the Grand Tour blog

Fine-tuning Berlin Highlights and Travel Details

The 'Highlights List' is now up to four pages of closely typed notes on the places I want to visit in Berlin, with two more pages of restaurants and highlights that I've already visited and probably won't go to again, but might. New attractions keep turning up and have to be fitted in somewhere. There are now 16 museums and galleries on the list, plus many other places including the multiple attractions in Frederick the Great's Park Sanssouci in Potsdam.

I'm pleased to have managed to book a place at an English talk on the Deutcher Bundestag – the German parliament – which takes place once a week in the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag. Much security palaver, as expected, but I now have the confirmation. Afterwards a chance so see the superb Norman Foster dome at the top of the building, which was closed for routine maintenance when I visited last year so that I had to wander round the outside in a rather cold wind.

Before leaving, I seem to have managed to get the 18 mile journey to the airport down to an hour and 40 minutes, by using three buses, so that I shall now have to leave home only four hours before take-off.

Months ago, when booking the flight, I had wondered whether I should choose to be one of the last people to use Schönefeld airport, or one of the first to use Berlin Brandenburg, which will replace Schönefeld and Tegel and was due to open on 3 June. But now it has been announced that the opening has been delayed (again) "indefinitely" – certainly until August this year. I'm rather glad to be going there and (hopefully) back before the inevitable chaos of the non-change sets in. 

Preparing for Berlin

As I come within sight of my ten-day return visit to Berlin, it's time to blow the dust out of the blog and check that everything still works.

I went there first - briefly - in 2008, as the final destination on my Grand Tour. I returned for three days last year, at the end of the shorter tour based on Leipzig, and came away feeling that I really ought to make a proper visit with the time to take in some of the superb art collections at a more leisurely pace. So this is it.

Actually I will have eight days 'on the ground', plus two tedious days of travel. The planning is mostly done, apart from trying to arrange an outline daily itinerary. I don't want to fix too much in advance, especially as this is meant to be a more relaxed trip, and much will depend on the weather. But some galleries and museums are naturally connected, either because they're physically close or can share tickets. Some are closed on Mondays, others not, and some are best avoided at weekends. I have one concert booked, in the wonderful Philharmonie.

I'm sorry to say that I shall be flying to Berlin - one of the last passengers to use the city's Schönefeld airport before it closes on 2 June - rather than my preferred option of travelling by train. Not that I have a problem with the flying itself, but the endless waiting around at a ghastly airport is really rather unpleasant. Added to which it looks as if I shall have to leave home no less than five hours before my flight to travel the 18 miles to the airport, such is the dire state of public transport in rural Hertfordshire.

Winding Down in Berlin

Saturday: departure day, although not until the evening. But it did mean I had to pack everything properly and bear in mind what I might need easy access to on the night train. Paid the hotel bill – only the second time I'd seen my hosts as I'd been out very early on both of the previous mornings – and to the nearby stop for the 142 bus to the Hauptbahnhof to leave my suitcase; the bus a new discovery for me, saving the 1.5km slog along Inviladenstraße which is currently in the middle of road works. The luggage lockers at the station are open again now – last time I was here everyone had to use the manual check-in system.

Then S-bahn to Friedrichstraße Bahnhof, U6 to Stadt Mitte with its confusing multiple exits, and eventually to Gendarmenmarkt. The sun is shining, for the first time since Leipzig! Which is just as well as I have no inside visits planned for my final day. I hung around Gendarmenmarkt for quite a while, enjoying the sun and taking a few pix of the Konzerthaus and the tall, narrow, matching Deutscher Dom and Französischer Dom:

The tower of the Französischer Dom had been closed as there was a wedding taking place in the church, but it reopened around 13:30 and inevitably I climbed to the top for views over the city. Then to Bebelplatz, where the outside of the opera house, the Deutscher Staatoper, is undergoing building work. But the point of interest for me was the glass panel, perhaps 4-feet or so square, let into the cobbles and providing a view into the Empty Library, whose blank shelves commemorate the book burning by the Nazis in 1933. 

Across Unter den Linden to Neue Wache, designed as a guard house by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1818 and used as such for a hundred years. It is now the National Memorial to Victims of War and Tyranny. At its centre an enlarged replica – by Harald Haacke – of the sculpture "Mother with her dead son" by Käthe Kollwitz:

Farther east along Unter den Linden to the river the crowds were heavier and the music louder, so I did the tourist thing as far as Alexanderplatz and the base of the Fernsehturm, before admitting defeat and heading west by S-bahn back to the Hauptbahnhof. At which point I dropped my sunglasses and someone must have seen them fall and made off with them. Basta! 

Before grabbing some junk food in the station and making for my 19:08 night train to Paris, I called in to the nearby Hamburger Bahnhof, an old station that is now the Museum für Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art). But the only ticket they could offer was a €12.00 combi-ticket to the entire museum, which certainly wasn't worth it for the less than an hour I had available.

So that's it. Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin.

Recalling the 20th Century

Friday was grey. Again. And felt cold: I wore an extra layer for the first time, and was glad of it. I got up slowly, after all that art on Thursday, but was out by 7:30. Walked to Oranienburger Tor station and took the S-bahn down to Unter den Linden.

Pariser Platz had been cleared of its rubbish and was almost empty, so a chance for a couple of pix of the Brandenberg Gate, although an almost white sky was not what I wanted. I'd picked up a coffee on the way and found it fits neatly in the camera bag – with a lid on of course – in the space where the camera normally sits.

