Germany is one of the biggest countries and economies in Europe and has a history which, whether we admit it or not, has affected all of us on multiple levels, including, for some, deep and personal ones. Even those of us born many years after the end of the World Wars and the cessation of hostilities have lived under the shadow of those wars and their aftermath and consequences. Catastrophes of that magnitude throw very long shadows, darkening the lives of generations of children and grandchildren, weighing on their lives and spirits, whether they are aware of it or not. Such is my experience, anyway.
So it was with a mixture of feelings that I learned that the venue of a course on which I teach had been moved from Belgium, which I have visited several times, to Berlin, which I had never visited – in fact I had never visited Germany. I was happy at the prospect of visiting one of the great capital cities of the world. Particularly appetising was the possibility that I would be able to at least figure out half of the street and shop names, notices, and the like – not that I can claim to speak German, but I have found that a good knowledge of Afrikaans, and a passing acquaintance with Yiddish through herself’s family, has helped a lot in the past. Coming from a country which is widely regarded itself to have undergone a miraculous unification and aversion of civil war in the 1990’s, I was keenly anticipating seeing the evidence of the “Berlin miracle” of 1989, when the Wall came down and nearly half a century of enforced artificial segregation came to an end. I was excited to visit the city where so many of the leading lights in my field of interest, particularly Robert Koch, had lived their lives, conducted their experiments, delivered their lectures and published their papers. Yet I could not escape the uneasy feeling that I would be visiting the city where Adolf Hitler, arguably the most evil person ever to have darkened our planetary doorstep, and his murderous band of henchmen, developed their pernicious theories and philosophies and then orchestrated and conducted their social engineering and reign of terror during the terrible decade of 1933-45. I would travel past places from which many thousands of Jewish men, women and children, not to mention other “undesirables”, were ripped from their families and communities and sent to lonely and terrible deaths in concentration camps. I had a feeling that I would find that 65 years had not been long enough to lay such ghosts to rest. I wondered what remnants I would find of a once thriving German Christian culture – many of the great Berlin churches were flattened in the Second World War and whilst some were rebuilt at great expense, I wondered whether I would find that Berliners had moved on and dispensed with God and the religion which informed every aspect of the lives of their forebears for so many centuries.
Saturday
I flew on the Lufthansa overnight direct flight from Cape Town to Frankfurt. It was a standard and uneventful flight and the only mildly irritating aspect was that for some reason I could check in online ahead of the flight but could not select my seat – I was told it would be assigned at the departure gate. The same applied when I dropped off my bag – the clerk told me she couldn’t assign my seat “because the plane is very full” – this despite the fact that I got to the airport 3 hours before my flight was due to leave. I threw a mildly hissy fit and was assured that I had a seat – they simply couldn’t say which one, so I retired to sulk on one of the seats next to A3 and read my book (Orsen Scott Gard – “The Worthing Chronicles” – sci-fi). In the end I had a nice seat – left side window, well back. But I could have done without the extra angst that comes with the creeping suspicion that you have been “bumped” but nobody is prepared to tell you so. We took off from Cape Town in a southerly direction around sunset and the captain took us on what I imagine was a courtesy flip over the peninsula – south to Cape Point and then north up the chain. I had a pretty good view of Simonstown, Fish Hoek and then Hout Bay, later Robben Island and then we left Cape Town behind and the view became either monotonous blue or monotonous white until the light faded and after that it was black with a small crescent moon hanging in the western sky.
Sunday
We landed very early at Frankfurt. To my surprise, the captain told us ground temperature was 12 degrees Celsius – I had expected less. I had been following temperatures in Germany the previous week on Google and Berlin had been down at minus 7. Two weeks before that it was in negative double figures. Also, my colleague from Cape Town had arrived in Berlin the previous day and had emailed to tell me that it was extremely cold. In fact his words were, “Make sure you bring something to keep your balls warm, if you don’t want to have an ice-block hanging between your legs!” So this was a pleasant surprise. I made my way to my connecting flight, with a brief pause at passport control and security. I had plenty of time, my luggage had been booked through and I was travelling on a European passport so I didn’t have any problems, despite the fact that Frankfurt is a huge (I find) and confusing airport.
