market for a home after the Spanish Inquisition. Frederick the Great was known as the philosopher King of Prussia, and Berlin, in 1740 and everybody was happy living together in square buildings with not enough windows. Napoleon marched into Berlin in 1806 and made everyone wear scarves, which nobody in Berlin liked, so he gave Berlin self-rule until he was sent to an island. In 1871 Bismarck tricked the French ("Nobody will make my people wear scarves!..You will wear scarves!") and Germany became a country with Berlin as its capital. WWI was a bust for Germany. President Wilson, England and France forced the Treaty of Versailles on Germany making them pay heavily for a war that everyone seemed happy to participate in. Wilson was good at moralizing but didn't seem very practical since everybody knows you shouldn't make Germans mad, and they were mad, oh baby, they were mad! So Germany did the best they could under the Wiemar Republic. In the 1920s Berlin was the largest municipality in the world but their economy was terrible with runaway inflation. Chaos ensued. The German people seem to like order, and not chaos, so they started listening to some lunatic that hated Jews as he clearly outlined in the two volume Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and everyone else who was short and had dark hair. But hey?! Hitler was short and...oh, well... Hitler was shrewd at playing politics and the German people. Since his minority party couldn't get enough votes for a coalition in the Reichstag's the Nazis decided to burn it down in 1933, but the Nazis successfully blamed a Dutch Communist, van der Lubbe, for the fire and arrested him while he was riding his bike (It has been thought that Hitler, as a propagandist in the 1920's, and Goebbels, propaganda minister of the Nazis, used mind strategies based on writings of Freud, a Swiss Jew. Freud was also the mastermind behind bacon and eggs for breakfast, but that's a distraction from this story). The chaos was great in Berlin and Germany which lead President von Hindenburg to give Hitler, as Chancellor, the right to suspend civil liberties and, for some reason, the Reichstag's gave Hitler the ability to write his own laws under the Enabling Act. (I'm whispering this..."What were they thinking?"...ssshhhh). After reading some history and experiencing Berlin, I believe as others do, that the German people were experiencing a sense of confusion and low self esteem lingering from WWI and the chaos that developed in their country as a young republic. Wiemar Germany couldn't make democracy work and their people were disgruntled so they reverted to a despot, claiming to enmesh national pride, nationalism, and a planned egalitarian economy, socialism, that later became a nightmare for Berlin and the country. This and the Jewish issue, one that was created through history by their dispersion from Palestine to Spain to Europe, led to a situation that we all know. I can't find a way to joke about this. The pictures in Berlin and Dachau prison that I have seen, that we've all seen, speak for themselves. The Third Reich, the Reich of a thousand years, fortunately did not come to fruition. Leaving still the only thousand year reign in Europe's history to be the reign of the Catholic Church, 400AD to about 1400AD, until the Reformation. The record remains. I'll back track a little and say that in addition to the distasteful behavior of the Nazi government I also think that doctors who torture and kill the ethnically impure and mentally unstable should not be invited to research conferences. Anyway, let's move on. Are you tired yet? Had enough of the Nazis? Let's move on to the communists. After Hitler killed himself in his bunker, now a parking lot, Berlin was in chaos, exactly what they were trying to avoid by putting Hitler in power. First the Russians moved in, then the Allies. In 1945 Berlin was partitioned into Russian, American, French and British quarters. The French and British fell out of the running early and eventually there was Russian Berlin and American Berlin. The Russians got East Germany after they beat the Americans in a game of Risk (A game of world domination!). So this left American, or West Berlin, an enclave in the middle of communist East Germany. The Russians got greedy and isolated West Berlin which lead to the Berlin airlift of 1948. It is said that every 3 minutes an American or British plane landed in West Berlin during its peak. But the hole in East Germany to West Germany let 3.5 million East Germans defect to the West. There was a hole in the Iron Curtain, so the Russians sent some spinsters to Germany and they mended the whole by knitting mittens, AND BUILDING A WALL. The East German government employees also realized that they had too many friends so they started spying on them through coffee pots, and arresting them, and torturing and killing them. "That should teach those people for being friendly", they thought. If you want to see a good movie dramatizing the Stazi Secret Police see The Lives of Others. So the wall coursed about 100 miles through the city of Berlin and went up in 1961. There were about 100 failed attempts to escape through the array of barbed wire, attack dogs, guard houses with men who had good eyesight and shooting skills, and eventually the wall. People tried to tunnel under it and fly over it in balloons. There is a memorial here to a kid who tried to escape, he was shot but not killed in "no man's land" and left to bleed to death without attention. They didn't even finish him off. Not friendly at all. Kennedy wrote a letter to Willy Brandt, West Berlin mayor, in 1963 stating that the wall was a sign of political cowardice by the East German government but the United States would not go to war over the issue. But Kennedy did go to Berlin in 1963 and it was here that he uttered those infamous words, "Eich bein ein Berliner" which translated means, "I am eating one Berliner". The crowd roared because they knew he had good intentions. Another presidential speech was given by Ronald Reagan in 1987 where he demanded that the USSR President demolish the wall as a symbol of Eastern intentions to lighten up a little, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The West had the USSR on the ropes, or Russia had the USSR on the ropes, and the Eastern block was crumbling. Finally, in the evening of Nov. 9, 1989 without any fanfare an East Berlin television station announced that there would no longer be travel restrictions between East and West Berlin, and then she moved onto sports. According to a cabbie that I discussed this with he, and others, had a difficult time believing the news was real. But when the Western stations began corroborating the news he and others were out of their apartments and planning to miss a few days of work. He also said that within about twelve hours the wall was being picked apart by the people. Apparently no one had said, OK you can go ahead and demolish that wall for us. No, it was a spontaneous and powerful thing. Berliners taking their city back. Now it looks great and apparently getting better. Berlin was again declared the center of government in 1991, Allied forces were gone by 1994 and the Bundestag (parliament) officially moved in 1999.