breathe history!
by Gillianina
What I liked most in Berlin is that every brick and every street of this city smells like history. It's a lively city, with a character and a soul. The things I visited I liked most are Brandenburg Gate, the museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie and the East Side Gallery. "freezing" with my friends around the city in search of Berlin's sights, making weird and funny pictures, the AEGEE party (and the cola rum!!), sitting in Starbucks and watching Brandenburg Gate for hours, after having dreamt of seeing it "live" for ages :-)
Wall Markings and more Traces of the Wall
by Kakapo2
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The Wall markings (Mauermarkierung) in Zimmerstraße near Checkpoint Charlie are close to being fun. You put one foot on the east side of the marking and one foot to the west, and somehow you cannot imagine what happened there.
If you want to get depressed go to Bernauer Straße (U-Bahn station of U 8; Bernauer Straße 111, 13355 Berlin-Mitte) which separtes the suburbs of Mitte (east) and Wedding (west). The former death stripe is still a bare space between apartment buildings. It shows the former border in its brutality with the death-stripe, consisting of the so-called Vorderlandmauer (front-wall), gravel stripe, road, light stripe and Hinterlandmauer (back-wall).
On August 1961 they started to shut off the houses in the Russian sector. The people jumped from their windows onto the footpath in the French sector. Soon the houses were demolished, just the walls remained as border wall. To clean up the death-stripe the graves of Sophien cemetery were relocated, and in 1985 they blew up the Church of Reconciliation (Versöhnungskirche) – at its former site a chapel was erected in 1999.
Since 1998 there is a memorial site at the corner with Ackerstraße, and a Dokumentationszentrum Berliner Mauer.
Another incredibly distasteful site of the Wall is Invalidenfriedhof, north of Hauptbahnhof. They flattened parts of the cemetery and used the cemetery wall as the part of the border fortification. But not a lot has remained of this part of the death-stripe.
Near Brandenburger Tor you will find an installation of trees, memorial stones and border segments as the reminder of the Wall and the people who died here.
Cricket in Berlin
by morgenhund
The Olympic Stadium complex also contains a cricket ground, with an artificial wicket, and there are now some 100 or so cricketers in Berlin, with 7 clubs making up the Berliner Cricket Komittee. There are matches most weekends, although there is often space in the calendar for friendlies.
Some teams include native Germans and the standard is good. The ground is very close to the German Sport Forum, where the Olympic Bell, replete with tank piercing shell damage, can be found.
The ground is a lovely mature ground surrounded by an alley of poplar trees, with changing facilities, scoreboard and residual crowd ripple from Hertha's nearby Stadium. There are no cricket equipment shops in Berlin.
Beautiful building ? Not for everyone.
by matcrazy1
This very looong, old, beautiful and pretty renovated buiding on my picture was located along western side of Mehringdamm. It housed local tax office of the district of Kreuzberg ("Finanzamt Kreuzberg"). Probably not all locals loved this building :-).
Hmm... one district and a few hundreds tax office staff working there? Was it a sign of huge European/German beaurocracy or of perfect tax system?
Volume Enough
by hartti about Quasimodo
It was quite a experience when 12-man horn orchestra was playing in a small cellar room. The orchestra was Barry Ross' Swing Machine, and there was noise enough... It was 1985, and I don't know, if the club is still working.
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Parisier Kommune
Kartoffel kiste
German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin
Sachsenhausen Camp,Oranienburg,Germany.