I had a window seat in a rather empty plane to Berlin. Most of the view was cloud but as we neared Berlin we dipped below it and I saw a number of frozen lakes and a lot of snow – not a huge amount else, to be honest. I worried briefly about landing on ice, but no one else seemed concerned so I buried my head in my book and waited for the inevitable bump. It was quite a jolt when it came, and we seemed to slew back and forth a bit across the runway, but I expect the pilot and others knew what they were doing and soon enough we had slowed down and were turning off towards the apron.
Tegel Airport in Berlin is quite a small facility, compared to Frankfurt, for instance. What I particularly liked was that the relevant carousel is right next to each gate so that we literally stepped off our plane, walked along the airbridge and into a warmed room, where we waited a short while for our cases before proceeding to what seemed to be a fairly tame customs and security check – maybe because we had come from Frankfurt, not elsewhere. The fellow in uniform wanted to see my passport and know where I was from and, when he heard South Africa, he enquired whether I was bringing in cigarettes. I assured him I wasn’t and he let me in. I found the exit, stepped out into the freezing cold and wet, and found Bus 109 to the Zooligisches Garten. It was surprisingly cheap – €2 or thereabouts if I recall. I had to get off at the Bleibtreustrasse stop on Kurfurstendamm. All sounds like quite a mouthful, but by the time we left these were familiar names, rolling off our tongues like any others. Kurfurstendamm, I later learned, is like the Oxford Street of Berlin – the premier shopping district - which is odd, because it didn’t really look that posh, or not our section of it, anyway. Further down it got a bit posher.
Our hotel, the “Hotel Kurfurst Pension”, as it said above the door, was easy to miss – the front door was wedged between “City Jeans” and an estate agency, and was rather blandly signposted. I had to press the buzzer, at which a loud buzzing noise emitted from the doorpost and the door miraculously sprang open. I then had a choice of going up the three stories to the reception, in a lift the size of a wardrobe which travelled at about one floor per minute, or taking the stairs. Since I had luggage I took the lift – thereafter I always took the stairs. I was early for check-in, but they kindly changed my room to one of the front rooms with a bay window. I had a very agreeable continental breakfast with my colleague who had already been there a day and we agreed to meet later to do some exploring. I then retired to bed for a few hours to catch up on the sleep I hadn’t been able to get on the plane.
Around 4 pm we took a walk down Kurfurstendamm in the direction of the Zoologisches Garten. We stopped at Starbucks for a cafe latte – I am fond of Starbucks latte’s, for a number of reasons, not least the fact that they don’t cost the earth and you pretty much know what you are getting. I suppose the same goes for MacDonald’s, but not everyone is a fan of theirs. Entrance to the zoo was €12, so we gave that a miss, thinking we could probably see more wild animals in the streets of Cape Town for free. Instead we explored a few shopping complexes and then came across the “Erotic Museum”. Well, what can I say? – curiosity got the better of me! I imagined that they would have on display Hitler’s fishnet stockings or at the very least some examples of what Berliners through the ages had used on those long cold nights for their mutual amusement and titillation. So I was disappointed to find that it was nothing more than a sex shop selling a large number, but very little variety, of Scandinavian porn, and little else.
From the boringly mundane to the sublime – on the way back to our hotel we stopped into the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche – or Memorial Church. It was built in 1895 in honour of Kaiser Wilhelm 1, but was severely damaged in the bombing raids of 1943. After the war it was slated for demolition, largely for safety reasons, but in a referendum Berliners voted not to demolish it. The steeple tower, only half its original height, was preserved, along with the vestibule, and a new church built alongside. The edges of the steeple are jagged and I read that as a result the ruin is known to the locals as “The Hollow Tooth”. It did remind me of one of a cavity-ridden molars I had extracted from mouths of patients in my days as a bush-doctor. I found it all at once beautiful, haunting and very sad. The intended aim is, I guess, to remind the visitor of the horrors of war – in that it certainly succeeds. But I also sensed hope here - hope and light, enduring and resilient strength …
Dinner was at Ali Baba’s. Not very German sounding, but the small restaurant not far from our hotel had a wonderful atmosphere, great beer, really good pizzas and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg – about €20 for us both, I think. The beer was called Berliner Weise, which I learned is sour beer with a shot of raspberry or woodruff syrup. It is served in what looks like a large wineglass and looks like green (woodruff) or red (raspberry) cold drink. I had the green and my friend the red and we both enjoyed it. We then had a short, wet and cold walk back to the hotel and so to bed. Thus ended my first day in Berlin. Thus began my week long struggle with the central heating system of the hotel, of which more anon.
