Travel Guides: All Countries / Europe / Germany / Berlin
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| | | | When the wall came tumbling down
From the Mail on Sunday
Can you imagine being asked along to witness the Russian revolutionaries storming the Winter Palace in St Petersburg or getting an invitation to attend the guillotining of Louis XVI?
It isn't often you get the chance to watch history in the making. So I well remember the day in November 1989 when I was asked if I wanted to join a day-trip to Berlin to see the Wall coming down.
So it was that just three days after the Wall started to crumble, about 200 of us - each having paid £100 for the privilege - gathered at an unfeasibly early hour on a Sunday morning at Luton airport. There was an extraordinary buzz of anticipation, something I've never experienced before or since.
I had been to Berlin in 1972 on an Inter-Rail trip. Instead of leaving the train at the Zoological Gardens - does this sound like the main stop to you? - I was still on board when I glanced out of the window and saw we were crossing what looked like the Berlin Wall.
It was the Berlin Wall. I nervously got off at Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin and found myself visa-less in a terrifying Iron Curtain scene from a James Bond movie: there were even machine gun-toting border guards patrolling the roof of the station with attack dogs.
With creditable self-possession, I climbed on the first train which seemed to be going in the direction from which I'd come. I was as relieved to arrive in West Berlin as an escaping East German refugee.
Landing at Tegel airport on our 1989 day trip, we were bussed to a spot near the Reichstag and then set free to wander where we wished. As soon as I left the coach, all around the air was filled with the noise of hammering.
Right along the length of the Wall as far as the eye could see, people were chipping away at it in a mad frenzy. If this wasn't bizarre enough, at certain points East German border guards stood on top of the Wall coolly watching people destroy their border - and they could do nothing about it.
Travel guide: Berlin
How Berlin rediscovered it's cool
It's official! Even if the World Cup didn't persuade you, Germany is now cool. Or very nearly.
The proof: a weekend nightclubbing in Berlin failed to uncover a single mullet hairstyle amid the sweaty, raving, moshing masses.
Yes, it seems the Germans have embraced the third millennium and no one wants to look like the Kajagoogoo drummer any more. And that can only be a good thing for humankind.
The German capital can seem a strange mixture of concrete and charm. On the face of it, much of it quite ugly.
But it is reinventing itself this year and it's not just down to football. Berlin has daytime treats like museums and historical sites like the Brandenburg Gate. It's also keen to claim that it's a 24-hour party capital.
During the World Cup hundreds of people were playing football at midnight on the temporary five-a-side pitches put up on the Reichstag's lawn.
As the saying on the sign in front of the Humboldt University bang in the middle of Berlin says: 'Germany is a land of ideas'. Just so you get the point, a huge sculpture of books, bearing the names of such intellectual giants as Marx, Thomas Mann and Goethe on the spines, stands nearby.
The Berlin wall was quite an original idea. But it was a rare bad one, though it has spawned its own tourist mystique.
A rather better idea for instance, is Splinder and Klatt. It might sound like an accountancy firm. But way out east on the River Spree, a huge warehouse in the middle of nowhere has been converted into a restaurant seating several hundred with a DJ spinning some tunes - it's a lot more relaxing than it might sound.
You can loll about on a bed pretending you're Emperor Nero as your food is fetched and you sprawl on a mattress. The only mullet is on the menu. Or was it tuna?
And at about £12 a main course you won't pay through the nose for the privilege.
Despite the grime, the relentless lack of prettification and the sheer functionality of much of former communist east Berlin, the wit and originality take you by surprise.
The Panorama bar is reached by taxi down a rutted road. Another block of ugly concrete. It's a former electricity factory which has been converted into a 24-hour nightclub.
But inside at 6am, there are about 1,000 people hedonistically pursuing the holy grail of nightclubbing nirvana and another great idea has just paid dividends.
Elsewhere, the Badeschiff has a sandpit to dance in and a swimming pool next to a river, so take your Speedos.
Next door is Hoppetosse - not only a great name, but a great club. It's located on a boat, and has two floors, a sweaty dance floor and some lovely cakes.
At Kiki Blofeld, supposedly named after the daughter of the James Bond baddie Blofeld, you can almost dance on the water. Upstairs you are outside in a garden playing pool in the open air or sitting on grass mounds.
Downstairs, a dance floor is set up over the river. In Britain the prevalence of binge-drinking Brits would make this a no-no - teetering tipplers would surely have collapsed into the water.
But Berliners can be trusted to behave with a decorum that we Brits rarely export. There are no chundering chavs slumped in the entrance to the loos as binge drinking appears to be frowned upon.
