History shows a city that has lived through considerable turmoil and pain. It somehow, seems closer since it has happened in the last couple of hundred years, and indeed some of it in our life time (not letting on what we can remember from the tv). During the 1700's and 1800's there were a number of Kaisers all with the name of Wilhelm, Frederick or just to confuse the issue both. They lived in rather large palaces in Potsdam and other places and the servants by all accounts seemed to live quite well - though with peeling potatoes and washing clothes in a bleak German winter I guess there may have been some hard times as well. Back in the 1870's Frederick the Great was Kaiser. He was known for his compassion - and considering he had a pretty hard childhood it is a credit to him that he could remain so. At 18, he hated his despot father and all he represented and ran away with a friend. His father found him, imprisoned him, beheaded his friend in front of him, married him off to someone he disliked (no kids from that marriage so they really didn't like each other or perhaps he was gay). Poor guy - what a punishment for wanting to be compassionate and caring. Anyway, he built Sanssouci Palace in 1747 and it sits majestically on top of a hill in Potsdam. He was known for many things including introducing potatoes to Germany (Sir Walter Raleigh introduced them to England from South America so not sure if Frederick found them somewhere a bit closer to hand or not). His grave is now at the palace and has potatoes on it in remembrance. (We did enjoy the odd potato during meals, the best was a potato fritter with apple sauce and sprinkled in icing sugar - I thought I was ordering a main dish and added a salad - but with all the amused looks when I ate them together I suspect it was actually a dessert - still I enjoyed it! We also tried dragon fruit and star fruit with our apple strudel one evening). The palace was surrounded by nice gardens, a windmill (once there were many more but these were destroyed in the war), parks and the river.
Around the same time, but not sure which came first was the Anglo-Prussian war. As a result the 'victory statue' was built. Spectacularly high, and sitting in a roundabout, it boasted columns made from French cannons and plaques depicting the victory. After the Second World War the French were keen to demolish this statue but the Americans and English put their foot down. So, one night the French stole a number of the plaques only to return them many years later.
Then came the second world war (obviously our 3 day trip to Berlin missed out a lot of the history but that is for another time). We didn't see much of the Nazi regime - partly because we didn't go on a 3rd reich tour but the impact of the war was evident to see throughout the weekend. We did stand on the car park that was once Hitlers bunker - where Hitler and Eva got married and committed suicide and saw the design of what was underground - a whole lot of cell like rooms. After the war the government was keen to initially destroy it but a load of dynamite only succeeded in lifting the roof (14inches of concrete) a couple of inches - so they gave up on that idea. It is still hidden underground and there are no plans to open it up, as it is felt it could become a shrine for Nazi followers. The apartments around the car park were considered 'creme dela creme' as mosts of them had their own toilets and some had airconditioning (I'll mention more about apartments later on). 
Our trip into Potsdam took us back to the post war era where Churchill (and later Atlee), Roosevelt (and later Truman) and Stalin agreed to the carving up of Germany after the allied victory. Given, the communist regime in Russia at the time, a very real punishment for a country that had caused so much grief. One of the Germans on the trip was obviously feeling the uncomfortableness of being associated with this history but for the rest of us it was a real eye opener and we enjoyed wandering through the Cecilienhof Palace where the big 3 entered into negotiations for a number of months. These three and their attaches sat together in a room, around a round table (big chairs for the three biggies and little chairs for the others). They ironically finally came to an agreement in the palace built by a Kaiser during the first world war (1913 to 1917) and modelled on Tudor design (it has over 80 chimneys everyone a different design).
After the war, as there were few able bodied men about, the Russians expected woman known as the 'Rubble Women' to clear the streets of the debris from the 9 out of 10 buildings destroyed. They were bribed with promises of nice housing (given to government officials in the end while these women were housed in blocks with no air conditioning, sometimes no toilets, and if you were lucky enough to have a lift it would only stop at every 4th or 5th floor because there was no money to install ones that stopped at every floor). We were told that because the West had given their sector an economic boost (students given grants to study there, people subsidised to live there, employers subsidised to base their businesses there) and the East had been pillaged by the Russians there was a 'brain drain' to the West as well as a real demand for the Western currency. Problems for the followers of Marx and Engels so up went the wall one night in 1961 - separating families and friends (they reckon up to 30,000 marriages were split up that night with no reconciliation in sight for 28 years). The desire for freedom is strong in all of us, and we could only imagine the driving force inside those that tried to escape from the 'accident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time'. Peter Feitcher was one of these escapees who died in the attempt (although his friend made it) and inscribed in a memorial to him is 'all he wanted was freedom'. It is hard to visualise the wall and the no man's land, where now there are trees, gardens and roads - but good that some has been left as a memorial. We cycled past a news magnates building in the West, where he used a bill board at the top of the skyscraper to inform the East Germans of the news, and hired 'town criers' to walk up and down the wall announcing the news. Check point Charlie was one of the checkpoints into the city and we heard how cars coming from West Germany into West Berlin, had speedometers and times were checked to make sure they had travelled from where they said (too slow, or too fast, either way meant trouble). We saw a couple of guard towers (one moved 1 metre after the cold war to align it with the trees in the street), some covered in graffiti (the Eastern side of the wall was not allowed to be touched while it stood - but the Westerners had a much more liberal life and could paint it to their hearts content. After the wall fell they commissioned artists to paint it on the Eastern side). The rim around the wall was built of sewage pipes. Apparently, the East sewage system had gone to pot and so the West gave them heaps of pipes to renew their system and get rid of the offensive smell. The East thanked them very much cut them in half and put them on the wall with barbed wire. I think that was the last present the West gave the East!! On some of the buildings in East Berlin there were wonderful mosaics - they depicted the happy life of the peasant working in the countryside, with their lifes gravitating around the Kremlin and Sputnik 1. 