Monday
I was worried about getting to the Institute on Monday morning – the instructions sounded daunting. My colleague, on the other hand was unperturbed. I needn’t have worried - it turned out he was right – I should have had more faith in the German public transport system. I remember in Washington DC that the metro (underground) had electronic signboards which let you know exactly how many minutes it would be until the next train, but I have never encountered this system for buses. In Berlin they have one at each stop on the major routes and they tell you not only your own bus’s expected movements but a few others besides. Amazing! Couldn’t help thinking that in Cape Town they would be nicked and used as televisions or something…
We caught the 109 back towards Tegel Airport, but got out at the Schloss Charlottenburg – a mansion on the banks of the Spree, and then caught the M45 west down Spandaustrasse for about 10 blocks, over a major highway, to the DR Klinik stop, where we alighted. Simple. The DR Klinik is a satellite of Charite University Medical School, I suppose, and it houses their Institute of Tropical Medicine, which is where I would be teaching / lecturing / facilitating for the next five days. I won’t bore you with the details of the course except to say that it was run with Germanic efficiency and was very successful. Each morning started with a joke or a story – here are some of those I remember:
“A lecture is a process wherein whatever a professor describes is transferred directly to the notepads of the students without going through the brain of either the professor or the students”.
“A minibus taxi was stopped near the South Africa – Zimbabwe border. The traffic officer told the river that his department was running a campaign and that because the driver was wearing his seat belt, he would receive R1000. The driver was naturally delighted. The traffic officer asked him, “So what are you going to spend the R1000 on?” “Oh, I think I will buy a driver’s licence with it!” said the driver. The main in the passenger seat, sensing that trouble was looming, told the officer, “Don’t worry officer – he only speaks like that when he is drunk!” Another passenger moaned, “I knew we wouldn’t get far in a stolen vehicle!” The officer was starting to get alarmed when there was a knocking noise from the back of the taxi and a disembodied voice shouted, “Hey, are we through the border post yet – I need the toilet!”
“A vaccinologist got married and went on honeymoon. After dinner on the first night he retired to bed with his new wife. As he started undressing and removed his socks, she noticed that he had very odd looking toes and asked him what was wrong with them. “Oh”, he said, “I had toe-lio as a child”. When he removed his trousers, she noticed he had very strange knees and asked about their origin. “Oh”, he said, “I had knee-sles as a child”. When he removed his underwear, she gave a gasp and said “Don’t tell me – you suffered from small-cox as a child!”
Each day started at 9 and ended at 6 or after. This sounded fine, since where I had just come from the sun was rising around 5 and setting at 8. The nasty shock waiting for me on Day One was that by four p.m. the streets were dark and the sky black. We caught the bus back to the hotel in the gloom, but we got used to it after a few days.
I was keen to try Ali Baba’s again, but my compatriot wanted a change so we tried the German Deli on the corner. We agreed to meet in the foyer at 8 and walked the 100m or so to the Deli. It was bitterly cold and we were thankful to step off the pavement and into the warm room. It seemed we were the only guests. The barman greeted us in German. We did our best to respond in kind but he could obviously see we weren’t Berliners and switched to English. We surveyed the menu. Every second item seemed to be either pork or potato or both. I ordered the potato soup which turned out to be very rich and filling. Good choice. My friend had a salmon dish and pronounced it satisfactory. I convinced him that we needed to drink some German beer, although he is not a beer drinker. The barman obliged with two tall glasses (500ml) of a dark coloured draft. Superb. My friend didn’t agree, so I finished his as well!