And the dress code is downbeat - no overdressed peacocks swaggering around like they own the universe. Leave your top togs back in Blighty otherwise you'll look like Puff Daddy. Foppery is forbidden!
Berlin is already renowned for the Love Parade in July, which attracts revellers from all over the globe. But there's no need to restrict yourself to the one event if a big night out is what you after.
To outsiders, Germany has reinvented itself this year and it's not just down to football. The transformation of its international image must rank as one of tourism's latter-day minor miracles.
Stay up all night in Berlin and you'll realise why. It puts the 'tonic' in 'Teutonic'.
*Air Berlin offers London Stansted- Berlin flights from £19 one way. See www.airberlin.com for more info. B&B prices for a double room in the Mövenpick Hotel start from 119 euros. See www.moevenpick-berlin.com. For a guide to Berlin's nightlife, see www.berlinagenten.com
Travel guide: Berlin
Children just can't get over the wall
From the Daily Mail
Many moons ago (our honeymoon, to be exact) my husband and I were in Florence. It was out of season, and we were surprised to find certain statues had been removed for cleaning, classic buildings were swathed in scaffolding, and the doors of famous museums were closed, bearing only the words 'in restauro'.
So much of Florence was 'in restauro' that this became the joke of the honeymoon. And I was reminded of it this autumn, when 12-year-old Frances and I paid our first visit to Berlin. Once a seat of opulence admired by all Europe, Berlin was ruined by events of the 20th century.
The depression stunned it, the Nazis drained it of all lifeblood, the British bombed it, and the communists encircled it with barbed wire and concrete.
Now, ten years after the collapse of the Wall, Berlin is 'in restauro'. To say that this is the biggest building site in Europe may not sound like an enticement, but there's never been a more exciting time to visit.
Futuristic architecture is springing up like new shoots out of the parched earth. 'Das Neue Berlin World City', proclaim the billboards with pride. A city once synonymous with Nazi oppression and Cold War isolation has become a symbol of peace and regeneration.
Children feel the buzz of politically charged places as much as any adult. Take them to Jerusalem and they bombard you with questions about religious freedom and history. And it's the same in Berlin, where every building tells an emotional story. Museums of recent struggles and skyscrapers of the future combine to make a potent history lesson.
Berlin
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| | | | Freeing the East with a fossil hammer
A friendly American couple lent me their fossil hammer and I joined in - yes, I helped to bring down the Iron Curtain. By the end of the day I had a bag filled with lumps of concrete (the best bits were offered as a prize in my children's school Christmas draw and raised £200). At the Brandenburg Gate, we bought gluhwein from a vendor and enjoyed the hubbub.
At Potsdamer Platz, photographs from 1905 showed how this had once been one of the most fashionable parts of old Berlin. It had become the gloomiest, most barren corner of the Wall, forlorn tram tracks trailed off into the nothingness of no-man's land.
On that November day, columns of Trabants - the funny little East German cars apparently powered by lawnmower engines - fanned out from their entry point at Checkpoint Charlie, their occupants gazing out wide-eyed at the West. It was a day trip I will never, ever forget.
Recently I returned to the city for the first time since that day a decade ago. I told the taxi driver at Tegel airport to take me to the Reichstag. 'Where?' he asked puzzled.
The Reichstag. 'Where?' This could have carried on all day. Eventually I had to show him the name in my guide book. 'Oh, the Reichstag,' he said. At least I knew there was no point in trying to chat during the journey.
The German parliament building has now been handsomely refurbished by British architect Sir Norman Foster, complete with striking glass dome (sadly, largely invisible from ground level). Ten years ago, the Reichstag seemed derelict - it sat among rough scrub land next to the Wall. Now, all around, new buildings are rapidly going up.
The adjacent Brandenburg Gate, the focal point of public festivities a decade ago, is now a busy thoroughfare for traffic passing through from Unter den Linden.
It was here that I began to feel slightly nostalgic for the Wall.
Before its demise in 1989, when you stood here you knew you were at the meeting point of East and West - it felt like the heart of the Iron Curtain, thrilling and unnerving.
A spiritual haven at the Neue
In an effort to clarify things, the all-too-confusing actions of the Nazis and the communists, we went to the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, a museum which showed the desperation of East Germans trapped behind the Berlin Wall.
It's a tale of tragedy and heroism, told with real objects, transfixing photographs and film. Frances was absorbed.
She could see a photo of a petrified boy before his midnight flight over the Wall, and touch the fabric hoist of the pulley his father had made to secure his escape.
'If they built a wall around us now,' she asked me, 'would we try to escape back home?' I have rarely seen a museum touch its visitors so directly. Frances bought herself a little bit of history, a chip of concrete about the size of a penny, with Berlin Wall graffiti paint on one side.