To the nearby Holocaust Memorial, the huge field of marble-like concrete blocks; evenly spaced, yet uneven, the outer blocks like graves. Walking among the tall ones in the centre feels oppressive and disorientating, though the way out is clear. Thought provoking. I spent 45 minutes or so taking abstract photos, with the thought of some sort of photo essay in the back of my mind:

Then a disrupted U-bahn journey (due to engineering work) towards the Kurfurstendamm 'shopping street'; specifically to the Käthe Kollwitz Museum. I've only recently become aware of her: active from around 1890 to World War II, her work in sculpture, charcoal, ink, lithograph and woodcut – always monochrome – often follows a mother and child theme, and particularly the suffering and sacrifice of war. It was heavily influenced by the death of her son Peter as an underage volunteer in 1914.

Her original pictures, beautifully displayed here, are incredibly moving, yet not depressing: her mothers are always protective, cradling. Often she seems to convey grief through the hands. She made a large number of self portraits, and has a striking profile. Predictably she was outlawed by the National Socialists in the 1930s.

To Berlin Zoo station, then, and ran for an M45 bus just leaving for Schloss Charlottenberg. In fact I was heading for the Berggreun Museum opposite the palace, but found that the ticket is now a joint one with the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection opposite (new to me), a modest but super display of Surrealist art by Max Klinger, Manet, Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Dali, Magritte and others; an unexpected bonus. Also in the same museum an exhibition of photos by the photographer Brassaï: 'On the Street: Graffiti', interspersed with paintings by Jean Debuffet; another bonus.

After an hour and a quarter there, across the road to Museum Berggreun, an outstanding collection of 20th century art, originally put together as a personal selection, and often with the collaboration of the artists themselves. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Giacometti, among others. And photos by Brassaï of the artists. Well, it kept me entertained for another 75 minutes.

By which time it was 5:00pm, and I'd missed a couple of highlights from the day's itinerary: one was the Funkturm, the old TV tower with a 126m high observation platform. It was open late, but the weather was too dull for any good daytime photos, and it's not properly dark – to capture city lights – until after 10:30pm, so I was happy to give it a miss.

Big Art in Berlin

Yesterday was my day to visit the big art galleries in the Kulturforum, the gaggle of museums plus the Philharmonie on the south-west edge of the city centre (Mitte): but the art to be preceded by some photo opportunities. So I was up early and out by 6:40 for the simple journey to the Brandenburg Gate to try to get the photos I failed to get last time because of a concert there. It rained heavily in the night and the weather was grey and very dull, not the bright July sunshine I'd expected.

And when I got there I found people cleaning up after another event the night before. I did my best with the camera and moved onto the Reichstag, where I wanted to get to the Norman Foster dome. It opens at 8:00 and I was there at 7:50, but noted that you now have to book online in advance. Luckily I had my passport with me and the nice lady on the gate let me in anyway. But they're working inside the dome so it's not possible to go up the spiral path inside at present; I made do with photos of the outside. The wind up there was very cold.

A couple of short bus journeys, to save my aching feet, to the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (Memorial to German Resistance), which is a huge and absorbing collection of photos and documents covering resistance to the Nazis. Visited the office of Stauffenberg, the officer who attempted to blow up Hitler. Stayed an hour, following the audio guide.

Walked to the Kunstgewerbemiseum (Museum of Applied Arts) to see a superb collection of European glass, ceramics, silver and furniture from the Renaissance to the 1960s. In an hour and a half it had to be a flying visit, but well worth it

Another short bus trip away from the Kulturforum to the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a building designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius's uncle, to see a major 300 print exhibition of work by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, one of my photo heroes. Another hour and a half...

After some domestic work – i.e. finding a bank, a surprisingly difficult thing to do in Berlin – I bussed back to the Kulturforum and the Neue Nationalgerie, the wonderfully simple building designed in 1965 by Mies van der Rohe, which houses a huge collection of 20th century paintings. The current exhibition, the first of two showing the collection, is called Modern Times (Moderne Zeiten) and covers 1900-1945. There was a lot that I liked, and I took many notes in the two hours I was there.

Finally, at 6:00pm, to the Gemäldegalerie (literally ‘Picture House’) – there's method in my madness as the last two galleries are open late on Thursdays – for a fabulous collection of early European paintings, with all the big names, and many others, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. But by 7:30 I'd run out of energy, despite stocking up on Sachertorte during the afternoon, so had to call it a day. Luckily I managed to get a table at my favourite Berlin restaurant.

Been Busy in Berlin

Here I am in Berlin towards the end of a rather hectic schedule, hence the lack of blog posts for a few days. I'm going to have to do a quick summary of the last three days: Wednesday morning I packed everything away after six nights in Leipzig - was it really that long? - said my goodbyes, paid a last quick visit to the Grassi Museum, and caught my pre-booked midday InterCity Express to Berlin.

By 2:30pm I was installed in my hotel north of the centre, close to where I stayed on the Grand Tour, and walked the short distance to the Berlin Wall Memorial, near Nordbahnhof station. Not just a section of the well known wall, it also has the inner wall, the very wide 'Death Strip' between the two, and a representation of the electrified barbed wire fence that ran along the middle. Particularly moving is the memorial, with photos, to the many who died trying to escape to the West; I noted among them two children of five and six.

Then to Hackeschen Höfe, 'restored early 20th century courtyards' says my guide book, actually now mainly expensive boutique fashion shops - and their customers - of the type I have trouble coming to terms with. But especially poignant (when I managed to find it) the museum about Otto Weidt, who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis by employing them in his workshop for the blind, in this building, making brushes 'for the war effort', as well as hiding them, giving them false papers, bribing officials, and more.

Finally, after ten days, I have an Internet connection via WiFi rather than over the roaming phone network.