Around the same time, but not sure which came first was the Anglo-Prussian war. As a result the 'victory statue' was built. Spectacularly high, and sitting in a roundabout, it boasted columns made from French cannons and plaques depicting the victory. After the Second World War the French were keen to demolish this statue but the Americans and English put their foot down. So, one night the French stole a number of the plaques only to return them many years later.Then came the second world war (obviously our 3 day trip to Berlin missed out a lot of the history but that is for another time). We didn't see much of the Nazi regime - partly because we didn't go on a 3rd reich tour but the impact of the war was evident to see throughout the weekend. We did stand on the car park that was once Hitlers bunker - where Hitler and Eva got married and committed suicide and saw the design of what was underground - a whole lot of cell like rooms. After the war the government was keen to initially destroy it but a load of dynamite only succeeded in lifting the roof (14inches of concrete) a couple of inches - so they gave up on that idea. It is still hidden underground and there are no plans to open it up, as it is felt it could become a shrine for Nazi followers. The apartments around the car park were considered 'creme dela creme' as mosts of them had their own toilets and some had airconditioning (I'll mention more about apartments later on). Our trip into Potsdam took us back to the post war era where Churchill (and later Atlee), Roosevelt (and later Truman) and Stalin agreed to the carving up of Germany after the allied victory. Given, the communist regime in Russia at the time, a very real punishment for a country that had caused so much grief. One of the Germans on the trip was obviously feeling the uncomfortableness of being associated with this history but for the rest of us it was a real eye opener and we enjoyed wandering through the Cecilienhof Palace where the big 3 entered into negotiations for a number of months. These three and their attaches sat together in a room, around a round table (big chairs for the three biggies and little chairs for the others). They ironically finally came to an agreement in the palace built by a Kaiser during the first world war (1913 to 1917) and modelled on Tudor design (it has over 80 chimneys everyone a different design).After the war, as there were few able bodied men about, the Russians expected woman known as the 'Rubble Women' to clear the streets of the debris from the 9 out of 10 buildings destroyed. They were bribed with promises of nice housing (given to government officials in the end while these women were housed in blocks with no air conditioning, sometimes no toilets, and if you were lucky enough to have a lift it would only stop at every 4th or 5th floor because there was no money to install ones that stopped at every floor). We were told that because the West had given their sector an economic boost (students given grants to study there, people subsidised to live there, employers subsidised to base their businesses there) and the East had been pillaged by the Russians there was a 'brain drain' to the West as well as a real demand for the Western currency. Problems for the followers of Marx and Engels so up went the wall one night in 1961 - separating families and friends (they reckon up to 30,000 marriages were split up that night with no reconciliation in sight for 28 years). The desire for freedom is strong in all of us, and we could only imagine the driving force inside those that tried to escape from the 'accident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time'. Peter Feitcher was one of these escapees who died in the attempt (although his friend made it) and inscribed in a memorial to him is 'all he wanted was freedom'. It is hard to visualise the wall and the no man's land, where now there are trees, gardens and roads - but good that some has been left as a memorial. We cycled past a news magnates building in the West, where he used a bill board at the top of the skyscraper to inform the East Germans of the news, and hired 'town criers' to walk up and down the wall announcing the news. Check point Charlie was one of the checkpoints into the city and we heard how cars coming from West Germany into West Berlin, had speedometers and times were checked to make sure they had travelled from where they said (too slow, or too fast, either way meant trouble). We saw a couple of guard towers (one moved 1 metre after the cold war to align it with the trees in the street), some covered in graffiti (the Eastern side of the wall was not allowed to be touched while it stood - but the Westerners had a much more liberal life and could paint it to their hearts content. After the wall fell they commissioned artists to paint it on the Eastern side). The rim around the wall was built of sewage pipes. Apparently, the East sewage system had gone to pot and so the West gave them heaps of pipes to renew their system and get rid of the offensive smell. The East thanked them very much cut them in half and put them on the wall with barbed wire. I think that was the last present the West gave the East!! On some of the buildings in East Berlin there were wonderful mosaics - they depicted the happy life of the peasant working in the countryside, with their lifes gravitating around the Kremlin and Sputnik 1. 
And now Berlin is different once again. It is quite a lovely city with tall buildings (and apartments with many centred around garden areas), shopping centres (near hotels that used to have every room bugged), and the River Spree (boat jams on the river were a common occurrence with the number of tourists wanting to boat up the water), and some of the few historic buildings such as the synagogue and a few churches. We visited the television tower - built during the Berlin Wall era (apparently commissioned by the East Berliners to compete with the tower built in the West - Swedish engineers and designers were used, as the skills weren't available locally - the last laugh was on the West because on a sunny day, a cross is reflected on the globe at the top of the tower). We also visited the Cupola in the Parliament Buildings, known as the Bundestag, rather an amazing dome shape where you could wander up a spiral to the top, stand on the top of Parliament, play with mirrors that formed an artistic stem in the middle of the dome. The architecture in the city is well integrated into the older parts of the town - I guess after 90% of the buildings were destroyed in the war, there was time to develop a plan for the city. We did visit some memorials, one to the Russians who perished (rumour has it that many Germans are buried in the mass grave), and the memorial to the Jews. Both very special and a reminder to us that 'there are only losers in war'. There are a number of derelict buildings, and with Berlin being nearly bankrupt there isn't much hope in the near future of rebuilding these. The East German parliament buildings is one of these. They discovered asbestos big time in it, after it was a museum, entertainment hall, casino (someone even flooded the first floor so you could canoe around it as a tourist gimic), but then they decided to demolish it and now it stands half up and half down on the River Spree with no hope of anything happening in the near future.
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