Berlin does tend to serve up its history in shards. There is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, for instance, where the blackened shell of the church tower is all that remains from the war.
In search of a spiritual haven, Frances and I found ourselves at the Neue Synagogue, also a shell of its former self. Once the biggest synagogue in Germany, it was destroyed by the Nazis on November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, 50 years before the Wall came down. Until recently, Berlin lay in fragments, with no interconnecting trains, U-Bahn or bus systems. All that is changing, but slowly.
A must is the Info Box, Berlin's most popular attraction - a bright red platform overlooking the acres of building works in varying stages and cranes in the distance.
When you shatter a glass, it takes a lot of effort to put the pieces back together. Berlin is 'in restauro' - catch it before it's finished.
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| | | | Taken from Checkpoint Charlie
With the Wall gone, the city has lost something of its edge. At Potsdamer Platz, there is no sign of those forlorn tram tracks.
Instead there is a massive new commercial development complete with glitzy shopping mall and IMAX 3D cinema. If Lenin wasn't pinned down in his glass case inside his Kremlin tomb, no doubt he would be spinning in his grave.
I yearned to see a stretch of wall and found a long section on Niederkirchnerstrasse. Well protected from chippers, it fronts the site of the soon-to-be-completed Topography Of Terror exhibition, and it was on this now largely barren stretch of land, at what used to be Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, that the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS once stood. It was here that the Nazis planned the annihilation of Europe's Jews.
Until the new museum is opened, a temporary exhibition on the site reveals its awful history in grim, unflinching detail through a series of chilling photographs and a variety of contemporary documents (the Nazis detailed their horrific plans with typical thoroughness).
Equally moving is the city's new Jewish Museum on Lindenstrasse, a strikingly modern building - to be compared with Bilbao's Guggenheim.
When it opens, it will present artefacts from the everyday life of Berlin's Jewish community. In 1939 the Jewish population in Berlin totalled 60,000; of these, 50,000 died in the concentration camps. It says something of Berlin's character that it is soberly and humbly prepared to confront its terrible history.
My final stop was at Checkpoint Charlie. A few bored Turks sitting behind their stalls broke off from their coffee to try to sell me some 'authentic' Russian militaria: watches, binoculars, hats and cigarette lighters.
For ten marks, I bought a 'genuine piece of the Berlin Wall'. 'Taken right here from the wall at Checkpoint Charlie,' said the man solemnly. I tried not to laugh. In a window a little further up the road, a placard trumpeted The New Checkpoint Charlie commercial development: 'a combination of business and residence, historic locale and innovative technology make Checkpoint Charlie a special place for its lifestyle and aesthetics - an innovative environment. . .'
The picture showed something that looked like Brent Cross Shopping Mall. From Berlin Wall to Shopping Mall - from Iron Curtain to Ikea wall hanging. That's what I call a revolution...
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| | Destination Guide : Berlin |
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| | | History like no other |  | Why go on holiday to Berlin?
Berlin has a history like no other city. Of strategic, cultural and economic importance since the Middle Ages, Berlin suffered during the 30 Years' War and Second World War — many buildings still bear shrapnel marks and monuments are common.
The nightlife is legendary and helps to keep Berlin where it always has been, at the cutting edge.
How much does it cost?
Prices vary but during the off-season, you should be able to get three-star, three-night city breaks from around £270. Flights-only start at £80. Reasonable rooms are available from about £30 per night.
When should I go?
Germany's climate is variable, but the best weather is from May to October. July is the hottest month at an average of 77F (25C) and the wettest month with nearly three inches of rain.
July is also the busy time, but the shoulder periods can be just as pleasant and quieter. In January the average temperature drops to 32F (1C).
If you're up for a good time don't miss the Love Parade in early July — it's one of the biggest street parties in the world.
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| | | Cultural crossroads |  | What should I do when I'm there?
Go and see some of the cultural landmarks like the Brandenburg Gate. Built in 1791, it has long been Berlin's most famous landmark but was trapped in no-man's land throughout the Cold War.
It has now been restored and stands majestically in the centre of Berlin, joining the two sides of the city.
Near the Hauptbahnhof and the Reichstag, parts of the Berlin Wall have been preserved and are worth a look, as is the Reichstag itself, once again home to the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament.
The Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtnis-Kirche, which was bombed in 1943, has been reconstructed using much blue stained glass, and is a weirdly impressive sight.
What about museums and galleries?
Well, if you come to Berlin, you're in the right place - there are plenty of them here. Head for Museum Island (Museumsinsel), home to most of Berlin's best museums such as the Pergamon Museum, Altes Museum, Nationalgalerie and the Bodemuseum.