I had been told that the speciality of Berlin is curry-wurst and that I must be sure to try some. Sure enough, there was a fast food on the corner advertising all types of wurst but emphasizing their curry wurst. I ordered one to take away. It turned out to be quite a messy affair. They sliced the sausage transversely and then slopped a fair amount of curry sauce over it. The bread was tasty, but very crumbly. Eating all of this in the hotel sitting room with a diminutive plastic fork and no napkins was a challenge and resulted in an appreciable amount of the meal ending up on the floor. As for the taste, it was interesting, pleasant, but I wouldn’t travel all the way to Berlin for it. Maybe we picked the wrong shop. Also, it didn’t seem very “German”.
Tuesday
We had another long day of lectures, discussion groups and the like. The weather was still wet and icy. Instead of taking lunch in the clinic’s staff cafeteria which is a 5 euro, sit-down affair, I walked up the road to a small convenience store and bought a large tin of peanuts which filled me up and gave me some exercise at the same time. I found those peanuts immensely satisfying – maybe they made me feel vaguely African again amidst the miserable Berlin weather.
My friend and I had been invited out for dinner with a colleague who originally comes from India, but has lived in Europe for many years and in Berlin for eight. He took us on a drive through the city centre, pointing out some famous structures and landmarks. We stopped alongside an old looking building which he indicated was the site of Robert Koch’s famous public lecture where he announced his discovery of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, well over a century ago. There is a plaque on the wall commemorating the occasion. He also took us to Checkpoint Charlie and the section of the wall which remains next to Hitler’s bunker, which they are making into some sort of museum. All very interesting, but the biting cold prevented us from spending too much time sight seeing. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant. I ordered a tofu vegetarian dish, which was a mistake. It wasn’t unpleasant, just nondescript. The others had some spicy seafood which they said was excellent. We washed it down with a nice bottle of South African Chardonnay and topped it off with banana (mine) and deep fried ice cream (my friend’s) deserts. All in all a very pleasant evening, and we were back at our hotel and in bed by 11 p.m.
Wednesday
Much the same sort of day, except that this time we had a Faculty Dinner at a German restaurant across Kaiser Friedrich Strasse from the Schloss Charlottenburg. It was a wonderful evening – great conversation, good food (I had the Bavarian wurst) and wonderful “seasonal” German beer, brewed on site in one of those huge copper contraptions, and again served in those long glasses by the half litre – it slipped down like honey. I liked it so much I had another glass, and then had to join two of my older colleagues, who are intrepid walkers, in electing to avoid the 109 bus back to the hotel and instead cover the 2 or 3km on foot. It was a cold but dry evening when we started and it only began to drizzle when we were a few blocks away from the hotel. I thoroughly enjoyed it. On the way, my Belgian colleague, who is a retired professor, educated us both on the tortuous convolutions of 20th century European history – normally one would have to pay a fortune for such an erudite tour guide!
Thursday
Our one free evening! Also the last evening before most of the European faculty would be going home to the UK, Belgium and elsewhere. It was rainy and miserable when we finished the sessions for the day, but we decided none the less to try and do some site seeing. We dropped our bags at the hotel and took a bus down Kurfurstendamm towards the Zoo, then transferred to another which would take us to the Fernsehturm tower in what was East Berlin. We found the tower and it was even open for visitors, but the person in the ticket office told us that there would be virtually no view from the top on account of the mist and cloud. At 12 euro that would be a bit steep so we decided against it and instead walked around the area to see what we could see. There was an impressive church nearby – the St. Marienkirche, which looked well preserved but was closed. Unfortunately the rain got worse so we eventually admitted defeat and took the bus home. It took us down Unter den Linden – originally a bridal path linking the royal residence with the Tiergarten, later the city’s most fashionable street, and then past the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, and through the Tiergarten to the zoo. We had all the upstairs front seats in the bus to ourselves, but unfortunately it was raining heavily by now and the windows were all misted up so we didn’t see much. For dinner we headed back to Ali Baba’s where we had another delightful meal of pizza and beer. Ironic that in a week in Berlin I should eat more Italian food than German, but there you are.
