Berlin in Seven Parts (Day 1: Kreutzberg)

Greetings, everyone!

I'm glad to see you're still checking in here. There haven't been posts in many months, but I have many things to post about, some of which are backlogged, and I plan on updating several times in the coming weeks and months, so keep checking in!

This week's posts are about Berlin, Germany, where Na'ama and I went for a week's vacation this last Easter/Passover. It's a huge, beautiful, fascinating city with an equally fascinating (and chilling) history, often written directly through the buildings and the streets. As always, click to enlarge the photos and see some of the details. This is a long trip, so I will divide it into seven days, and post one at a time.

Berlin Day One: Kreutzberg and Environs

We booked a hostel in a younger and cheaper neighborhood in the southern part of the city center called Kreutzberg. This is a shot of our hostel building above, which used to be a medium-scale factory. The tall ceilings, long hallways, and block-like large rooms are now filled with IKEA furniture, and the price was right. Also, it is located mere steps (steps!) from a U-Bahn (underground railway) station, so it was very easy to get moving through the city in the mornings.

This is a shot directly outside the hostel on street level. The enormous line is for a street vendor called Mustafa who served famously delicious shawarma and other middle-eastern specialties. This line stretched down the block day and night, every day and every night. The wait, combined with an already too-intimate appreciation of middle-eastern food, prevented us from finding out just how delicious it was.

The wonderful first day is always for making some circles in the neighborhood and seeing what is where. Across the Mehringdamm boulevard from our hostel was this serene and beautiful graveyard, with many graves from the early part of the century. Berlin was full of little park oases like this (though usually without the accompanying gravestones.)

A little further north on Mehringdamm we came across this spectacular mural on the side of a rooming house, the first of many we found in the Kreutzberg area. Notice how it's on both sides of the building, and how the "sky" of the mural blends in with the surrounding skyline. It shows some prominent Berlin buildings being sucked into some kind of vortex, though I don't know any of the symbolism.

Directly east of the muraled building was this courtyard park. Kreutzberg had a slower, Brooklyn-like feel to it, with many small businesses, restaurants, and an unpolished, artsy aesthetic. In retrospect, much of Berlin felt like this by varying degrees.

The Jewish Museum, one of Berlin's new architectural achievements, was also in the Kreutzberg neighborhood. From above, it resembles a deconstructed Star of David, and has many "experiential" architectural components, one of which can be seen closer below:

This sunken garden is a series of columns on a tilted plane that's meant to give a sense of disorientation and uneasiness while walking through, and supposed to mirror the disorientation of Jewish emigrees during WWII. We went through later, and it certainly did the trick.

Meanwhile, up the street, sitting down outside at a Thai restaurant in the neighborhood. The weather in April was just starting to turn warm, and it was a fantastic time to be outside.

Na'ama has the Tom Kha, and I have the Tom Yum and a Berliner Pilsner while looking up how to say "the check, please" in German. My German sounds simultaneously French and Hebraic, and is rarely accurate, but I have fun. The food is spicy and wonderful on this brisk day.

Down the same street there were a few more examples of this awesome muraling. These are public apartments (I think).

This wise man endorses any billboard mounted near his face.

A broad shot of the street from a square. The apartment building on the left is ring-shaped and is elevated off the ground like many of the apartment blocks in Tel Aviv.

A large church. Every church I saw in Berlin was made out of red bricks. This was something that was new to me, and I wondered if they were rebuilt after the war, but apparently Protestant churches in this part of Germany were just mortared from red bricks as a general practice.

When we got inside we saw that the church was actually a performance space. It may have doubled as a church as well (still had the pipe organ) but it looked like it was mainly used for concerts and other secular gatherings, and it had catwalks for curtains and other modular stage appurtenances.

A rendering of the church hanging in the vestibule.

The actual church, outside, from a better angle.

I love this shot. The streets are almost disproportionately wide in many parts of Berlin, and the sunlight filters through the trees lining them. The main boulevard in town, we would later find out, is called "Unter den Linden" which literally means "under the linden trees".

This is a wonderful shot (taken by Na'ama) that has a flower shop's corner with bleeding hearts juxtaposed with the graffiti and brick exterior. Flower, or blumen shops were super-common in Berlin.

Bergmannstrasse. What a cool street. This ran East-to-West on the southern edge of Kreutzberg, and had a dazzling assortment of specialty shops, world restaurants, coffee places, and a generally young and relaxed atmosphere. The sun was shining, so the espresso lounge (and many other coffee shops) opened their accordion-style front windows and let the tables spill onto the street.

Up the hill a bit from Bergmannstrasse was Viktoriapark, an urban park from the early 1800s. No gravestones, but a monument to the Napoleonic wars at the top. Very peaceful near the end of the day.

Another specialty shop in the area, this time with books. Some intriguing silk-screened prints lure us to its windows.

For adventure, we ducked into a courtyard on the street and found a "secret garden" that the surrounding buildings faced. Kreutzberg could be rather bustling in the Bergmannstrasse area, but this was a very quiet retreat with some mighty old apartment buildings around. I loved the inlaid steps with "SALVE." written on the stoop. It might be a religious reference, and I'm not sure, but what a great way to be "hailed" every day.

That evening, we met up with some local friends: Mindi and her husband, originally from the states, both teach at JFK which is the local German international school. Mindi is a string teacher I had met at a few festivals, and it was too convenient not to visit, which they generously made time for. We went to a local German/Mexican(!) restaurant and each had a margarita, each a different color. End Day 1.