The New National Gallery on Potsdamerstrasse is home to a huge collection of German art.
Anything else?
The Schloss Charlottenburg is a sumptuous palace dating from the 1600s with beautiful garden, and the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) provides panoramic views of the city from its 207m revolving cafe.
At the zoo in the peaceful wooded Tiergarten you can see animals housed in enclosures simulating their natural habitat.
The Olympic Stadium built for Hitler's 1936 Olympic Games, in which African-American runner Jesse Owens won four gold medals, is open daily.
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| | | Hearty cuisine | | Where's good for nightlife?
Berlin is known for its nightlife and has such a huge number of venues that there is something for everyone.
Choose from trendy 30-something hangouts like Gainsbourg on Sevignyplatz, to techno-den Tresor which is in the money vault of a former department store on Leipziger Strasse.
Other popular bars and clubs are the kitschy Delicious Doughnut Research on Rosenthaler Strasse and the KitKat Club on Glogauer Strasse, which on Saturday and Sunday nights you can only enter wearing your 'sexual fantasy outfit'!
There are also plenty of gay and lesbian hangouts, jazz clubs and beer gardens.
What's the food like?
Meat and potatoes are the backbone of one of the world's heartiest cuisines.
Berlin specialties include Kassler rippen (smoked pork chops) or Eisbein (pork knuckles) with sauerkraut and mash.
The city's sausage is spicy currywurst, served with a tangy sauce and a hunk of bread. Further artery-clogging delights are boulette (a meatball-cum-hamburger), sauerbraten (marinated beef) and matjes (pickled herring). German beers and wines are brilliant.
What should I buy?
Berlin has no main shopping centre as such, rather small shopping areas in various neighbourhoods, many of which have a local or "speciality" feel.
For art galleries and haute couture, head for Charlottenburg, for second-hand stores and junk head for Kreuzberg and if you want everything under one roof, head for KaDeWe, Germany's equivalent of Harrods, on Tauentzienstrasse.
Get off the U7 at Wilmersdorfer Strasse and you'll find yourself in the thick of pedestrian streets lined with affordable shops and department stores frequented by real Berliners.
What is there for children to do?
Kids enjoy the Zoo, the Aquarium am Zoo, Labyrinth (the children's museum), Blubb (the kids' swimming pool complex) and the dinosaurs in the Nature Museum.
Tourist office
German National Tourist Office, PO Box 2695, London W1A 3TN. Tel. 020 7317 0908.
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| | Fact File : Berlin |
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| | | Berlin | | Did you know?
Berlin is the largest city in Germany.
Language
German
Visas
No visa required.
Getting there
London is one of the few cities with daily flights to and from Berlin. Domestic flights from other German cities are frequent and the train service is excellent.
Flying time from London
Approximately two hours
Getting around
The public transport in Berlin is extensive and highly efficient. Trains (underground and overground), trams and buses are clean, comfortable and punctual. The ferry service is a cheap way to enjoy some great views. Avoid city centre buses at peak times as extensive rebuilding work causes severe traffic problems.
Currency
Euro
Costs
All prices vary but as a guide: a roll of camera film £1.50-£2.50, moderate meal for two £15, litre of petrol 60p, bottle of beer 50p, five-mile taxi-ride £4.
Weather
July temperatures reach 23C (72F). The December maximum is 3C (37F). Rainfall is highest in July at three inches.
Time difference
One hour ahead of GMT (two hours ahead between late March and late October).
International dialling code from the UK
00 49 30
Voltage
220V. You will need an adaptor if you want to use UK electrical equipment in Germany.
Opening hours
Most shops open at 8am or 9am and close about 6pm. Department stores and some supermarkets stay open til 8pm. Banks open Monday to Friday 8.30am-1pm, 2.30pm-4pm, although several banks remain open all day. Museums often close on Mondays.
Health - Before you go
Pick up an EHIC from a post office to claim free medical care in Germany.
Health - When you are there
No precautions necessary.
Warnings
Theft and other crimes against travellers are relatively rare. However, avoid the area around the Spree river south of the Ostbahnhof where muggers tend to congregate.
Emergency
Police 110, Fire/Ambulance 112, Medical 115. British Embassy, Unter den Linden 32-34, D-10117 Berlin. Tel. (30) 201 840.
Customs
Germans are a polite and comparatively formal bunch, so try to be on your best behaviour.
Pets
Pets are allowed into Germany if they have a Pets Passport with details of vaccination. See your vet for details of the Pet Travel Scheme.
Tipping
Not widespread. 10% in restaurants etc is considered generous.
Tourist office
German National Tourist Office, PO Box 295 London, W1A 3TN. Tel: 020 7317 0908.
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| | Available rental properties in Berlin |
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