Friday
The course finished in the early afternoon. We had lunch in the DR Klinik cafeteria with our colleagues and bade some fond farewells, headed back to the hotel to drop our bags and then walked down Kurfurstendamm to the bus station at the Zoo. There is an area of central Berlin up near the Tiergarten called the Kulturforum – it houses a few churches, museums (and some “church-museums”) and the Philharmonie and Kammermusiksaal concert halls when the Berlin Philharmonic is based. I had a vague notion that I might be able to get into a concert although, my friends had warned me that concerts are sold out well ahead of time. They were correct – I could have heard Yo Yo Ma playing Shostakovich for €70 a seat (all the cheaper seats were sold out), but thought better of it - a decision I may live to regret. Instead, we walked through the Sony building, with its remarkable modern architecture, down to the Brandenburg Gate, with all that it means, and past the Reichstag. The weather held and we had a very interesting time, albeit most everything was closed. From the station under the Bundestag, we got on the U train which took us back to the Zoo, and then walked along under and next to the S line until we found a likely looking restaurant (which also turned out to be Italian!). After another pizza and another beer, we returned to the hotel.
Saturday
Blue sky! We had agreed that if the weather was good we would try and go for a run on Saturday morning, so at 7 a.m. I phoned my colleague and confirmed that he was still game – he was. At 7.30 we met, in tracksuits, if not quite in gloves and beanies, and began our run – down Kurfurstendamm to Breitscheidplatz (don’t you love these names), down Tauentzienstrasse, past the Europa Centre, past Wittenberg Platz and into Kleiststrasse, then left up An der Urania, Schill Strasse, and Klingelhoferstrasse (in Central Berlin the same strasse is wont to change its name every block or two, it seems, which gets confusing) to the Tiergarten. We ran up Hofjägerallee to the Grosser Stern and then along Strasse des 17 Juni (evidently named after a workers uprising in 1953 in former East Germany), back to the Zoo and the hotel. Nice light run – maybe 4km all told.
After breakfast and checking out we met a South African colleague who is working at Charite University and together we made the trip to the town/suburb of Potsdam. It takes half an hour or so by train and is well worth it. The train was clean, punctual and quiet, but it seems even in Berlin the graffiti artists had been busy on the windows with some sharp objects. Nothing that a horse whipping wouldn’t cure, say I. The track winds through suburbia and then snowy woodland and over one or two rivers and canals, I recall – very pretty. We arrived at a fairly large station and were almost immediately accosted by a short man with a large handlebar moustache, who was intent on being our tour guide. We listened politely (he spoke English), accepted the free map he offered us, and then told him we didn’t have time as we needed to return to Berlin in a few hours. We walked around the town, admiring some fine churches, including the very impressive 1830 Nikolaikirche, with its huge dome, the rows of beautiful red brick tenant houses in the 1733-42 Hollandisches Viertel, the “New Gate”, which looked fairly old to me, and finally the Neuer Garten, a lovely bit of parkland next to the Heiliger See, with its Marmor Palais (Marble Palace) and the manor house style Schloss Cecilienhof where Churchill, Stalin and Truman met to decide Germany’s fate and carve her up in 1945. It is now a hotel with a small museum.
I was a little concerned about making my flight, so probably didn’t stay in Potsdam as long as I should have – certainly worth another visit. We bought some food and drink (cheese roll and baked cheesecake for me) and took the train back to the Zoo, where we parted with a “give my love to Cape Town” from our colleague. A quick visit to a curio shop (I didn’t buy anything) and then back to the hotel.
The rest was pretty uneventful – Bus 109 to Tegel, check-in, long wait, short flight to Frankfurt, another long wait, and then the long flight home to Cape Town where I arrived a little after 10. The trip had been too short, but I know that I need to go back sometime, preferably with herself, to whom these sights, smells, sounds and names will mean a lot more. I cannot say “Ich bin ein Berliner” with JFK, but I can say that I loved Berlin, in a strange way that is difficult to articulate.
The amazing architecture of the Sony Building
St Marienkirche and the Fernsehturm tower
The Brandenburg Gate
St Nikolaikirche, Potsdam
A really impressive building just next to it.
The Heiliger See
Some interesting contrasts at the DR Klinik, Charite University.
